Quick Overview

Let’s face it, it can get lonely sitting in your code bunker hammering out sites into the small hours. Sometimes it’d be nice to hang out at a regular watercooler and catch up on what’s new. Only a watercooler where everyone talks about WordPress, rather than what happened on TV last night, or whether the section manager is ever going to discover a more powerful anti-perspirant. With WPwatercooler’s video podcast goodness, you can sit in on regular WordPress roundtable discussions without ever leaving your seat. Watch it live, watch it after the fact, but, seriously, watch it already.

Image based on Water Cooler by IdleFormat, CC-BY-2.0.

How did you first get started with web design and development? Is it something you expected to find yourself doing a few years ago?

I graduated in architecture and after a few years struggling in the interior design field, I decided to change areas. Back at that time, it was 2000, web design seemed to be a promising career, so I took the chance and studied a postgraduate course in Hypermedia Design. At the same time I started working at a web agency and I’ve been working as a web designer ever since.

It’s not something I expected to find myself doing a few years ago — it’s been almost 12 years I’ve been doing this I mean, it’s been a long time! But before 2000, definitely not, my dream was to work with animation.

As an illustrator and graphic designer, do you think that you bring things you’ve learned or experimented with in those disciplines over to your work with WordPress or are they distinctly separate?

I think web design owes a lot to graphic design, therefore any work with WordPress does too, but I believe it’s a different discipline. I’d rather compare web design to architecture than to graphic design, mainly because of the relationship between architects and engineers versus designers and programmers. To design a website it’s really important to understand how it’s built, the possibilities, what can be done or not. I know that in graphic design you need to have an understanding of the printing process, colors, type of papers etc., but it’s not so much dependant on the technology behind it. About illustration, it’s something I’d like to bring more often to my designs, I don’t explore the possibilities that much, however what I’ve learned about colors and composition with illustration are reflected on my work, yes.

When did you first start working with WordPress, and what made you choose it over the other options available?

I started working with WordPress in 2007. A few years earlier I did a website for a traditional Catholic Festival in my native town, as a volunteer. It’s annual and they desperately needed to renew their website, but they had no money to pay for it. The programmer who worked with me before had disappeared and I didn’t know anyone else who would do the job as a volunteer. So I searched the internet for a solution where I could do the job all by myself and at the same time give the festival organizers the freedom to update and run their site independently. I was looking for a solution which respected web standards and that was free. When I found WordPress I thought it was fantastic, I didn’t know anything about PHP, MySQL, I didn’t know to write a line of code, but I just didn’t need to! There was great documentation and almost all of my doubts were already answered in the forums. I could do everything on my own. The other options I tried were Plone, but there was too much to learn, and Mambo (there was no Joomla yet) which generated terrible HTML. So there wasn’t a better choice than WordPress!

Tell us about a WordPress project you’ve worked on recently that made you proud. What did you enjoy and find most challenging about it?

We’ve just launched a redesign project called Catraca Livre. I did the design, HTML, and CSS. It’s a calendar for free or low cost events. It’s becoming very popular and it gets between fifty and a hundred-thousand visitors every day. Their Facebook page has been liked almost 1,500,000 times so far, too. Catraca Livre was one of Hacklab’s first clients — their website has been running on WordPress since the beginning of 2008. As it grew, its interface needed an upgrade to address mobile devices and the code needed improvements to deal with the growing audience. Besides, it needed a better search mechanism so the users could find events easier.

What I enjoyed the most was the fact the client liked the idea of a very colourful site and they gave me a lot of freedom to work as I chose. I really love bright colours and on this job I got to play with them.

The two most chalenging parts of the job from a front-end point of view were making it responsive while at the same time fitting the client’s dynamic workflow. Its homepage has a very flexible layout and its system lets its administrators choose from a set of three different types of rows of features: With one, two or three categories. Inside each row, they can choose from many different combinations of layout grids. It wasn’t easy to make it responsive, mainly because it depends on some editorial policies too.

The client’s workflow is crazy and from the beginning of the project they changed their main categories countless times. Because of this, it was difficult to make a perfect main menu. Sometimes it was best to make it horizontal, sometimes vertical. We launched it horizontal, but I believe we’ll need to rethink it soon.

From the development point of view, the most challenging part was to integrate a search server based on Solr. It allows users to find events near them by a geographical search, or filter the events by a variety of parameters. And all of this at an incredible speed.

What hard-won advice would you give to someone just starting out in life as a designer?

I read this article by Nathan Peretic at A List Apart and I couldn’t agree more with it. It’s about writing a proposal, but there’s a lot of good advice in it that I heavily recommend anyone starting out in this career to read. My favorite quote is this one:

Why should you be selected for this project? Because you’re the cheapest? The quickest? Because you promise to do more than the other guys? Maybe. Sometimes those are the reasons, but they’re also the levers you least want to rely on pulling. Website design and development are services and not, on the professional level, commodities. Providing a commodity is an exhausting, unsatisfying, deadening experience. Doing what you love, on the other hand, working as an equal partner with smart, respectful clients is invigorating.

Do you have a typical client or a particular niche you work with, or do you find that you’re working on all kinds of different projects in a given year? Would you change anything about that?

At Hacklab we like to position ourselves as a business with social concern; we believe in Free Software and we like to publish our solutions whenever we can. We also like to work with innovative projects. So though we’ve worked with different types of clients, most of them have a little bit of those values. What I’d change about it is that I’d like to work just for clients who shared those values.

Tell us about your work in the Brazilian WordPress community, and how that’s infleunced your professional or personal life?

I started the community in 2008 with Anderson Clayton, a guy from Rio de Janeiro. In the begining it consumed a lot of my time! I did a lot of everything, I translated WordPress, bbPress, BuddyPress, plugins, ran the website, moderated the forums, organized WordCamp, meetups. I had help, but I was on the front of all these activities. As I worked as a freelancer, I had plenty of time for that, but because of WordPress, more work came in and I started working with the guys at Hacklab.

So in 2010/2011 I had to let it go a little, and it was good because other people came in and started helping me out with the translations, etc. In 2012 I came back, mostly helping organize the two WordCamps we had, in Curitiba and São Paulo.

The influence on my professional and personal life was huge; since I had the idea of translating WordPress I haven’t stopped working, and what’s best, I’ve received some sort of recognition I didn’t have before. This interview, being featured in Matt’s State of the Word talk last WordCamp SF, and participating at the Community Summit are a great honor to me. I’ve met many interesting people, I’ve made great professional contacts, I’ve made good friends. There’s a feeling of fulfilment that is the best part, which is to know that with a relatively small effort I’ve helped many people and I’m part of this great thing that is WordPress .

What can people do to get involved with localization, submitting patches, or otherwise improving WordPress, and why should they bother?

There are many channels available. I think the best way is to go to any of the make blogs and see what’s up. But if people don’t think they have the time, they should at least adopt the pratice of sharing their WordPress knowledge and experience by publishing their code under GPL. They should bother because WordPress belongs to them, they should own it and make it better everyday. Knowledge is something we should cherish and share so everyone is able to profit with it, not only a small group. That’s why WordPress is great.

Quick Overview

Whether you totally missed the free 24-hour-streamathon of WordSesh, or just want to catch up on the infinite payload of WordPress wisdom shared by its participants, you’ll be pleased to know that the whole thing has been captured on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Image based on Words by Alby Headrick, CC-BY-2.0.

Customer service is more than just solving problems and making people happy they decided to use your product. Support is a form of art. How you shape customer service is up to you. Like Thomas Kinkade and Pablo Picasso before him, success in art is defined by crafting an approach that best connects with your patrons. The most beautiful thing about art, though? When you start with a blank slate, you can take it in any direction you want. And the same goes for support.

Some say "good artists are born, not made." But the masters in the Louvre didn't emerge from the womb with paintbrush in hand. They developed interests and pursued those, learning from their experiences to better themselves — and more importantly, their processes — over time. If support really is an art…why treat it any differently? Shouldn't you be able to come to the table with little more than passion for the cause, and carve your own style that spreads throughout the community based on how well it speaks to them?

Running support with a non-technical background

Just over two years ago, I joined Modern Tribe to help handle support for Events Calendar PRO.

The premium plugin was still relatively new at the time. Shane — our CEO — and I did a daily divide-and-conquer on the CodeCanyon forum. The only strategy we had was "make sure to respond before people get pissed off."

That much I understood. But beyond that, things were hazy. Coming into this role I had no experience doing dedicated customer service, barely knew a thing about Events Calendar PRO, and had only a working knowledge of WordPress itself. I could find a line of code in a PHP file but wouldn't feel comfortable making changes myself. I could fake my way through a conversation on Javascript or CSS but would freeze up if asked to hack at core files.

And guess what? It didn't matter…and still doesn't.

If anything, a non-technical support lead can approach customer service without the constraints of a developer's mind. A non-technical support person views things as the customer does, and can convey community wants/needs to the dev team in plain English. They force devs to consider and plan for the fact that not all users are developers.

There is a line that you need to walk: give the devs too much control, and they may build what they want without considering the community. Let the customers drive the carriage, and you're sure to veer from the project's core scope. You're probably going to run over budget, too.

At Modern Tribe, we call the support lead a "community advocate." Remember that it's hard to advocate for the community if you can't put yourself in their shoes.

Since taking that first pass at CodeCanyon, we've grown. Support has become a five-person team and is likely to get bigger in 2013. Shane's removed himself from daily support entirely, and I've stepped back to a management role so I'm not as involved in the day-to-day exchanges either.

My technical skill is not much more advanced than it was two years ago. Likewise as I build the team, technical accomplishments are one of my lowest priorities. I want people who care and empathize; if that means they need to bring in dev help for the more complex support tickets, that's a tradeoff I'm more than willing to make.

Why all good support teams also do Quality Assurance (QA)

If a support team isn't at least partially involved in the QA process, they're doing it wrong. With proper testing instructions even the least technical support staff can effectively run quality assurance testing to verify that something works.

Consider five premium plugins, each with a dedicated support forum that one team member manages. This person effectively "owns" that forum: they address all threads, report feature requests and log bugs to the core dev team. As those come in, the dev team works off this feedback to produce the next release. When it’s time to verify that the new code accomplishes what the community wants to see, does it really make sense to have an isolated QA team verifying that? Ultimately, who'd be the most sensible person to conduct testing here? Answer: the support team member who initially reported the problem. They know the problem, have a rapport with the user and won't have to waste time researching how to replicate the issue. What better way to expose your staff to the code they'll be required to support in the near future?

This is why it's always surprising to hear from teams who handle QA differently. Normally they fall into one of these categories:

• QA exists independent from the support team.
• The devs who did the work do QA. (You'd better be damn confident in your dev team if this is the route you take!)
• There's no real formal QA process whatsoever.

The merits of each could be debated…except maybe the last. (That's just foolish.) But all three create silos — independent, isolated teams working among themselves, which makes for a fragmented experience for the end user. By exposing support to QA, and having support teams increasingly involved in pre-release testing so that everyone knows what’s shipping, we've been able to do a much better job of accurately communicating to users…and setting their expectations on the scope or timetable for a given fix.

As an added bonus, we've found as we get the team more actively involved in the entire project cycle, everyone becomes more excited and willing to share their ideas. The situational awareness such testing offers helps the support team to work more effectively with devs just as much as it helps in their customer encounters. This works well with co-located teams. But what happens with remote employees?

Avoiding the pitfalls of a remote, freeelance support team

Whether QA is a factor or not, support momentum becomes more complex when everyone works remotely. Consider the fact that the whole team is part time and everyone freelances — meaning they've got other clients, too — and things can get messy, quickly. We've only got so much overlapping time in a given day and so we have a strategy for handling support.

No system — no matter how awesome — is going to keep a bad team from failing. If you've got support staff who are genuinely disinterested, view this as "just a job" or who don't share the customer's sense of urgency, then you've got bigger problems.

As a general rule of thumb: if a support member doesn't approach every new support exchange with, "How would I feel if I were in this person's situation?" then they probably aren’t well-suited for a remote support position. The amount of uncertainty — the sleepless nights you'll have wondering how much babysitting this person requires to get the job done — you don't want that. As with anything freelance, you want self-starters: good people who you can count on to get things done. And you'll be able to tell pretty quickly which side of that coin they fall on.

You will find good people — they're out there. Here are few things I've found effective at maintaining momentum with my distributed team:

• A shared commitment to 24-hour response times. This is pretty standard, and I question the dedication of any team who doesn't guarantee customers a response of some kind within 24 hours of the original post. We openly publicize this 24-hour window. It forces the team to stay accountable, because they know there is no gray area: if your forum has threads outside that timeframe, you've failed and so have our systems. And it's going to warrant a discussion you'd probably rather not have.
• Twice-weekly scrums. We meet for 30 minutes, twice a week, to review the support obstacles we're facing. Everyone brings up exactly what stands in their way and we figure out how to work through it on the spot. Everyone normally comes away with one to two action items outside of their regular support duties, to report back on at the next scrum.
• An active Skype chatroom. We've got our broader "Products" chat with the whole crew, but we also started a support-only chat a few months back. What a change this has made! It's like a never-ending scrum meeting where we can ask each other questions and pass off threads or support emails to someone better qualified. Plus, there's just enough goofiness and off-kilter banter that it feels as close to a watercooler as you're going to find in the digital world.

Despite the fact that I have never met three of the four support members on my team, we've developed working systems that are as effective as any established by comparable groups working in physical offices.

Turn support into a flexible creature

Different systems are going to work for different teams, and that's OK. This piece is meant to be an overview of what worked for Modern Tribe in case it might work for you too…and you're welcome to take a page from our book if it does.

But if I could leave support teams out there with one bit of advice, it's to try new things. Buck conventional wisdom. Go with your gut and accept that your idea might not work.

What I touched on here and — for that matter — virtually every aspect of Modern Tribe's support system does not come from a book or from reading articles like this one. It comes from trial and error: seeing what works, what doesn't and adjusting to make sure it doesn't happen again. If you're willing to do the same, you'll learn a lot.

Image based on Billetes y sombreros by Germán Póo-Caamaño, CC-BY-2.0.

How did you first get into WordPress, and (presumably later) BuddyPress, and what was it that pulled you in?

Like many, I went the hand rolled route to start blogging. It was somewhat of a “rite of passage” to develop your own. I was lucky enough to be a member of the blogging network 9rules back then. This was an amazing collection of people focusing on creating great content. A few others in this community were using WordPress when it was still a fledgling platform. I took a bit of time to be convinced I could do what I wanted to do theme-wise — but once I worked that out, the simplicity sold me.

BuddyPress was a slightly different story. I was creating WordPress themes and had a chance to create some BuddyPress themes. I had time to dive into what then was quite a learning curve to create themes. Over time as I learned that communities was where my heart was, my work reflected this passion and I moved to creating using BuddyPress full time.

When did you set up Logical Binary, and what have you learned since then?

Logical Binary was set up initially nearly 12 years ago as a way to showcase the work I was doing. It for a while was name only, my “web presence” only fully forming in 2005. I’d been doing freelance by word of mouth for a few years mixed in with agency work and needed a home online. Logical Binary, the site, grew from a need to take things a bit more seriously and focus on a business.

What I’ve learned over the years is to focus on what you love, and that niché is good. I’m not someone that can do everything — if you are then great but I design better when focused. Playing to my strengths is focusing on community design.

Talk to us about your strongly held belief in “design for humans.” Where can design go wrong when it loses sight of this idea?

I think my passion for designing for humans comes from my love of psychology, which I studied up to A-level and has impacted my entire life. Some of my first experiments on my own site were with theme switches by mood. It was a perhaps naive way of exploring back in 2006, but it was my first step outside of the single experience and thinking about who was using the site.

Design goes wrong when it assumes the operator at the end is the same. As a designer it’s easy to assume everyone will think like us — we’re not “every man.” I’m very into asking stupid questions of interfaces — this is when you see the gaps. Using the word “Submit” is a prime example — how unfriendly is that? Or a page that you land on with everything at the same level, everything shouting at you for attention. Where do you look? Our brains can’t handle it. We need paths, we need emotional feedback from what we interact with, we need guidance and we need common manners on sites.

You’re a heavy contributor to open source projects. How has that fed into your work life, opportunities, and learning?

I got my first taste of the ‘net from the Linux community many years ago. This was long before WordPress so when that showed on my radar I was already sold on open source. Whilst I’m not religious, I have one belief in life and that’s karma. I truly believe if I didn’t give back I’d not get anywhere near as much as I do in work life, opportunities, and learning. You truly do get out what you put in. The ease with which people share information is mind blowing and we should never forget how special that is.

I had the pleasure of attending BuddyCamp in Miami recently and it blew my mind. At one point I was told that there were several hundred people watching the live stream. This really filled me with energy to do more, create more, and get more people involved in BuddyPress. I truly believe that I’d not be where I was without the community, and I’m thankful every day for being part of this and those I’ve met. We’re united by a love for WordPress and BuddyPress, by an obsession with open source — this is a powerful thing.

What are you most proud of having contributed to BuddyPress, and what are you most excited about in terms of its future?

I’m most proud to have been able to contribute as a designer to BuddyPress. This may sound odd but it’s a misconception generally you have to be a developer to contribute. This is far from true of course. WordPress has blown this myth away but in some ways it hung around BuddyPress for a bit longer.

An exact contribution is tricky. I’m proud of organizing the default theme CSS file. I learned from looking at people’s code and hopefully this has helped other people. I’m also proud to have been part of the Status theme and Turtleshell project. I think above all I’m just stoked to be part of the BuddyPress project in a small way at this time.

I’ve described BuddyPress before, in terms of age, as starting school. It’s a young project but growing. I’m excited about getting more people involved beyond just developers. For BuddyPress to grow I really believe that not just developers should be part of its future and present. It’s really cool to see what can be built that isn’t using everything — maybe it’s just activity, maybe just groups, using BuddyPress as a platform, as an API and as a starting point to building a whole host of things with a dash of community — now that’s exciting.

As a specialist in BuddyPress, how would you explain the key benefits of making use of it over other alternatives a client or fellow designer might be considering?

BuddyPress, I’ve said before, is social lego. You can use as much or as little as you want. You pick the tools and create the community. That’s the big benefit at the start. You can, since the release of 1.7, do all this with a flick of a switch on your existing WordPress site. Default in communities only gets you so far. If you want to build, grow, and allow your community to take off, you need to go beyond default. BuddyPress lets you do this. It lets designers be free to create, it lets developers be free to build.

BuddyPress also has a very powerful community behind it full of passion, and an open sharing of information at its core. If you build on BuddyPress you get an entire community behind you from the start. I’m not ignorant to other solutions but no other option really allows for such ease, unique communities, and support of resources.

One of your many projects is buddydesignlabs.com. What were your goals in starting work on “lab” style projects, and how are they different from your contributions to BuddyPress itself, or the work you do for clients.

Buddy design labs is aimed at being an open-ended project for me. In it, I want to explore what could be for BuddyPress. I probably will develop some ideas into plugin form but I truly have no set goal. The reason I wanted to just indulge in pure speculation and exploration was that it frees me to think outside client projects. I’m not constrained by anyone’s requirements and that’s quite a powerful experiment.

The format I’m choosing is of a blog post. It shows my sketches and mockups and reminds me a lot of the sketchbooks we kept as art students that documented the work we did. In many regards that’s what this project is becoming for me. I used to love my sketchbooks and am growing as fond of Buddy design labs for the same reasons. It’s about musing, putting things out there, and seeing what happens.

You’ve worked with some really diverse clients. What would you say unifies them, and more broadly, what attracts you most in a potential client project?

Most get to me by word of mouth. I have to take a moment here to thank those who pass work on to me the BuddyPress core team specifically are amazing at spreading work among the community. Community is really the unifying element.

What gets me to take a project is understanding. Communities don’t just grow on trees, you have to understand their complexity and that there are no easy wins. Yes, it’s rewarding and powerful to have a community but it’s something that needs work. Not all communities are successful and sometimes I have to be honest about that to the prospective client and not take a project.

Out of all the work you’ve done, which project are you proudest of, and what challenges did it present to you?

I am most proud of being part of shift.ms. The current design isn’t my work but we’re going through a redesign and this is what I’m most proud of. As a client they’ve been very open to taking a step back and re-analyzing every part. It wasn’t an easy process but everyone involved had the community goals at the heart of every decision.

We’ve gone through focus groups, inspiration collection, wireframes, and are currently in the prototyping phase. I’ve had a lot of my own assumptions challenged during this process, too. The one that comes to mind is tag clouds. They’ve in many ways gone out of fashion; their users, though, love them. This backed up the fact that sometimes we should just ignore what is “trendy” and focus on the user. We’re brewing up some interesting takes on many traditional community functionality we’d have only thought of by going through this process.

Finally, you’re one of the organizers of WordCamp Europe. What’s the big idea there, and what are you most excited about?

WordCamp Europe is a celebration of the European WordPress community. It’s a two-day event in an amazing venue which several of the organizing team (myself included) visited for another conference in December. There’s a really strong community in Europe and we hope that this event highlights that.

I think I’m most excited about the focus being on Europe and showcasing all the amazing things we as a community do. I really think the time is right for an umbrella WordCamp like this.

Quick Overview

WPShout kicked off in 2009 and has been bringing a range of free resources, insightful opinion pieces, and useful tutorials ever since. With pieces on everything from the economics of premium themes, to comparison pieces on WordPress hosting services, with a side order of free ebook, screencast tutorials and more besides, it’s well worth your time.

Image based on shout by Krista Baltroka, CC-BY-2.0.

How did you get started with web development, and when did WordPress enter the picture?

I got caught in the web before the first bubble in 1999 as a teenager in Montréal. My first exposure to code was Flash Actionscript 4.

That was soon forgotten and I started teaching myself C#. I built a simple CMS out of it, only to move to PHP thereafter. By mid 2000, I put the project manager’s hat. I gradually dropped coding and concentrated on organizing teams.

WordPress first came to me while I was in the Congo in 2005. I entertained my first blog on a platform built by a friend.

The “5 minute install” promise of WordPress piqued my curiosity. I was quickly sold and I knew that WordPress would be a game changer.

Tell us about Wysija and the problem you’re trying to solve with it.

Wysija is a newsletter plugin for WordPress that was first released in early 2012. It’s a freemium solution.

Me and my 3 partners in crime wanted to fill a gap: what newsletter solution can be more flexible than Subscribe2 or Feedburner’s email alerts and yet, not force users to leave WordPress.

There were 3 challenges:

• build an easy to use drag and drop editor
• make the installation easy
• keep it essentially free

What made you decide to build a product on top of WordPress, rather than as standalone software?

There are dozens of great standalones. Great, but users want an integrated solution within WordPress.

Once you’ve trained your friends, family or clients to use WordPress, you don’t want to teach them yet another third party application.

How did you arrive at the business model for Wysija, and what was the thinking behind it?

For some reason, I can’t imagine another model than freemium. Here’s why:

• I’m personally averse to buying Premium plugins myself, believe it or not.
• We need a lot of users to quickly to build a better product.
• The “competition” already use freemium models.

How do the challenges of supporting a product compare to those of dealing directly with clients, as a service provider?

I grew tired of answering phone calls from clients. Consider me relieved at having a product instead of a service.

Supporting a product is very intense nonetheless. Yet, it’s quintessential to our success and I regard it as our number one marketing tool. When you have a product, it’s OK to make some mistakes, but it’s fatal not to respond to your users.

What pitfalls do you think entrepreneurs and designer/developers might face when making the leap from service to product?

Good question. I get it all the time at WordCamps. Many developers are tempted, and yet afraid to make the leap.

Here’s my own unordered list:

• Committing to your product is a full time affair.
• Underestimating support, or disliking it.
• Working alone, because having a partner is tricky, will get you nowhere.
• It’s about the experience, not the features.
• Your users know what they want, they don’t always know what they need.
• Yes, you’ll be poor for a while. But you’ll be exhilarated and happy.
• Sell from day one, don’t wait.

What’s been your approach to branding, telling your story, and setting Wysija apart from the pack?

Your product needs to speak for itself. Build an experience and user interface that is easy and fun. Your users should feel they’re using something special.

As an author, you need to be reachable and transparent. Humans love to hear about other humans. When people write to you, or ask for help, they are friendlier when they’ve seen your photo. Go to WordCamps, and meet your users — it’s gratifying.

Then, it’s all about service. Provide fast and friendly support.

Your website has to look professional so your visitors know you’re serious about it.

Acquiring users is difficult. Try to make every single one of them loyal ambassadors of your product.

What do you look for in a plugin or WP-powered product you’re considering using, and what makes you run a mile?

I look for plugins that have, in this order:

• Regular updates.
• High number of downloads.
• Support reputation.
• Best compromise between features and user experience.

What part, if any, has the WordPress community played in your work and the success of your business?

The WordPress plugin repository is how people find us. More than Google, word of mouth, and sponsoring WordCamps combined.

I consider the repository as the most important community tool because it offers the support forums, the reviews and star ratings. More importantly, it’s not commercial.

Sponsoring WordCamps hasn’t given us a lot of traction, but we do it nonetheless.

Talking at WordCamps has a definite impact. Then again, the crowd is composed of enthusiasts and hardcores. An infinite group.

WordPress is used by the masses. They’re actually everywhere around you, in your daily life. They are unknowingly part of the movement. I’m thrilled when I stumble on someone who uses Wysija, yet knows absolutely nothing about it or WordPress. This is when I feel we’ve reached the core of the community.

What are the three most important things to keep in mind when supporting a premium product or service?

Premium or free, you should always support your users with this in mind:

• Answer within 48 hours, possibly 24 hours.
• Be courteous and friendly.
• Get to the bottom of the problem and fix it.
• Ask for a review when finished. See our reviews, as example.

Additional tip: ever noticed how girls always say they’re sorry when you tell them something bad happened?

They’re right! Say you’re sorry, even if you have nothing to do with the problem itself.

What are you proudest about Wysija, in terms of really distinguishing it from the other options available for creating and maintaining mailing lists?

Its simplicity. This said, you still need to be a geek to configure it. This is part of our ongoing battle to add features while keeping it simple.

I’ll leave the last words for a Matt Mullenweg quote:

“The goal is to reach simplicity and not to be simplistic.”

Quick Overview

If you’re interested in web design and development and want to expand your horizons across a range of sizzling hot topics, you’re probably going to want to plug your ears into the Boagworld Show. Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington of Headscape, alongside frequent guests, take on big subjects like analytics, best practices, and building sites for ROI, and all in their quintessentially British fashion.

Image based on Blue Marble 2002 by NASA Goddard Photo & Video, CC-BY-2.0.

It’s not every day that we find ourselves interviewing a philosophy major who went on to become a pro-football player before taking on WordPress and building a successful business around theme design. Tell us about your journey into WordPress.

WordPress started as a hobby for me. While I was playing football, we had a lot of free time in the offseason. I’d often find myself tinkering on the web. I stumbled across WordPress while looking for a better tool to build websites. After my football career was over I kept an active interest in WordPress and eventually started designing themes. If you want to read the whole backstory, check out “The last 3 years” over on The Theme Foundry blog.

Are there any similarities to or things you’ve learned from professional football that apply to your entirely different role as founder and head honcho of Theme Foundry?

I learned a lot about hard work and the importance of being a dependable teammate. Football is the quintessential team game. It requires you to do your job while trusting the other 10 players on the field with you to do the same. When everybody does their job well, the team is usually successful. I think this spills over into business as well, and it certainly has helped me while building The Theme Foundry team.

The theme Vigilance was a huge breakthrough for you. How did it come about, and what did you learn from the changes that followed in its wake?

Vigilance was my first foray into theme design and it was way back in 2008. The WordPress theme market was in the very early stages, and I think we just hit the right spot with Vigilance. It was minimal and clean, and had some pretty cool options for a free theme at that time.

The biggest lesson I learned from Vigilance was that customers are willing to pay real money when you provide them with value. Until that point it was more of a concept than a reality for me.

What commonalities do you see in your customers, in terms of their needs, frustrations, or objectives?

Most of our customers need a website and they’ve usually already decided to use WordPress. At the core everyone’s objectives are very similar — stake out my spot on the internet, easily manage my content, and make sure my website looks great and functions well. WordPress handles the first two and we focus on that last part.

You tell the story behind Theme Foundry, as well as those of your clients, on your site. How important do you think it is to have a story in a competitive marketplace, and where would you place that in the mix of other factors that set a WordPress business apart from the pack?

I think it’s extremely important to have a story. A story resonates with your audience in a way that a simple set of facts cannot. Human beings love stories, and for good reason. Stories have defined and embodied the human experience across all cultures for centuries. We’re at an exciting time in history as we now have the chance to bring those stories alive on the web as a shared experience using amazing tools like WordPress.

How important is documenting and supporting your work if you’re in the WordPress products and services industry, and where do some people go wrong with this? What have you learned over time about this process?

Extremely important. As a customer, knowing that the product I purchase is supported and will continue to be supported is a deciding factor in whether or not I buy that product.

Tell us about your design process. Has that changed a lot over the last few years or have you settled on a tried-and-true approach that works for you?

Design is about constantly evolving —- new tools, new methods, new ideas. There are so many talented and smart folks working hard on design problems and it’s great that many of them are happy to share those ideas with everyone.

My design process follows this pattern: sketch, rough mockups in Adobe Illustrator, design, and build in the browser. The first two steps only take about 5% of the total time I spend working on a theme or a design. This is also how we design themes at The Theme Foundry. This isn’t the traditional approach, because most folks either come from an agency background or are working in an agency. Therefore, they usually end up following a more rigid waterfall process that works well in that agency environment. They spend quite a bit of time on the mockup stage and then pass Photoshop files over to a front-end developer and say “code this.” Unfortunately, it’s never that easy. When you make the browser your canvas you can truly design around the medium itself and build a better website.

As a self-taught designer what do you think you were able to bring to the table that those trained specifically in one form of design or other might have overlooked?

I think my weakness as a designer can serve as a strength on the web. I don’t have great artistic abilities, but on the web artistic abilities aren’t valued in quite the same way as they are in the physical world. I think the web at its core is about publishing, so we should take inspiration from the centuries of work in that field. I think some of the best designers on the web have a background in print. Ultimately, I think being a great web designer requires a multidisciplinary skillset, which naturally lends itself to self-teaching.

You’ve created a range of beautiful and innovative themes that have often pushed the envelope. Which are you proudest of, and where do you see theme design evolving next?

I’m most proud of some of our latest themes — Avid, Portfolio, Watson. I think they represent the type of high quality work we want to continue to add to our collection at The Theme Foundry. I should also note, I didn’t personally design or build those themes. But, I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with the really talented folks that did design and build them.

When it comes to deciding on your next product, do you approach your decisions from a particular angle, such as serving new verticals or putting new WordPress core affordances into practice, or do you just let inspiration strike?

We have an internal process for deciding what theme to build next. Much of this revolves around gaps and areas we need to improve in our current collection. I still don’t think we’ve nailed down those core areas and filled out our collection completely.

Once we’ve focused on a scope it’s the designer’s job to come up with some sketches and inspiration for the direction of the theme.

What’s the one thing you wish you had known when you were first getting started with Theme Foundry?

Push the limits and don’t obsess over small problems. I have a somewhat obsessive personality, and I like things to be organized, scalable, and structured. While this has helped us in many ways it has also slowed us down in others. I’m just now starting to understand the importance of moving faster when the wind is at your back.

How did you first get involved with WordPress and what drew you in?

In early 2005 I was using my personal site to test out a bunch of the available CMSs. I tried WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, Xoops, PHP-Nuke, phpBB, Typo3, and probably a few more that I can’t even remember at this point. I was trying to stick to the PHP-based options, since that’s what I knew. WordPress was the perfect mix for me. It was easily extensible and easy to use.

Two years later I was doing client work using WordPress and I ran across a bug. I fixed it for the client, and then started trying to figure out how to get my fix into Core. I remember reading a bunch of existing tickets in Trac, and asking several questions before actually opening my first ticket (#4433). The patch didn’t follow coding standards, was created with diff not svn diff, and it doesn’t look like it was relative to trunk, but Mark Jaquith recognized that it fixed a legitimate issue and committed it. That was it. The hook was set.

After that I started following WordPress development more closely. I wasn’t especially outgoing, so it was mostly lurking at first, but I’ve been getting progressively more involved ever since.

When did you first start working with WordPress commercially?

When version 2.0 came out in late 2005 I started seeing it as a viable solution for clients. WordPress now had rich editing, static pages, a decent default template that I could use as a starting point for whatever I built (yep, I’m talking about Kubrick), and it supported plugins. It took me a little while before I found the right projects for it, but by mid-2006 I had used it on several client projects.

Tell us about your involvement with WordPress Core and the community. Has that influenced your professional work with WordPress?

At this point I’d say that I’m pretty heavily involved in the community. The community itself is getting bigger though, so I try to focus my involvement into the areas where I can make the most difference. I’ve contributed code to every version of WordPress since I started on 2.3. I attend all the dev meetings in IRC, try to help review patches, etc. I’m even co-leading the 3.6 release. I also speak at WordCamps as well as other events, especially when they’ll let me talk about getting involved in WordPress.

And yes, it has drastically influenced my professional work. At first it mostly affected how I positioned myself in the market, allowing me to know more about WordPress and what was coming down the pipeline. Then I started getting work referrals from other community members that knew the quality of my work because they saw it in Core. Eventually this allowed me to be more selective about the work that I took, giving me the flexibility that every freelancer wants. The biggest change though came within the last year when I partnered with two other WordPress contributors to start Range, a WordPress design and development company staffed completely with WordPress contributors!

How can people get involved in helping out with WordPress as an Open Source project, and when or why should they?

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to get involved with the WordPress project. Sometimes it’s as simple as profit. WordPress currently runs 17.5% of the internet or more than one out of every six sites! This is up nearly two percent in the last year, with steady growth. It powers tens of millions of websites. If you’re a designer, developer, business consultant, or work with the web in any way, WordPress is a huge potential market. That’s great, but how do you differentiate yourself and stand out from all your competition? When you get involved with the WordPress project — you increase your WordPress skills and even learn about new or upcoming changes. Just by getting involved, you become more valuable to your clients.

Another reason is a little more altruistic, and is what actually drew me to contribute. If you help make WordPress better, it’s not only better for you, it’s better for everybody. Your contribution will help someone else out, and someone else will contribute something that will help you! In the end, everyone benefits.

Once you’re ready to help, there are plenty of places to get involved including translation, documentation, events, support, accessibility, user interface or user experience, testing, and development. A great place to start is the Codex article on Contributing to WordPress.

Tell us about WordPress 3.6 and what you’re proudest about as a co-lead of the release.

WordPress 3.6 is still under heavy development, but so far I definitely think it’s our work around post formats, lead by Helen Hou-Sandi and Range’s own Pete Mall. It’s been such an underused feature, that has such potential! We’re going to be revamping the post screen to make them easier to use, standardizing the way extra data for each post format is stored, and even creating fallback output so all themes can use them. Then, we’re going to add the icing on the cake by really showcasing them in Twenty Thirteen, the new default theme that will also be shipped with this release!

What are the three most important lessons you’ve learned since setting up shop?

Make sure you clearly set expectations up front, and be specific. No matter how well you think you understand what a client wants, it’s likely that you’re not quite right. Documenting exactly what is going to be delivered will help. It gives the client the chance to make corrections, gives the client something that they can hold you to, and helps prevent scope creep by giving you something that you can hold the client to. I can’t stress enough how important this is.

Charge what you’re worth. Undercharging isn’t just bad for you. When you undercharge you attract the wrong clientele. You end up with projects that don’t challenge you or interest you and you end up underperforming. Your poor work doesn’t allow you to charge more, and the cycle ends up being self-perpetuating.

Lastly, work with the right people. This applies to both clients as well as contractors or employees. A client that really matches your goals and abilities will be a happy client, and one that doesn’t only cause grief. Similarly, working with the wrong contractors or employees can kill your reputation. Remember, you’re putting your name on whatever they do. It is well worth it to take your time and make sure you’re always working with the right people.

Do you prefer to work solo, as part of a team, or both depending on the circumstances?

I love working on my own. I really do. I distract easily, take a long time to get back on task after being distracted, and I hate both waiting on other people to finish something I need as well as the feeling that someone is waiting on me. I’m also not bothered that I’m the only one in my office at home. I don’t feel the need for personal contact to come through work, I have friends for that.

Having said that though, there is a huge drawback to working solo, and that’s stagnation. You’ll never learn as quickly, or as much, than when you have other great people to learn from. This is something that I didn’t even realize I’d get from the community when I started contributing to WordPress, but I did. Working on WordPress with people like Mark Jaquith, Ryan Boren, Andrew Nacin, Pete Mall, and many more, has made me a better developer. Working with people like Sara Cannon, Jen Mylo, Lance Willet, and Helen Hou-Sandi has given me a better eye for usability. This was one of the driving forces behind starting Range. We get better just by working closer together.

Tell us about Range and the impetus behind joining forces with fellow WordPress luminaries Sara Cannon and Pete Mall. How does this fit into the other work you do?

First of all, Pete and Sara are awesome! Who wouldn’t want to work them?! Honestly though, we’d all been running our own companies for a while. We’d trade work back and forth some, but we realized there was a lot more potential there. By teaming up we’ve been able to create an amazing team capable of handling much more than we could ever do individually. And the best part is, we all have the same desires to give back to WordPress and have been able to make that an integral part of what Range is! Which means that instead of Range getting in the way of my contributions, it actually helps to enable them. There’s no possible way that I could be co-leading the 3.6 release without their support.

What advice would you give someone just getting started with working with WordPress professionally?

The WordPress community is a great tool. Use it to your advantage. Take the time to get involved and to connect with other WordPress professionals. There’s a huge wealth of knowledge there, and it would be crazy to ignore it.

Finally, as a self-confessed beer snob, could you recommend some choice beverages Code Poets should be seeking out?

My two favorite beer styles are the dark heavy beers with layers and layers of flavors, such as the porters and stouts, and the bitter hop-heavy beers like the IPAs. For the darks, you really can’t beat the barrel-aged Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout, but you should definitely try the Big Bad Baptist Imperial Stout as well. Also, look for a place that serves beers on nitro instead of just beer gas. They’ll often have something like the Left Hand Nitro Milk Stout, which is phenomenally smooth on nitro.

For the IPAs, just look to the West Coast. Almost everyone there is doing it right including Stone, Green Flash, Alpine Brewing, and many more. Some of the team-ups between these breweries are absolutely stellar.

Also, if you use untappd my username is aaroncampbell.