Interview with woothemes.com’s co-founder Mark Forrester | Heart Internet Blog – Focusing on all aspects of the web

woothemesWe recently had a chat with Mark Forrester co-founder of the premium WordPress template site  www.woothemes.com about how he got started, how they come up with new theme ideas, how he see’s WordPress developing in the coming years and some great resources for your WordPress powered website.

Could you provide a bit of information about yourself and WooThemes? E.g. Your background, why the site was created, how long the site has been running, who uses your website…

I’m a half baked English / South African web designer and online entrepreneur currently living in London, UK.  I met Adii, one of the two of my now business partners at WooThemes.com, on one of my holiday visits back home to Cape Town a few years back. We got on well and shared a passion for the up and coming content management system WordPress and digital design. Adii had been testing the waters with designing a commercial theme for WordPress when they first started appearing and asked me to collaborate on a theme design with him. At the same time Magnus Jepson, our now Norwegian business partner had also been trialling a collaboration with Adii.

After a few months of building, supporting and marketing our WordPress themes we saw there was more in it and a huge gap in the market for affordable, good quality and well supported WordPress themes. The 3 of us decided to collaborate on a more serious level and sell our themes under the name WooThemes. A month later as WooThemes gained momentum Magnus quit his job as a developer, Adii quit his online media job he’d only started a month previously, I stopped my freelance design work and the rest is history! We are now a completely international online company with team members in England, South Africa, Norway, Portugal, and America.

When you are creating a new theme, from the initial idea through to it being put on your website what are the stages involved at WooThemes?

We usually brainstorm a theme idea over Skype and email, based on user’s feedback and reports of what has been selling well. One of us then sketches up some wireframes and design mock-ups in Photoshop. We then get feedback from the rest of the team and tweak until pixel perfect. Once we are happy with the design we slice and dice it into neat semantic html/css. After that we build in our WooTheme WordPress framework and build in our theme option’s panel that gives the end user great customisation options to the layout and content structure from within the WordPress backend.

We of course test our themes rigorously and in different web browsers, before packaging the theme, writing the theme documentation, setting up the demo, setting up the support forum for the theme, posting the theme listing page and the launch blog post. It’s quite a process, but we are a team of 5 designers and developers so the responsibilities are shared.

You have committed yourselves to two new themes every month, how do you gain inspiration for your new designs?

We are never short of inspiration, one of our unique selling points is that we collaborate with the cream of the crop international web designers nearly every month (https://www.woothemes.com/collaborative-designers/) – each with their own unique styles. Every month’s theme releases are therefore unique, and really motivate us to come up with wonderful new theme designs too.

WooThemes thrives off listening to its community as is evident by the amount of comments on each and every blog post we publish. Our community decides on what sort of themes they want and we launch.

What are the key design and usability features you ensure all your designs have?

All our themes are built off the same reliable, tested theme framework, with each theme we try to make sure the user has the option to customize the navigation, home page structure and widgetized sidebar spaces. All the while somewhat restricting them to our design layout, as after all we are a team of experienced web designers and we don’t want our often novice wootheme users to completely run riot and break the themes they have purchased.

Our themes are built on a clean grid structure making sure everything aligns neatly, but well commented and coded so that freelance web designers, and web agencies using our themes as a base design to build their client work upon is flexible and ready for modifications.

We recently published a blog post about essential WordPress plug-ins. Are there any WordPress plug-ins you would recommend?

Page Navi – https://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/

Navigation List – https://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/WordPress-navigation-list-plugin-navt/

Mail Chimp’s Analytics360 – https://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/analytics360/

CformsII – https://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin

A lot of your themes are using WordPress as a CMS rather than just a straight out blog. Do you see WordPress developing in to a traditional CMS over time?

I think it already is. WordPress has matured over the past year with nifty tagging, and categorization features. It’s core code is hugely powerful and flexible and we are seeing it used far more creatively than just for blogging purposes. Have a look over our theme portfolio – https://www.woothemes.com/themes/ – to see how it can be used and moulded for other CMS purposes.

As a blog owner, how do I encourage more reader interaction and loyalty?

We are theme designers not expert bloggers so aren’t the best people to ask. However, we’ve learnt a huge amount since we formed WooThemes in June last year. We run a blog called WooCamp which is our “design, development and better blogging outlet”. We’ve documented a lot of our journey.

When it comes to placing advertising on a blog, are you a believer that less is more or should I put banners and text links wherever I can?

Personally I despise sites littered with adverts, and it certainly forms a bad first impression of that site.  If you write good content and interact with your readers and market your content creatively using the online social media tools available to you you’ll draw traffic and retain it. The more traffic you generate the more valuable your ad space becomes and the more you can charge for it, eliminating spamming your readers with too many adverts.

Are there any resources/ articles on the internet you use that you would recommend people read?

Plenty, but I’ll leave you with a few, other than the WooThemes blog of course – www.woothemes.com/blog.

WP Topics for a directory of some great WordPress resources – https://www.wptopics.com/

Our South African friends The Perel Brothers who run a weekly video show on anything web design related – https://www.from-the-couch.com/

Pro Blogger – for some great blogging tips – https://www.problogger.net/

And for some inspiration the “Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss – http://tim.blog/ and the online hussler – Gary Vaynerchuk – https://garyvaynerchuk.com/

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