2009-09-11-WooThemes

You will find some of the most cutting edge WordPress templates, packed full of features, presented beautifully with clean layouts, slick colour palettes and neat typography. All woothemes are available for purchase individually or you can join the theme club and have access to all our themes.
They have established themselves as one of the biggest WordPress theme clubs on the market today and continue to grow with the ever-growing WordPress community.

Adriaan Pienaar (a.k.a. Adii) taught himself how to work with WordPress. He’s been clever with marketing himself online and along with partners Magnus Jepson and Mark Forrester, has built a business out of helping others do the same. Their business – WooThemes – offers premium quality WordPress themes to both novice users and experienced designers.

Adii Pienaar

Adii is a WordPress rockstar, blogger and Web 2.0 strategist. He resides is sunny Cape Town, South Africa. He also runs a design agency called Radiiate.

As well as a designer at WooThemes He is generally in charge of the administrative tasks and all the sales/support email correspondence.

Magnus Jepson

He covesr all the bases at WooThemes, but He’s a heavy-weight when it comes to theme updating and making sure the forum is happy.

Mark Forrester

He’s a self taught web-designer from South Africa, but currently residing in London, England. When he is not at woothemes he works on his business venture Afrigator.

Apart from pushing pixels around in Photoshop and making sure they then align in a web browser, I can often be found trolling the support forums, finding Woo-powered websites for our showcase or making pretty pictures for the WooThemes website.

Malan Joubert

Nickname: Foxinni
At WooThemes I take care of the heavy lifting in terms developing of PHP and WordPress systems. I’m also highly skilled in jQuery and CSS. No task is is out of my reach. Staying on top of developing issues and in turn client happiness takes high priority.

Cobus Bester

Front-end designer & developer
He works from there Cape Town office, along with Adii and Foxinni.
My daily duties at WooThemes involve designing in Photoshop, slicing themes into XHTML and CSS, some basic WordPress stuff, theme maintenance.

Woothemes also has Collaborative designs, that help them design specific styled themes

Affiliated Woo Workers

WooThemes modifiers, some of which who you would have met in the support forums. These Affiliated Woo Workers take care of all the modification work for you at a fixed price. These guys & girls know our themes inside / out – so if you work with them, you’re sure to get a beautiful, unique-looking version of our themes with all sorts of bells and whistles.

Woothemes re-design

Mangus, Mark and Cobus worked on the original mockups for the new design.
Cobus did the final designs to the site, and cut the home page into modules.

1. Header Navigation and logo
2. Featured space – What’s Woothemes about
3. Key selling points
4. The process – WooThemes purchase process.
5. Social media – social media presence in the form of a blog summary, a twitter feed, an email subscription form and our affiliate offering.
6. Sitemap

They changed colour scheme from dark blue to cooler blue

Once all the mock ups had been made and signed off by the team it was over to the Magatron (Mangus) html/css and WordPress chop shop.

Whilst this was all happening the backend was being reviewed, and of course more wireframe sketches were being drafted for our third party Amember developer to work on and implement on a test server. Magnus’s wordpress work was being polished by Foxinni with lots of awesome javascript animations and transitions being added. Content was being re-written, theme documents were re-organised, terms and conditions were tweaked and the forum, showcase and newly created WooCamp were all given shiny new templates to fit the Woo2 branding. This of course all the while we were still doing our usual WooThemes tasks of creating themes, supporting themes, answering mail, collaborating with designers and fueling the marketing machine.

Along with the launch of WOO2, they announce that they’ll be embracing the (GPL) on all of there themes going forward. How did this happen?
Through many meeting with the Wootheme team and Matt Mullenweg from WP.
And the only one reason they decided this is because they love WordPress.
So what does this mean?

1. The only thing that really changes, is that there’s no more restrictions on a Standard / Single and Developer      License ( i.e. you can use these themes on unlimited domains irrespective of the package you choose)
2. The themes aren’t free and you still need to buy them! (i.e. there’s no hidden download link somewhere)

Social networking

• They have a big twitter following, allowing people constant updates on theme frleases and bug fixes – http://twitter.com/WooThemes
• They use Flikr to showcase visual design and promotional accessories to a visually demanding community – http://www.flickr.com/groups/woothemes/
• Woothemes also has a blog and support network
• Blog – http://www.woothemes.com/blog/
• Forum – http://forum.woothemes.com/
• Support – http://www.woothemes.com/support/
• Affiliates monitor forum posts and help were possible
• Magnus Jepson is the Forum Master

Introduction:

What is ecommerce?

The use of electronic networks to exchange information, products, services and payments for commercial and communication purposes.

• Brief History
• Things you need to start your own e-commerce site
• Key elements of e-commerce:
  • Trust and Credibility
  • Build brand loyalty
  • Know your target market
  • Content and Design
  • The Shopping cart
• Things to consider for your site

Brief History:

• Started back in the 80′s – Compuserve added a service called the Electronic Mall, where users could purchase items directly from 110 online merchants
• Netscape 1.0′s release in 1994 included an important security protocol called Secure Socket Layer (SSL) that encrypted messages on both the sending and receiving side of an online transaction. SSL ensured that personal information like names, addresses and credit card numbers could be encrypted as they passed over the Internet.
• In 1994 and 1995, the first third-party services for processing online credit card sales began to appear
• Companies that transformed e-commerce in the mid-1990s: Amazon and eBay.

Things you need to start your own e-commerce site:

• A Product
• A place to sell the product – in this case the website
• A way to get people to come to your Web site
• A way to accept orders – an on-line form of some sort
• A way to accept money – normally a merchant account handling credit card payments. This piece requires a secure ordering page and a connection to a bank. Or you may use more traditional billing techniques either online or through the mail.
• A fulfillment facility to ship products to customers (often outsource-able). In the case of software and information, however, fulfillment can occur over the Web through a file download mechanism.
• A way to accept returns
• A way to handle warranty claims if necessary
• A way to provide customer service (often through email, on-line forms, on-line knowledge bases and FAQs

Key elements of e-commerce:

1. Trust and Credibility:

Security

• Always making sure your customer knows that your website is secure and that their privacy will never be compromised
• issue of trust – because of fraud

Money-back guarantee

• Money-back guarantees can make a purchase easier, even when mistrust or uncertainty have a significant impact on the customer’s deicision-making. Offering your customers such a guarantee, you build up the feeling of trust and comfort, making it easier for users to actually purchase a product.
• Be open and honest – make all information clear on the site – don’t have hidden agenda’s
• (example: information related to the product, shipping, credit card security risks, privacy)
• For everything you do on your website, keep in mind that the user always has to be in control of what’s happening.

2. Build brand loyalty:

• you will earn trust
• Clients need to “experience” the site
• It is not enough simply to make a website usable
• the right combination of usability, creative design, writing and a strong brand will create an experience through which your customers learn to trust you
• When it comes to building customer’s trust in your company, a professional, trustworthy design becomes crucial.

3. Know your target market:

• know the target market of your site – and create the website around that (example – UTI want fun element but they want older people to spend money on site, wrong target)
• design for the customer and not ourselves – most important

4. Content and Design:

• A professional design is necessary to differentiate your business from that of amateurs and students
• Provide your customers with e-mail addresses of the team, phone numbers, and, of course, e-mails – earn trust by being open
• Too much focus is put on the design and usability of the home page, and that effort does not continue through to the rest of the website
• Tell people clearly what they should do next – good navigation to the site
• Make the most important option the biggest. – BUY NOW button
• “More information,” “Details” and “Technical data” are also important, but less important than the conversion itself. They should be displayed in a smaller font or in less aggressive colors.
• Products page – clients want to spend time on this page – make sure they are buying the correct thing
• Must be clear what you are advertising – within 3seconds you should know what the ad is about

5. The Shopping cart:

• How well you manage to drive users to the “Checkout”-button
• The incorrect use of the shopping cart icon = an example of flawed design decision
• Shopping cart should become part of the site and not a seperate element
• Important info about the cart:
  • provide customers with the information of what is inside the shopping cart,
  • indicate the minimal requirements for successful ordering
  • put a link to the checkout-section which might help users to finish the shopping process immediately
  • offer some help in case users have lost track of the process
• Shopping Cart Gone Wrong:
  • the shopping cart icon is not clickable,
  • the shopping cart icon is difficult to recognize
  • the shopping cart icon is difficult to find.

Things to consider for your site:

1. Social media – Very important for the customer to add your site as a favourite
2. Polls – get more people to take your poll – giving some form of incentive to participate
3. Neglected Thank you page – makes it more personal – someone just spent money on your site so make an effort to thank them
4. User ratings and customer reviews

Wrap up:

Key to remember on ecommerce site – you want the customer to buy from your site!

References:

E-Commerce Comparisons

WP e-Commerce Features

Shopping Carts Gallery: Examples and Good Practices

5 Universal Principles For Successful eCommerce-Sites

35 Free High-Quality E-Commerce Templates

The History of E-commerce

Recent eCommerce Designs

Automattic is a web development & blogware company – August 2005. Attributing much of its success to its popular blog platform WordPress.com. An adaptation of the popular open source wordpress project

Key People

• Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, founding developer of WordPress – Matt writes a popular blog ma.tt, and continues to be the primary developer and spokesman for the company. Former OddPost CEO
• Toni Schneider, CEO of Automatic – In addition to Automattic, Toni is also a Venture Partner at True Ventures. Toni was a co-founder of Sphere (acquired by AOL)
• Ryan Boren, Lead developer of WordPress and a co-conspirator at Automattic.

In addition to having 4 self-produced products (WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Akismet.com and bbPress)

Automattic Products

• Wordpess.com – 2.2 million blogs that it hosts, with 482 million page views overall (Jan 2008)
• Akismet – An anti-comment spam system capable of integration with many blogging platforms and forums.
• WordPress MU – A multi-blog community system built on WordPress.

They also contribute to a number of non-profit and Open Source projects, here are a few:

• bbPress – Forum Software
• BuddyPress – Social Networking Plugin Suite
• WordPress.org
• Ping-O-Matic -  is a mechanism by which blogs notify external servers that content has been updated

Background

Matt Mullenweg, wrote in December 2005 that the company wasn’t seeking funding. However in March 2006. They obtained investors ;Polaris Ventures,  Blacksmith Capital,  Radar Partners,  and CNET.

Automattic began raising a $1.25 million round Dec 2005 and had sold $1.1 million in series A stocksJanuary 2008 – It was mentioned in a discussion by Matt, that Automattic had raised a whopping $29.5 million in a Series B Round of funding, including a strategic investment from The New York Times Co. Previous investors True Ventures, Polaris Ventures, and Radar Ventures also invested in this round.

Acquired

• Automattic,  acquired blog avatar provider Gravatar. October 2007 – Gravatar was facing “classic problems of scale” that Automattic was capable of handling.
• On September 23 2008, Automattic announces acquiring IntenseDebate.
• Two months later, on November 15th, Automattic acquired PollDaddy – polls and survey

Services

There a big  demand for professional services around Automattics projects

• BraveNewCode – They are active in the WordPress community contributing plugins like WPtouch and WordTwit, they host WordCamp events & work with others to try and make our favourite open-source publishing tool even better.
• Instinct (NZ) – Aside from our two core products (WP e-Commerce & Game Creator); WordPress Plugin development is there bread and butter.
• Incsub – They are a web development firm specializing in blog and social networks built around WordPress MultiUser. They are the founders, developers and operators of one of the largest blog sites on the web (Edublogs) and central hub for community and premium WordPress MU functionality (WPMU DEV)
• The Yellow Llama (South Africa): There main skillset lies in the development, tweaking, hybridizing and creation of custom WordPress websites. Since around 2005, they have been working with WordPress as a blogging engine and more specifically, a highly customizable Content Management System.