A real person in a virtual world

Adriaan Pienaar lives and works in Cape Town South Africa and is one of the developers over at WooThemes. I came across Woo while I was looking for a new theme for this blog, and their stuff blew me away. Since talking to Adriaan I have realised that Woo is just one part of his online life, there is a load more going on over at his personal blog Adii WordPress Rockstar. I caught up with Adriaan via email and asked him my usual Five questions – his answers are great and here for you all to read.

The Woo themes can be found here:

WooThemes Premium WordPress Themes

1. Who are Woo and what is www.woothemes.com all about?

WooThemes is a theme club & store for niche-based WordPress blogging & CMS templates. The business is currently co-owned by myself, Magnus Jepson (www.jepson.no) and Mark Forrester (www.markforrester.co.za), whilst we collaborate with various other well-known designers & developers on a regular basis.

It is our aim to create a niche community for users of our themes, where we can add value; not only through the design & functionality of our themes, but also through quality support, modification help, superior customer service and other user resources (such as tutorials & free themes). With our themes, we try push the boundaries of what is possible with WordPress and in the process target niche solutions for WordPress themes. We also try create themes that work out of the box and are basically ready to go once purchased.

2. When and why did you start blogging?

I started blogging at the beginning of 2007 and there was really two reasons for that… The first being that I had started to follow other blogs and thought that “Hey! This is cool and I can / want to do it as well!”; so I got a blog, because I had something to say. The second reason was business-related, as I knew that I needed a cheap, cost-effective way of marketing myself and my freelance services.

3. Is your blog also your day job?

Yes and no. I’ve started up a formal company now – {radiiate} designs – which has basically taken over my freelance design & development work. So as the company grows, my own blog will become less of a business tool and more of a personal, online property. That said however, we still get 90% of our business leads through my blog; so maintaining my blog is definitely still considered to be a business task.

4. What challenges did you face and overcome when you set up WooThemes?

I think there was 2 main challenges. Firstly, the whole idea of running a business based on designing & developing digital products was new to all 3 of us (partners) and it took us a while to get to grips with all the requirements that the business model poses (in terms of support, customer service, development maintenance etc.). The second challenge was on a whole different level and it challenged us to create a reputation for ourselves and essentially establishing ourselves as a credible source of great WordPress themes.

5. What is your one killer piece of advice for a new blogger?

Persistence! Unless you are family of Robert Scoble or Micheal Arrington (TechCrunch), then your new blog will probably take a while before it gathers some traction. So in the initial stages, when no one is reading your ramblings, don’t get demotivated and stop blogging… Instead stick to what you set out to do – the traffic will come!

Well to be fair, the blog bit of it hasn’t, WordPress is a dream to use and coming from a web design background I found it very easy to install. The content hasn’t been to hard to write either, I’m secretly enjoying the writing bit now, and my head is fizzing with all sorts of ideas for posts.

No the challenge was the theme, not the graphics because I changed all that easily. Every day my old theme seemed to break on me, everyday I would view a page and a column had burst out spilling its content over my browser window. everyday I was having to tinker and repair something. I had searched long and hard for a theme, both free and paid for and eventually came across something that I could mold into my own site. I installed it and set about changing the graphics to my logos and altering the CSS colours. Perhaps it was my tinkering that did it, but it never really settled down enough to allow me to just get on and blog.

A couple of weeks in and I was sick of this naughty child theme and I set about looking for a new theme, but this time a theme to purchase. I figured that if I wanted to be professional about blogging I ought to get a theme from other blog professionals.

WooThemes

I found what I was looking for in the shape of WooThemes and more specifically the FreshNews theme. It was perfect because it has this great black band across the top and a landscape logo format just right for my Blogging Rocket logo. Apart from changing the logo, some link colours and of course creating my own graphics for my posts etc, I haven’t changed the theme at all. I’ve installed plugins and widgets that have extended the functions of my blog, but the theme… well the theme just works, I haven’t had to adjust or tinker with anything.

It seems that all the WooThemes come with a settings page in the WP admin and here you can make all sorts of adjustments. My theme came with eight other preset CSS styles, so I could choose the base colour schemes (and still can at a flick of an option). There are fields for me to add google tracking codes, feedburner RSS codes and options to use gravatars. I can decide how many posts are on the first page, what format and from what category. I can choose to feature categories, add sidebar content and even manage the advert spot from here too. I’m really pleased with my choice of theme and if I need to set up another blog – I will be buying another WooTheme.

A very interesting thing from a designers point of view is their theme club. For not very much money you can buy into all their themes in one go and you get support forum access and the original photoshop files. It’s a must for web developers, use a WooTheme – your clients will love you for it!