Make the Levers
This quote from a WordPress.com customer caught my eye recently: It just really helped me to solidify what I really want my business to be. I don’t need this big huge gigantic “American dream” of […]
Playing the Right Chords
No matter what type of work you do, you can easily focus on the details too much. Let’s say you’re learning guitar, and you worry about your strumming technique or type of strings you use […]
Front End Design, WordPress Themes and the Future
Say goodbye to the themer. If you’re not familiar with the WordPress world, that term may not mean much. But in that space, it’s a role, usually with a front end design skill set, filled […]
An Hour with Gutenberg to Create an Image-Rich Story
Today, I spent an hour recreating a post from Longreads in the Gutenberg publishing experience to gain some empathy for our customers. You can check out the video, and see a screenshot of the final […]
Driving More Traffic to Your Site with $20 and Pizza
Yes, the secret is pizza. 🍕 Let me explain. As a customer empathy challenge, the designers at Automattic have dove into coming up with a plan to drive more traffic to a colleague’s post. With […]
Staying Positive When Your Product Causes Pain
I make and think about WordPress themes all day with the WordPress.com Theme Team. They control the appearance of a WordPress website, and it’s a heck of a fun job. Most of the time. What […]
Themes are Mission Control
When we think of space flight, we often think of the thing that gets us there: the shuttle, module or rockets that take us out of this world. However, in the early days of space […]
The Next Chapter for Themes
Every few months I read a post about how the WordPress theme business has shrunk. The authors always reach a similar conclusion. Sales have dwindled. Competition has increased. Putting food on the table, finding a […]
How to Know When to Walk Away from a Project
This week, I published a post about how the Theme Team at Automattic decided to retire one of our recent experiments:
