We also decided to celebrate our birthday with letting this guy wear our WooThemes t-shirt for a day. The video he made made me laugh really hard, and I suggest you check it out

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.

OCZ Vertex 120gb SSD

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).

Seek and Destroy

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. TwitterFox – If you’re on Twitter, then this tool makes it dead easy to receive updates and add new ones.
4. 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
5. 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.

Honorable mentions: Web developer Toolbar, Download Statusbar, ColorZilla, Screengrab, YSlow

Got any vital plugins you can’t live without that I have missed?

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.

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.

But we get a lot of request via comments, email and twitter for help on the themes. Are we expected to give free support and make the documentation available for free? I understand that if you see a great design and it’s free, you’d want to make it work on your own site, which in all fairness it should, and we therefore make our free themes as easy as possible to setup. But I still think that we are entitled to keep the support benefits available only to our members.

Which makes me wonder… Does it have a negative effect on some potential customers if they can’t setup the free themes because of lacking free support? Are we pushing potential customers away by doing this? We firmly believe that we are contributing back to the community by giving out free themes, but as a value addon for our paying subscribers/customers, I think that the support should be kept as a member only extra.

Do you agree that this is makes good business sense?

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.

In other words, all their web apps are full of bugs, and are not made to standards. I’m known for my weird “it’s just like” examples, but I can’t even come up with a good example of why this is so bad. I think it it is obvious that the developers didn’t have a choice (they probably did) back when there was no Internet Explorer 7 available. So instead of coding it correctly, they had to code it incorrectly for it to look correct in IE6.

I just got this from a friend in Norways largest oil companies today, and we all know a picture says a thousand words… well this says a bit less, but that is because there is actual text in the image Enjoy!

Info message for Statoil employees about IE6

The new design of Stavanger Golfklubb

So what has changed then since then? Well first of all, I actually make a living of designing websites now, and I’ve made quite a few in the 3-4 years since I did the initial design. The main reason for doing the redesign was to get the site up and running on my beloved WordPress platform. The old site was built on html, tables (yuck!) and a simple php news system (CuteNews), and it just can’t compare with the brilliance of WP.

Powered by WordPress

Surprisingly, the original design has stood it’s ground all these years, at least in my eyes. So I didn’t want to drastically change the design, since the colors and layout had done so well. My main goals were simply; Re-use the color scheme, make it 960px wide and make it easier to read. The old design was lacking in the typography department because I was heavily influenced by all the Flash sites back in 05/06 that used mini fonts. I’m glad that has worn of, and I now enjoy new design trends that allow for more white space and better typography.

The old design

The design took about a day to finish in Photoshop, and the coding was done the following day. The tweaking part is what take up most of the time. The production of the site took about 4 days, and although it isn’t completely propped with content yet, it is 95% done. I was quite pleased with the end result, and that always leaves a good feeling, and gets me motivated about keeping it looking good for the years to come.

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.

WooTube is my take on how a basic video theme should be, basic in the sense that it doesn’t have any fancy homepage with images to link to your videos. It’s just a no thrills video post browser. You add your video embed code, put it in a category, add some tags and your set. It shouldn’t be any harder than that.

The design is a reflection of my past themes and also my personal blog, with subtle gradients, arial/georgia font usage and my (self proclaimed) signature style logo with cute icon (which you can pickup here). Some might say it looks to much like Busy Bee, but I only see that as a positive remark, since the theme functionality is totally different from BB, and truth of the matter is that BB is very popular.

The nice jQuery effect in the slider was done by the awesome Foxinni who works at Radiiate (run by Adii). We’ll hopefully be seeing a lot more stuff by him in the coming year, as he is really much quicker than me on anything that has to do with javascript.

So what do you think of this latest outing? Is there anything that is cool or that you think is missing? Does it serve it’s purpose or is it a MUST with a custom homepage?