Balancing Options vs. Overload

On WordPress.com, one thing we’ve been focusing on is making themes that just work. It’s a bit of a balancing act; it’s very tempting to allow customers to control every aspect of their theme, because it seems like the simplest way to give them what they want. That idea may sound great to customers, but …

Reflections on theme retirements

For the past few weeks I’ve been gradually retiring themes from the WordPress.com showcase. Retirement may sound a bit dramatic, but it simply means a theme will be removed from our offerings, and new customers won’t be able to activate it on their sites. This way we can keep our theme collection fresh and make sure …

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 …

One Theme May Hide Another

At WordPress.com, every time we launch a new theme, we launch a demo site to go with it. As a Theme Wrangler, after spending weeks working on a new theme, we spend hours on its demo site. We tend to create a theme with a defined user type (e.g. Photographers) and as a result, the …

Evolution of a theme

On WordPress.com we have a showcase full of beautiful, diverse themes, but it has an ugly side as well, hidden from the public view. Behind the scenes we have Trac (our bug tracking system of choice) full of issues reported by our customers. Some of those issues are legitimate bugs. Oftentimes though, we receive reports …

Consistency isn’t just good for users; it’s good for us, too

As a Theme Wrangler, I'm a member of the team here at Automattic that builds, maintains and reviews the themes on WordPress.com. Right now we have over 380 themes available for folks to pick from. Each theme is its own little microcosm, a standalone bundle of files and functions. The differences between these themes can …