From this point forward updates to our products will be on a quarterly release schedule.

To be specific:

• As we patch and fix minor bugs throughout the month, we will not release-as-we-go. Instead, we will batch them into a “versioned release.”
• As we create new features we will include them in these versioned releases.
• Releases will be deployed to the support community’s download area at the beginning of the quarter.

I don’t mean to infer that we will always have a release for every product at the beginning of every quarter, but if we do have releasable fixes or changes, they will happen at predictable intervals.

As usual you can find release information in the release notes for each product. Standard’s notes, for example, can be found at http://standardtheme.com/releases. So you see we’ve been doing versioned releases all along. Now, you’ll be able to predict when it will happen next.

See you in April!

Theme Updates Now on Quarterly Release Schedule is a post from: State of the 8BIT!

His idea is that good.

As a team we are all excellent in our individual disciplines. Design, development, operations, support, editorial. You name it. And we each have enough overlap in our secondary skills to fill in for (or even challenge) each other’s primary. In fact, if you look hard enough, there are a few places where you might even think we have redundancy within our team. To an outsider looking in, it may seem like we could accomplish the same thing with fewer people.

John and I, for example, have noticeable overlap. Especially in business related strengths such as communication and strategy.

But the idea that significant overlap creates inefficiency is fundamentally flawed. In fact, I would argue that if you’re taking the time to even notice those things you’re not focusing on the right end of the spectrum.

The parts where John really shines are irreplaceable, and they are not the parts in which he overlaps, but the parts that are his and his alone. His ability to see the big picture, to cast vision, to aggregate information, refactor it, and come up with original concepts that iterate and leverage our existing body of work… stuns me. The “best idea” that he mentioned previously is just one example and have no fear. Standard Theme is a foundational component of it. Then, once a path is established, John is able to consistently coach, guide, and motivate us as a team along that path.

Let’s revisit some of the points of his post from my perspective. That of business partner.

Is his “greatest idea ever” unique?

Yes. Especially when you examine it from all sides.

Was it his idea?

Yes. We had an entirely different direction as a team until the point that he came in and pitched it.

Did it build off pre-existing successes that were a team effort?

Of course, just like he indicated.

Has it changed since he pitched it, and since the team got behind it?

Without question. It’s better, just like he said. But the green leafy thing that is growing is still true to the seed that he placed and watered in our greenhouse.

Our team is constantly in the trenches grinding out good work. John is the one who steps out of the fray, looks at what we do from new vantage points, and becomes dissatisfied with any visible mediocrity (his words for this are “BUT IT’S NOT EFFICIENT!”). Sure, this would probably still happen organically in his absence, but it would be a scarce occurrence by comparison. And our products, and success as a business, would suffer for lack of it.

Our success will not be defined by the areas in which we overlap, but the ones in which we uniquely dominate. This gives oxygen to the sparks and flames and explosions of ingenuity that eventually turn into the products we craft with pride.

Further Thoughts On The Best Idea John’s Ever Had is a post from: State of the 8BIT!

And I’m proud to say that it might just be my best and most original idea that I’ve ever had. But here’s the truth: It didn’t become great until the rest of the team spoke into it. In fact, my idea was just a vision of what might be while the team systematically scrutinized it, put “meat on the bones” so to speak, and really gave it life.

Without a team we’d never have a clear picture of execution. Without a team my small seed of an idea wouldn’t be keeping most of us up at night. Without my team I’d never be able to see it work.

The best ideas that you and I have are pretty poor until we share them with others – the act of refinement is so critical to innovation:

 All great inventions emerge from a long sequence of small sparks; the first idea often isn’t all that good, but thanks to collaboration it later sparks another idea, or it’s reinterpreted in an unexpected way.

Collaboration brings small sparks together to generate breakthrough innovation.

Thanks Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi for that truth. It was once theory but I’ve seen in work empirically. Win.

The Best Idea I’ve Ever Had is a post from: State of the 8BIT!

I’ll be speaking specifically on Friday at 11:00am on using a blog effectively for growing traffic, an audience, and business and although I’m not a professional speaker I’m more than happy to be do it since it’s part of my role for this team. And heck, I can’t stop talking about blogs, publishing, and building successful businesses! It’s just what we do, as a team, and I happen to be a spokesperson this week for it.

But I know that many of you are speakers, even professional speakers, and that you’re using your blogs as marketing and communication channels for your brand, your business, and your speaking careers to hook more opportunities to share with others what you’ve learned and what you’ve got to give.

This is an area that we’re going to be watching as we flesh out our new products since we want you to be the very best communicators possible (at least online as we can’t coach you on public speaking methodology!).

Are there any areas within online publishing that you wish would improve, especially if you’re a public speaker? Are there any features, functionalities, design aesthetics which you’d love to see? Any “widgets,” so to speak? Love to hear your thoughts!

Speaking about Publishing, Literally. is a post from: State of the 8BIT!

 The beta will be available in the forums in ~2 weeks. So you will be able to start your dev efforts.

Alternatively, if you do decide to make such a direct and resolute promise, be sure to announce any deviations when it they become apparent and certain. Customers make plans based on information of this nature, and it’s common courtesy to keep them updated (thank you for reminding me of this, James).

The buzz that our community is generating around Standard 3 is growing and we hear you loud and clear. I promise we are working on Standard, and only Standard. We want it to be right! Michael and I are fielding requests every week for updates on progress. He in the support community, myself via our pre-sales inbox and Twitter.

Here is one example.

I have a new project starting up, should I use Standard 2.7 or should I wait for 3.0?

And here is another.

Any idea on timeframe for @standardtheme 3? Months? Weeks? Days??

The Short Answer

We won’t release until it is thoroughly complete. And I’m not talking about it being bug-free, I’m talking about it having an unparalleled blend of powerful features, robust code, and elegant design.

I can say do not expect a January release (obviously). It feels safe to say do not expect one for February, either. Beyond that, it’s not prudent to go on record at this time.

What Changed?

Going into December we completed several rounds of design and development followed by subsequent rounds of testing. By January 6th we completed what I believed would be the Standard 3 Preview for the forums. This was derived from our beta codebase and included the core theme features minus incomplete/unpolished plugins.

Before unleashing it on our Support License users we huddled up as a team, used it, abused it, talked about it, and collectively we came to the realization that it was better than we hoped and therefore not ready for release (yet). Let me explain. Once we saw it in action we realized just how much potential this has to be the de facto theme for a WordPress blog. The core code and the design are fantastic, but the feature set didn’t do them justice. Our goal is to create a theme that does an incredible amount of heavy lifting for you behind the scenes, while having a ridiculously small admin panel. The idea is that the theme should do its thing with as little manual intervention or configuration as possible. We knew we had delivered on parts of this, but not other parts. The admin panel was light, but so was the lifting.

By and large, our customers would never really know. But we would.

We then started plotting out a second round of refinement. We went back to the basics and performed a top-to-bottom SEO audit. We added laser-targeted features to bring this to the next level. Last week we scrutinized every pixel in an all-hands-on-deck design review. Again, a litany of new additions, adjustments, and tweaks were identified. Next up will be a detailed code review. From organization, to convention, to continuity, to library, we will improve parts of the theme that most customers will never lay eyes on to honor the ones who will.

What’s Next?

Once these 3 reviews are complete, and all code and design have been updated based on the results, we will consider planning a release of the Standard 3 Preview to the support community. Whether we release it soon after or not, we will begin to interrogate the plugins, widgets, and non-core admin options to perfect those as well.

So you see, we still have work to do. Larger theme shops, with hundreds of WordPress themes, would have shipped the version we have now. It looks great, it functions well, and it would boost sales. I speak on behalf of the team when I say this product is our passion. We delayed the release and we added heaps of work onto our never-ending to do lists, and in spite of that we are actually more energized than when we started.

With each and every day that passes it is becoming clearer that we have no interest in running the race of quantity. Today, we’re a startup and even when we grow out of this stage, we’ll never have 100 WordPress themes for sale. That’s not our thing.

Instead, we want unparalleled quality in the design, code, and feature set. We want perfection, as far as it is attainable. We want it for ourselves. We want it for you. And we’re feeling patient enough to achieve it.

In the meantime, I do need to better my role as Product Manager. I’m learning that parts of it are more art than science. Balancing the tension between our customer’s expectations and a shifting release date is about as scientifically black and white as it gets. If something changes with certainty, say so right away.

The artistry factors-in when it’s time to discern if an internal milestone should mature into an external promise. As a manager, and as a team, we’re still leveling up this skill.

Standard 3, What’s the Hold Up? is a post from: State of the 8BIT!

We spent a considerable amount of time last Friday “sprucing” up our temporary office environment to give it a bit more character and class.

If you remember what it used to look like (here and here) then you’ll be surprised with what we were able (allowed?) to do in our limited space.

We’ve added some wood-like panelling, a couch, some musical gear and even a nice “mural” on the wall. Take a look:

It’s far from what we’d like to have in the future but this is where it all starts. We don’t mind the humble beginnings as they keep our heads down so that we can work on great products for the people that need them most. But we simply can’t help ourselves to take whatever little budgets that we have to craft and environment that’s a bit more like us.

We love to share these types of culturally iterative changes with our readers and our customers – we want you to know that we’re doing everything we can to build a successful business around what you do every single day: Communicating value to your teams and businesses and audiences. Our job is to make sure that we’re still around when you need us and out of the way when you don’t (but ever-present and supportive).

To do so we have to love not only what we do but who we do it with and where we get to do it – just like you customize your own publishing environment we have no choice but to customize ours as well. Heck, you knew that, right? All of our team are publishers just like you so we know what it’s like to have a really unimaginative writing and working environment!

Cheers to the small things. We’re getting closer every day. Can you see it?

Building Culture with What You’ve Got is a post from: State of the 8BIT!

We like Jimmy John’s. Why? Because they are so convenient and they deliver. Their pricing is pretty slick too which is good because we’re a bootstrapped technology startup with not much cash.

But hey, we don’t want to eat pizza all the time. That’s just not healthy!

So, we’d like to ask Jimmy John’s to sponsor our efforts this year. Honestly? We’d like a sweet hookup and in return we’ll share with our followers every single week how awesome Mr. J J is to us. And we have a lot of followers.

See? All smiles!

I mean, think how awesome it would be?! Jimmy John’s would be able to say that they helped change the world as they fed the team that created the world-changing products!

What a sweet deal!

We’re quite serious about this deal Jimmy… – just let us know!

We Want Jimmy Johns to Sponsor Us is a post from: State of the 8BIT!

We take our craft very seriously – and yesterday was a great example of that as our entire team sat in front of the new iteration of our product and scrutinized every single pixel, from the inside to the outside, and found that we couldn’t compromise any of them.

This is not a matter of “getting things out the door” or “shipping” but rather an intensely-deep love for our products (and our customers who will use it). We want to spend the laborious time sweating the small stuff so that they don’t have to – and so that they get to enjoy our work as much as we enjoyed making it a reality.

I think this is always true of those that see themselves as craftsmen – their joy is made complete as they see people touch, feel, and engage with their work, even if most will never completely appreciate the artistry and sweat that went into it.

Although our product is for the publisher, the ones that spend hours daily communicating words that change the lives of their customers and the direction of their organizations. Our joy is the publisher’s freedom to create and publish on an unparalleled canvas that combines simplicity with excellence.

Most publishers will never see the work that was put into the development of our products  (oh, it’s so much more than just “code”) but their ignorance is our satisfaction as we want them to trust us completely with our product. This level of trust between the publisher and theme developer hasn’t been exhausted by us, yet.

And we’re looking at reworking this entire philosophy this year. You trust us with your written words and by extension your business – we want to expand that trust from A to Z. I can’t wait for you to see it.

Publishing, Trust, and Our Joy is a post from: State of the 8BIT!

Look what came in the mail yesterday – a little taste of Italy!

Did you know that we’ve got some international team members? Yeah, it’s pretty slick – the internet is allows us to do this; the internet is so amazing!

Thanks Eric for sending ups some sweet “Pocket Coffee Espresso” – although you addressed it to all of the team I think I’m going to be a jerk and keep it all for myself.

Sorry guys. My bad.

Butterflies, Rainbows, and Unicorns!

Win.

A Little Taste of Italy is a post from: State of the 8BIT!

Go figure, right?

We work hard. We play hard. It’s the only successful formula we know.

We are currently in the process of crafting the best publishing platform that you’ve ever encountered. I cannot even wait to show you – and there’s even bigger plans this year to provide the most comprehensive end-to-end publishing ecosystem for your needs.

It’s ok if you have no idea what I’m talking about – we’ve never seen it done either, but we’re going to build it just for you. In the mean time we’ll continue to work and play hard for you!

And here’s a sweet video action:

Mixing Fun with Business = Fun Business! is a post from: State of the 8BIT!