The first in a new series of posts that will aim to share the lessons we have learned from running and building WooThemes in the last 3 years.

WooThemes has just released the design (by Tim van Damme) which I used to promote & pre-sell my book, Rockstar Business. Having sold more than a 1000 copies already, I'd argue that the design served my needs pretty well. :)

The Tumblr experiment is over & I'm officially back on WordPress. Heck, I couldn't be the co-founder of one of the largest WordPress theming companies online & not take advantage of all the cool stuff we've been building lately...

This is my new setup:

• WordPress (exported my data via this tool, which WooThemes will probably look to improve soon);
• An unmodified version of the magnificent Canvas (soon to be replaced with a custom-designed child theme);
• Support for the WooTumblog plugin, which is integrated with Canvas; and
• Mobile publishing via our new iPhone application, Express.

Why did I do this now? Well, our WordPress work in the last couple of months evolved and progressed to such an extent that most of the benefits of initially experimenting with Tumblr finally evaporated (in the sense that I could get the same features on WordPress and own my own data). So moving back to WordPress and thoroughly giving our own work a kick of the tires, seemed like a logical and much more flexible choice.

You can thus take this move as a signal of my and our intent in the microblogging space and you should expect WooThemes to cause a few ripples in this regard in the next couple of months.

Watch this space.

[box type="note"]There's a lot still to happen here and this is just the very first phase of the migration back to WordPress. So bear with me whilst I customize & improve everything again...[/box]

We recently worked with the super-talented Jon Hicks to create these new bad boys for WooThemes. Read about our training of the new WooNinja’s here.

I was a guest on the WordPress Community Podcast last night and had a lot of fun with the show’s hosts, Joost de Valk & Frederick Townes.

We discussed a lot of the strategies & “policies” that we have implemented with WooThemes; especially with regards to customer service, creating loyal & evangelistic users, as well as our development cycles & processes around that.

Definitely worth a listen if you have 40-odd minutes to spare.