I was recently away on holiday in Italy and missed WooThemes official birthday on 9th July. It was over one year ago that me, Adii and Mark brought our new venture online and it’s been a one woopping year for us, with myself leaving my job in August and also our team growing from five strong.
I started my own startup company last year called WooThemes in case you didn’t notice. Before I left my day job to work full-time on Woo, I probably had the same idea that everybody has about startup companies, especially those dot-com-bubble online startup companies. They all seemed like they needed a ton of work and funding to get off the ground.
It was from actually doing stuff on the side from my normal day job, that I realized that it does not take very much effort to get your startup up and going. WooThemes has now grown into a successful business, and we have been approaced by others who are interested in buying us out. It’s tempting to want to sell what I built up in the last year, but I always ask where I would be after I sell. And the answer is that I would be without a business and with some extra cash on my bank account. Now that might sound great for everybody who is in a day job… if somebody offered me a lot of cash to quit my day job, I probably would, but as I’m already doing what I love, it would be pretty stupid to exchange that for some cash, since I’m already making a profit on what I do.
David Hansson from 37Signals, who is behind great services like Basecamp that I use every day, has hit the nail on it’s head in this great presentation about creating a startup company. At the end he answers some questions about working 14 hours a day and getting things done, where he answers that they work 4 day work weeks, at about 8 hours a day where he is probably productive about 3 hours a day. I always though I was being a slacker if I didn’t work productively for 7-8 hours a day, but I think the fact is that you can get more done if you try to focus only a few hours a day on what you are supposed to do. Anyways, watch this presentation and be inspired.
Yes that is one of the nicknames I have gotten in the past year when working with my partners on WooThemes… part because I designed a theme called Flash News, but also because I don’t hang around to answer e-mails, support and comment on stuff on BaseCamp.
Now I’ve added to my name and bought a piece of kit for my PC that is just sooooo fast; A 120gb OCZ SSD (Solid State Drive), which I’ve installed the latest beta of Windows 7. It is expensive compared to normal hard drives (roughly $700 at this time for 120gb), but the speed difference on overall system performance is so good, that it beats buying a new up-to-date computer.
Check out how fast Win 7 loads and how fast I simultaneously start Firefox, Thunderbird, Dreamweaver and Photoshop… This would have taken me over 2 minutes before, and the disk would probably still be loading stuff after they all started.
For all you freelancers who sit every day in front of the computer… go buy one! You can do all your tasks so much quicker, that you can take half the week off
I took a trip to London this weekend to see Metallica live at the O2 Arena (fantastic stadium, bad location), and since my partner at WooThemes (Mark Forrester) lives and works there, we finally got together for a little pub grup and a sneaky lunch beer. This was the first time I met a WooThemes partner face to face, having only chatted on skype for the previous year whilst building a succesful online startup. We had a nice chat and look forward to getting together to discuss some more business next month, when I’ll be attending FOWD London and also getting to meet the rest of the WooThemes team for the first time.
For those of you out there who like Metallica, here are a couple of videos from the concert. The O2 Arena was packed and with Metallica putting the stage in the centre, you really get an up close view of the well aged thrash metal superstars (James, Lars, Kirk and Robert). Definately go and see them this summer if you are a fan! Check out the falling balls on the second video (last song of the night).
As a web developer I need to be able to debug websites easily, and I really feel sorry for those poor souls that had to do development and bugfixing back in the days when there was no firefox. Check out these vital addons I use every day to make my life so much easier:
Firebug – A must have for anyone who needs to edit HTML or CSS. This tool will let you inspect all parts of your page and make temporary changes to your site so you can easily see how the changes will look.
Iimmgg.com Tools – Since I do a lot of screengrabs of websites every day, this tool is an absolute killer. It allows you to save the screenshot locally or upload it directly so that others can see (example ) . Vital do doing forum work for WooThemes when you need to show something.
TwitterFox – If you’re on Twitter, then this tool makes it dead easy to receive updates and add new ones.
FoxMarks – I have more than one PC, so I need my bookmarks stored on my laptop as well. With this plugin that is as easy as pie
FireGestures – I’m an addict of shortcuts, and when I want to browse quickly and go back, forward, open a new tab and close a tab, I use this plugin to do that all with my mouse. Saves a lot of time if you surf a lot.
I haven’t been designing anything new lately, since I’ve been put on the task of coding some of the themes from our WooContest held back in ‘08.
Irresistible
The first theme I finished coding on (basic coding done by PSDtoWP) was Irresistible, which we release as a free theme on WooThemes. It was designed by Izzudin Helmi who also designed the whole Groovy Series which I’ve now been put in charge of.
Groovy Video
First up was Groovy Video which I coded from scratch to lay the foundation for the other two themes in the series. After I designed and coded WooTube, I sorta got the hang of how to do a video theme, so this was naturally my first pick to code.
Next themes I will be working on will be Groovy Photo and Groovy Mag(azine), and hopefully the base work I’ve done with Groovy Video will make development time much faster for these new ones.
As a follow up to Adii’s blog post about The Freebie Culture, I wanted to share my thoughts and hear yours on what expectations the freebie culture have, and how much we should adhere to their expectations. As Adii explains in his blog post, we use freebies as a great marketing tool for WooThemes, by giving away free WordPress themes. Our latest free theme called Irresistible, has been well received by those who downloaded it, and we also made some initial changes to the theme based on the first feedback we got on our blog.
Giving away freebies is very good marketing for you site, but we at WooThemes also offer support for our products in the form of documentation, tutorials and last but not least, forum support. All our members get all this information readily available, but if you are not a member you can’t get a step by step detailed instruction for installing your theme or figuring out any problems you might have.
There has been an ongoing campaign the last week in Norway, started by Finn.no, our biggest buy/sell website, to warn users of IE6 (Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 for those who don’t know jack) that they need to upgrade. It’s reached such big international websites as Wired and PCWorld.
I’ve even put the message on one of my websites to join in on the fun. That doesn’t mean I don’t support IE6 when I design websites, since about 20% of the users out there still are stuck with IE6. I say stuck, because a majority of users are stuck. They probably use it at work, and their system admin will not let them upgrade, because all the wonderful web apps they use only work in IE6.
A long, long time ago, when html was html, tables were the sh*t, and hover effect on links was the hottest thing out there, I made a website. Specifically it was my first “real” project, where I would actually receive some sort of compensation, and it was for my local golf club where I actively play, Stavanger Golf Club.
After the success of Busy Bee, it was time to focus on a more niche style theme, and since we still didn’t have a video theme in our WooThemes arsenal, I thought it was about time.
I was recently away on holiday in Italy and missed WooThemes official birthday on 9th July. It was over one year ago that me, Adii and Mark brought our new venture online and it’s been a one woopping year for us, with myself leaving my job in August and also our team growing from five strong.
