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 a kicker, we also have an imaginary $20 budget to spend on the task. I'll also share that in another …

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 I often hear from customers who use our products: "I just want to get it to look how I see …

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 flight programs at NASA, one man realized how important control from the ground would be to quickly evolving missions. Christopher …

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 niche and standing out is near impossible. It may not be so impossible though. With a new editing interface on …

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: For the last year and a half, we’ve experimented with a new starter-theme generator called Components. It was a way to make a few different theme “types” comprised of different components. The starter themes …