Interview With Mark Forrester of WooThemes

Mark: I am a half South African, half British digital designer, currently living in London, but soon returning to the beautiful, warm Cape Town. I’ve been freelancing in web design since 2003, but always involved in my own online pet projects. In the last 2 years though I’ve been able to quit the freelance-based contract work and concentrate on my pet projects that now generate me enough passive income to live comfortably, namely WooThemes.com.

Mark: Straight out of school I enrolled in a one year course in digital design that touched on desktop publishing, graphic design, and motion design. I then went on to the University of Cape Town where I completed a 3 year commerce degree, majoring in Information Systems. Throughout the degree I struggled with the analytical approach to systems development, and always preferred working on interface designs, usability studies and playing in Photoshop with color and shapes. The combination of the commerce degree and the digital design course gelled well together in third year when we learnt the basics of table-based web design. I knew it was for me. 7 years later the web has changed pretty significantly, but I’ve loved the journey.

I’ve followed Jeffrey Zeldman, Jon Hicks, John Oxton, and 456 Berea Street from the very early days and always drawn oodles of inspiration from their sites.

Mark: WooThemes has changed my life. Being able to take a holiday, or be sick and not worry about how I’m going to pay the next bill is rather satisfying. Taking what used to be my billable hourly contract work and turn it into something commodity based that we can sell exponentially is much more sustainable for me and my family’s future. Only with WooThemes would I have been able to do cool things like – http://slopes.woothemes.com/

Heading up the design collaborations at WooThemes means I’ve networked, met and worked with some of the industry leading web designers around the world. Working with these individuals has really inspired and pushed me to excel in my design expertise.

Mark: A theme usually takes about a month to develop, from conceptualisation right through to release. We usually gain inspiration for a theme with feedback from our Woo users on our blog, or on Basecamp where we have a group of beta testers suggesting theme ideas. This is followed by either Cobus, Magnus or myself pushing pixels around in Photoshop getting the wireframe, layouts and styling 100%. We then convert the design into html/css templates after which we jack in the basic wordpress functionality and create some alternate styles. Jeff and Fox then add the WooThemes bells and whistles being our easy to use WooFramework wizardry.

Luckily we quite a big team now, together with our designer collaborations, so each theme is usually really unique with a lot of creative juice poured into the design from a lot of different angles.

Mark: I believe the fast-growing number of commercial theme providers need to really up their game in order to be sustainable, producing innovative themes that haven’t been seen before, for niche users that have previously not been catered for. I believe in 2010 we’ll see lots of themes pushing the boundaries of WordPress, themes that are more than just aesthetically pleasing, themes that when installed offer plugin-based functionality right out of the box. At WooThemes we plan more Google Maps integration, advanced search functionality, e-commerce facilities, and custom post types.

Mark: I’d say it’s a combination of the two. Design wise I still trust my instincts in Photoshop, whilst with the functionality I’m building into the design I turn to the end-user’s opinion for really innovative ideas. Working with a vast array of designer’s definitely helps inspire you to produce something better each time though.

Mark: Harness the social media tools available to you, follow the cream of the crop in your area of online expertise and learn from them. Network with them. Grow, groom and market your portfolio, and when you have even a few minutes of spare time don’t waste them – work on pet projects!