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.

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.

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?

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.

On Monday, one of the more popular web developer magazines, Think Vitamin, changed their look to… you guessed it… Fresh News! I was very pleased to see my design on such a popular site, which is produced by the incredible Carsonified, a world renowned web company who run great projects like Future Of Web Design conference, which I’ll hopefully be attending in London later this year.

Although I was pleased, I wasn’t shocked, as I’ve seen this growing trend a long time now. As discussed on the latest post on WooThemes, it is becoming very popular for web designers to use a template to cut production time and cost. This is one of the reasons that we are able to make WooThemes such a successful venture, and I think that more designers/bloggers/entrepreneurs have yet to discover this.

I did honestly think that Think Vitamin would customize Fresh News beyond the default look, but I understand that the focus is not on the uniqueness of the site, but more on the content.

So what do you think about this growing trend of using templates instead of building a site from the ground up? Have your say here or on the WooThemes blog post!

It’s not often you get recognized for what you do on the internet, so when you finally do, you’re allowed to brag about it right? Of course you are!

Freelance Folder is a very popular blog about freelancing, which I’ve followed for a long time, even before going freelance. They have now written an article on 12 awesome businesses started by freelancers, where WooThemes (me, Mark and Adii) are mentioned. Many on this list are people I’ve always looked up to in the freelance world, and it still feels a bit weird knowing that we’ve managed to propell WooThemes to online startup stardom.

Now that we have built such a great platform as WooThemes for ourselves, I think that it will be easier for me or us to go into other markets or businesses in 2009. Not many freelancers get the oportunity to theoreically do whatever they want, so I feel like I have to use my time wisely to further build my freelance career to something that will last well into my thirties (and beyond).

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.

January

Started my second collab with Adii, and came up with a smoother looking concept called Flash News, which was released soon thereafter on PNT website.

April

Learning from my first two collaborations with Adii, I stepped up my game and created what turned out to be our most popular WordPress theme by far, maybe even THE single most popular theme ever: FRESH NEWS

May

After working as a programmer at EM Software for just over 7 years, and after much thinking and soul searching, I finally took the plunge and handed in my letter of resignation. This was a step I was able to make because of my increased involvement with Adii and increased work flow from custom design projects.

July

After months of planning, coding and designing, we rebranded Premium News Theme to WooThemes. Me, Adii and Mark Forrester became equal partners, when the initial 4th partner, start designer Elliot Jay Stocks, decided to focus on his own work.

August

15th of August was my last day at work, and the first day of my freelancing career.

September

Released my first theme to the WooThemes gallery called Fresh Folio. This was meant as a personal portfolio redesign, but decided it would make a good addition to our only other portfolio theme on Woo.

October

Quickly followed up with another very popular theme on WooThemes, my first business theme called Over Easy.

November

Finally redesigned my old portfolio by using Over Easy as the foundation.

December

Released my 6th theme named Busy Bee (code named Fresh-News-Killer) on WooThemes, and after posting a few previews on my blog and Flickr, it smashed our previous first day record for amount of downloads, and is already heading towards becoming one of our most popular themes.

So that is me blowing my own trumpet on the important happenings in 2008. I’d like to thank Adii and Mark Forrester for getting me where I am today (gotta love freelancing), everyone who has backed me on my decisions (girlfriend, family and friends), and last but not least, all of those who follow and appreciate my work; Your emails and comments have really been heart warming to say the least.

I wish everybody a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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.

Check out the demo and grab a copy if you like 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 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!

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.

View the demo, download the theme and enjoy!