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.
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.
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.
It’s not a secret that Fresh News is the most popular theme on WooThemes, and that it has been customized far beyond what I ever intended the theme to be when i first designed it. One of the best customizations of this theme came from GoMediaZine, who are experts in graphic design.
It’s been quite the year for me in 2008, and I thought a nice blog post summing up all my “achievements” for the year would be in order. This year has seen me transition from a part time, unknown web designer to a full time freelancer and co-founder of an online “startup”.
Here are some of my personal achievements for 2008 (and late 2007 to tie the knots):
November 2007
Made a couple of free WordPress themes after checking out WordPress for the first time. Thought it would be a good exercise since I wasn’t exactly pulling web design work. Saw that the free themes became very popular and were downloaded a lot. Decided to try and make a “premium” theme (or commercial/paid), after seeing that there was a market for this.
Sent an e-mail to Adii, who had a very popular commercial theme called “Premium News Theme”, about a possible collaboration on a theme. This would turn out to be quite a important e-mail that would change my path in life. NewsPress was released as the second theme in the PNT series.
It’s been a few weeks since I first sat down to doodle up something in Photoshop and walked away with a brand new theme concept. During that time I’ve been on holiday in Florida playing some golf and visiting my sister. I was supposed to be travelling to South Africa last friday, but on the last day of my stay in the US, I woke up feeling dizzy and almost fell over on my way to the bathroom. Turns out that it was case of vertigo, which led to cancelling my trip to SA, where I would have been caddying on the European Tour and visiting Adii in Cape Town. My balance is almost back to normal, and I don’t look like Ozzy Osbourne when I walk anymore.
Anyways, the cancellation gave me some extra time to finish up Busy Bee, and it is now available over at WooThemes. According to the feedback I’ve gotten on my blog and on the official release post, it looks like the design is to most people’s liking, which I’m really thankful for. I tried to replicate all the things that has made Fresh News the most popular theme on WooThemes by far, so that is why I didn’t try to do anything experimental with this, but rather improve on both the design and the features available in the theme.
On friday evening, I had a little time to myself, so instead of doing the normal stuff (tv, movies or misbehaving in town), I decided to start up Photoshop. I know that sounds incredibly geeky, and I won’t deny that it is… but I enjoyed the heck out of it
A couple of beers later and I had a new theme designed for WooThemes, and we’re planning on releasing it sometime in December. Let me know what you think!
I thought I’d write a little post about how I actually managed to sit down in front of my new 24″ monitor, boot up Photoshop and design my site in a little over 24 hours. And by 24 hours, I don’t mean 24 hours of straight working, cause that would just be silly to work that long. The effective work hours is probably about half of that, since I had to eat, sleep and get my daily fix of The Office US in as well So how did I go about designing and coding a fully fledged WordPress theme in that short amount of time? Simple.
I cheated.
Yep that’s right… I consider it cheating, because I didn’t code my site from scratch, but instead used Over Easy, my latest contribution to the ever growing WooThemes theme collection. I finished making Over Easy a few weeks ago, and I liked the simple layout I had created in that theme. The only big difference between my new website and Over Easy is the front page, which took me the longest to code. But as you can see from the blog page, the layout is pretty similar, although I have changed the sidebar and the list styling.
This should be good proof of the usability of a standard WooThemes theme, and as you can see from our showcase, there are quite a large number of web designers doing the same as me; cutting corners. So is this kind of “cheating” a bad thing, or is this becoming the norm for designers wanting to save production time and increase profit from their clients? Let me know what you think by posting a comment!
October ended on a high for WooThemes, with the first WooContest coming to a close. We got a lot of great designers joining in, and I was really surprised over the quality of some of the entries. We ended up picking one winner and two runner ups, and also got our hands on several other designs which we thought were a good match for WooThemes.
So as thanks to all the participants, we thought that we should release the first theme for free. The design is from the very talented Armono Wibowo, who lives in Jakarta in Indonesia, a place I visited last year when I caddied for my buddy on the European Tour.
It’s been quite the year for me in 2008, and I thought a nice blog post summing up all my “achievements” for the year would be in order. This year has seen me transition from a part time, unknown web designer to a full time freelancer and co-founder of an online “startup”.
