Blog For Profit

Tabbed Leaf for Headway Themes is here!

Grant Griffiths — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:13:22 +0000

One of the most requested leafs around the Headway community is one which presents content in tabbed panels. And just as often, we get asked if there’s a leaf which does tabbed widgets. As of now, the answer is yes to both, and what’s more, they are one in the same leaf!

Our Australian developer, Chris Howard – known for the hugely popular Excerpts+ and Gallery+ leafs – now brings another brilliant leaf to the “plus” series, Tabs+.

Tabs+ adds native tabbed content support to Headway Themes and the content can be posts, excerpts, pages and even widgets. Furthermore, as well as standard horizontal and vertical tabs, it also supports vertical accordion style tabs.

Have you ever wanted to shrink your page so the user doesn’t have to scroll so much? Maybe you show your 10 most recent posts on the home page but your home page is becoming unweildingly long? No worries. Tabs+ accordion layout is just what you’re looking for!

Ever wanted to group your widgets and minimize the space they take up in the sidebar? No worries, Tabs+ tabbed horizontal widgets is just what you need!

Those are just two examples of how Tabs+ will help tidy up your pages, and bring more content into the immediate view of your readers. Best of all, the content in the inactive tabs is only being hidden from your readers. It is still visible to search engines, so your SEO is not affected.

Features

Layouts: Vertical and horizontal tabs; Vertical accordions
Content types: Posts (Full/Excerpt), Pages, Widgets
Thumbnails in tabs
Option for tab titles to display Text, Numbers or Bullets
Custom text for tab titles
Tabs can be changed by: Mouse click; Mouse hover; Double click; or Automatically
Tabs and panels styling
Background styling can take single HTML colours, multiple ofr gradients, or full CSS declarations for complex gradients
Extensive CSS classes for designers to customize even further

The following shows a couple of examples

Widgets in tabs with styled backgrounds

Posts in accordion style layout

You can see more demos at Tabs+ Demo

We’re really excited about Tabs+, it is the leaf we and so many others have been waiting for. Like the other “plus” series leafs, it’s an absolute steal at $25. Get it now from the Headway Dashboard. It rocks!

If you’re not a Headway user already, you can see now why people are raving about it. Headway Theme framework for WordPress is simple and easy for non-coders, and powerful and flexible for developers and designers. Grab a copy today and get started making great looking sites quicker than you could imagine.

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Published by: Grant Griffiths

Pippity Review – How to Increase Sign-Ups Without Annoying Your Visitors

Michael Martine — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:00:07 +0000

On the one hand, you want more sign-ups to your email newsletter or for that special offer on your site.

On the other hand, even though it’s generally agreed that popups can work very well for this, you don’t want to annoy your visitors.

So the trade-off has always been you could grow your list and annoy your visitors, or you could not annoy your visitors and knowingly leave sign-ups on the table.

Until now.

Most Popups Suck… Here’s Why Pippity is Different

Most other popups work based on timers: you show up at a page and they either pop right away (super annoying) or they pop after, say, a minute (still pretty damn annoying). So… no wonder people say they hate them. I’m not gonna sign up for anything without having a clue what the site’s about, so if I just arrived shoving a popup in my face is not a good idea. Likewise, when I’m right in the middle of reading an article I don’t want to be interrupted and annoyed by a popup. That does not make me feel good about signing up for anything. It’s irritating.

The only time I’m mentally in a place to be open to the prospect of signing up for an email list is after I’ve read an article and I’ve decided I liked it.

Pippity is different. Pippity popups have this setting you can turn on (I show you how in the video) where it only pops when the reader scrolls to the bottom of the page. In other words, it doesn’t pop when they’re in the middle of reading anything.

While many bloggers will notice increased sign-ups from using any ol’ popup, you might want to consider how many more you would get if the popup tool you were using wasn’t also annoying the hell out of your visitors.

Pippity is Super-Easy to Use

And I mean, like, ridiculously easy. You pick a template, customize it with easy-to-use menus, hook it up to your email list provider and… that’s it.

You can get all crazy-sophisticated with it if you want to, but you most certainly don’t have to. When I made the video below, I had barely ever used Pippity at all. I did it this way on purpose to show you how easy it is. I essentially went into it blind and was able to get it all set up within minutes.

Pippity works with the following email list providers:

Aweber
Madmimi
MailChimp
Constant Contact
1ShoppingCart
Get Response
Campaign Monitor
Graphic Mail
iContact

If there was any aspect of this I figured would trip people up, it would be with list integration.

However, that turned to not at all be the case. It was so simple I actually thought I was doing something wrong at first because I thought it just had to be more complicated than just copy and paste my Aweber form code. Needless to say I was impressed. You get to see all this in the demo video I made below.

Pippity Demo Video

Disclosure

Grant, the owner of this blog, has partnered with the makers of Pippity. The links in this article are not affiliate links, however I am an affiliate for Pippity and will provide you with my own affiliate link if you like. Just contact me.

More to Come

Pippity has some really awesome features, like built-in analytics and A/B split testing. I’ll show you those in future videos. I need to let it run for a couple weeks on my site to build up a set of control data first.

Free Trial

You can try Pippity for free for 30 days, so go check it out.

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How to Filter your Popup with Pippity

Grant Griffiths — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:44:28 +0000

With Pippity, you have fine-grained control of who sees your popup where and when. Not familiar with Pippity and the powerful features built into this new marketing tool, you need to check it out here. And if you did not already know, we are involved as partners in Pippity.

The interface is quite easy to understand and as you get a feel for it, you’ll realize just how much power you have.

Basic Filters

The most common filters are simply to have a popup that shows only to logged out users on post pages. If that’s all you need, all it takes is a flip of the switch when you open up the Basic Filters section of the Settings panel.

Power Filters

What if you want to target a popup to readers on a specific page, category or coming from a specific site, like Google? What if you want to target a combination of those?

That’s exactly what Power Filters allow you to do.

To get started, click Power Filters from the Settings panel while creating or editing a popup. Then click Add a Filter.

Basic Structure

Notice that with power filters, you’ll always specify 3 things:

Filter Type: What parameter should we be checking? These options include Post, Page Type, Category, Referrer, etc. (A full list is shown below)
Match Value: Each type will give you different options to match against. Options will be things like a list of your public posts, categories, etc.
Is or isn’t: Should the popup appear when the above condition is met or when it isn’t met?

Fine Grain Control with And-Or

Once you add a single filter, you can add additional filters by clicking either ‘And’ or ‘Or’ on an existing one.

An And relationship requires that the filter and any filter below it must be true.

Adding an Or filter returns true if either the original filter or it’s sibling returns true.

The nested display as you add filters will make this fairly clear. As you go deeper, you’re building And relationships that must be fulfilled to satisfy the parent. As you add Or filters, you add additional filters within a level that will satisfy it.

In the above example, the popup will appear if the reader is on post “Natural Talent is a Sham” AND they got to that page via Google OR Bing. It will also appear (an OR from the top level) on post “What Do You Want to Do With Your Life?”.

Power Settings

You’ll notice that the Settings panel when creating or editing a popup also includes some additional settings that can be particularly useful when using power-filters.

Custom Cookie

Pippity uses a cookie to be sure a user doesn’t see a popup twice. However, it may be the case that you have popups on different pages and you want a user to see them unrelated to whether they’ve seen another.

To accomplish this, simply type in a word to associate with this popup. If you want to have a set of popups of which a reader should only see one, give them all the same unique cookie.

If you want to set the cookie back to the default you can just leave the field blank or set it to ‘visited’.

Popup Priority

If it happens to be the case that multiple popups pass the filters of a given page, you can set a popups priority to be sure it has precedence of others. A higher priority popup will always be shown over a lower priority one.

If popups that pass have the same priority, they’ll be shown randomly.

The default priority of a popup is 0.

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WooThemes Forks Jigoshop and they brag about it

Grant Griffiths — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:37:32 +0000

WooThemes openly admits and celebrates the Forking of Jigoshop.

Call me old fashion, but I have an issue with this.

Where are the days of coming up with your own original ideas? Taking the time, energy, blood, sweat and tears and actually building your own product.

But of course, open source makes it so easy to simply “steal” someone’s idea and hard work. And justifying it by hiding under the umbrella of open source and “legal” forking.

“On the matter of forking, the Jargon File says:”

Forking is considered a Bad Thing—not merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but because forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony between the successor groups over issues of legitimacy, succession, and design direction. There is serious social pressure against forking. (Emphasis added)

Where is the outrage?

I am sad and sick we are not seeing outrage from anyone on this. The Woo community is giving a resonding “great news” in the comments in Woo’s post on their forking of Jigoshop. Doesn’t anyone else see an issue or a problem with this?

And finally, right before I hit the publish button, this comment comes into Woo’s post:

So let me get this straight.

You guys failed at developing your own WooCommerce solution. Attempting numerous times to outsource the development (mistake #1) to developers who didn’t really know a lick about ecommerce (mistake #2).

So instead of creating your own solution you’ve decided to copy someone else’s product outright and release it as your own?

Then just for good measure you decided to hire away the developers who worked on that product for the other company?

You do realize this is going to screw JigoWatt and their JigoShop product, correct? On what planet is this commendable? I guess if you can’t built it yourself, you might as well steal it, eh?

This is a perfect example of the GPL gone wrong. This isn’t a fork of a free plugin to create a another free plugin. This is one of the largest commercial WordPress developers forking another commercial WordPress developers hard work for their own commercial gain.

Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.

Is it really this simple to just “steal” someones hard work and copy it just because it is open source? And yes, I used the word steal. Call it forking if you want and if that makes you feel better. And if that helps you justify what you are doing WooThemes.

Who or what is next for the Woo forking machine? WooForms, WooBackup, WooBuddy, iWooThemes, WooPress75, WooStudio, WooThesis WooAllure, WooOrganic or WooWay?

Surely this is not the future of WordPress product development.

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The Story Behind Headway’s SEO Features

Michael Martine — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:01:29 +0000

There are more WordPress theme frameworks available now than ever before, and all of them are great. They each have something to offer that the others don’t. Diff’rent strokes, and all that.

Where they tend to differ most is in how the user interface is set up and laid out and what options it gives you. This is clearly where Headway outshines the rest with its Visual Editor (not only from the beginning, but with the upcoming 3.0 release it will explode far to the forefront again). At a certain basic functional level—under the hood, if you like, you’d think most theme frameworks are all very similar.

But you’d be wrong.

While Thesis has a more robust offering of SEO features now, early on its search optimization features were simple and basic. The idea of eliminating the need for extra plugins by having the theme framework provide that functionality was still new and credit goes to Thesis for pioneering that.

Grant approached me about assisting him and Clay with the SEO features of Headway. This was perfect because I really felt that a theme framework should be capable of so much more than what was available. Even though I never wanted to be, I became somewhat known as a “blog SEO guy.” More than that, though, I’ve always been the guy focusing on blogs as marketing tools for business. SEO is an important part of that.

For a person who may be including affiliate links or advertising links in blog content, or who may be creating sales pages and squeeze pages, a more granular level of control is needed:

The ability to make all the links in a post or page “nofollow”
The ability to have a post permalink or a page not be indexed by search spiders
The ability to “nofollow” specific navigation links
The ability to disallow certain families of permalinks from being indexed, like category archives and tag archives
Elimination of the worry about all the work put into the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin—Headway plays nice with any SEO plugins you may be using so there is no conflict

Some of the above are now features in other theme frameworks, but Headway had the “nofollow” features in particular first. And Headway was the first to use the same database table field names so you could start using Headway even if you had already been using the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin with no problems.

Other themes now have SEO features where you can enter a separate title tag from your post or page headline, a description meta tag and the now defunct keywords meta tag. With Headway, we took it a step further and provided a word count feature for the meta tag description as well as a live preview of what your post’s SERP entry would look like (search engine results pages—in other words, how it would look turning up in a Google search).

As search evolves and becomes more integrated with social networks, you can bet that we’ll be adding new SEO features into Headway as we can while maintaining backwards compatibility. For example, in 3.0 we will actively discourage people from using the meta keywords field but it will still be there because locking people out from the information they entered for old content would be unacceptable.

As blog SEO and Headway both evolve, you can look forward to us staying on top of the changes and working them into Headway.

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Headway Themes – What’s in a name

Grant Griffiths — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:14:02 +0000

The name Headway Themes came about by using a Thesaurus and looking at things from a marketing point of view. It really was as simple as that too.

I would like to tell you we spent hours and thousands of dollars on marketing research and focus groups to come up with the name Headway Themes. But, I can’t.

When you look at our early tagline, “Are you making Headway with your website?”, you can see the name worked well and continues too.

What we also strived to do was to own the keyword Headway. And when you do a search in Google, we took what Michael Martine and his SEO advice has given us and run with that too.

We also needed an official twitter hashtag. We originally started out using just #headway. But, we soon discovered there was a group in the UK using #headway. In fact, that group is involved in head injury and head trauma work. We certainly did not want to encroach on that. The logical next choice was #headwaywp. Combining Headway with WordPress seemed like the best use of our brand. Plus we wanted to make sure there was no doubt Headway was a WordPress theme/framework when we had conversations on twitter.

Having an official twitter hashtag is a very important key to making sure your brand has a prominent voice on twitter too. And you need to use that official twitter hashtag in every official company tweet too. The Headway Team makes it a point to use #headwaywp when we are answering any questions on twitter. Plus, we all follow the hashtag as a saved twitter search so we are aware of any mention of Headway.

As a brand, you have to keep up on the conversation taking place online. Especially twitter.

Over the last two years we have seen two versions of the Headway website. The original branding was simple and inexpensive for us to accomplish. What you see now on the Headway site is new branding we arrived at for the release of Headway 2.0 which occurred last October.

And with the release of Headway 3.0 later this summer, you are going to see the same branding. However, there will be some changes to the site design. And as an FYI, Clay started planning and working on Headway 3.0 last December. It is amazing just how long the developing stage of a product like Headway Themes takes.

Final thoughts

Again, I wish I could say the choice of the name Headway Themes was some stroke of genius. Where we took weeks if not months to come up with. However, it really was a simple process which had a lot to do with simply taking a gut feeling and running with it.

Sometimes we just need to run with our gut and stop over thinking things too.

Next time we will spend the time discussing how we built up to the launch of Headway Themes 1.0

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Headway v.1 – a spring and summer of building and planning

Grant Griffiths — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:00:00 +0000

During the spring of 2009 and of course the summer, Clay was busy building, coding, testing, breaking and whatever else he does in that head of his while working on the early version of Headway Themes.

I on the other hand was doing what I do and that is networking and showing early version of Headway 1.0 to people to get more input and ideas. And just as important. I wanted to get the buzz started on this new product we were building.

New and exciting ground

The whole process of building a product to sale was certainly something I had never done. Never mind Clay was totally excited to be working on something he could sink his teeth into. He really didn’t like designing and building sites as we later discovered.

And since I was raising a capitalist pig like myself, he was looking at building a company and making money too.

Networking, reaching out and making connections with people I had come to know from blogging and using social media like twitter was really my main focus.

Since I really had no idea when we would be ready to launch this product we would eventually call Headway Themes, I wanted to start building as much buzz around the internet as I could. I started to do screen sharing and showing what this new Layout Editor could do as far as helping people build sites. I started to line up very early alpha testers with people I knew had an audience and influence on that audience.

What we had to establish very early on was to position our new venture as a WordPress product. While I first saw this as perhaps a plugin, Clay had bigger ideas. He wanted to build a theme. Which later has become more of a WordPress framework.

Clay has admitted he was influenced very early on with the work being done by Chris Pearson over at DIYthemes. And of course Chris’ main product Thesis.

More than anything, seeing what Chris had built with Thesis gave Clay the inspiration he needed to build our own product. And it is safe to say, we both saw the potential dollars one can make with a good quality WordPress premium product. Looking at what others were doing also gave me an idea of what we had to do as far as building market share.

Initially and as stated above, I made it a point to spend almost every day just connecting and networking with other bloggers and some WordPress developers. I had some influence out there since I had been blogging for over 4 years. But, I also knew there was no way we were going to pull off a successful launch of a brand new WordPress theme without a lot of help from others.

One blogger I reached out to was John Haydon. I came to know John also through my friendship and business relationship with Michael Martine. John was a very happy Thesis customer. And I was good with that. It wasn’t so much as I wanted to get him to switch as I wanted his input on what we could do to make this brand new product the best it could be. I showed John the layout editor and what he could do with it via a screen share. Initially, John being John and being very straight forward, told me he was not really too impressed with anything other than what he was already using. I told him I was fine with that and that was exactly why I wanted to show him what we were working on. I went on to ask him if he would be willing to be a very early alpha tester and he agreed. John has since become one of our biggest supporters and had a huge impact on what became a very successful launch of Headway. His continued support and almost evangelical passion for Headway and what we do has been huge for us.

I also talked to guys like Chris Cree and Danny Brown. Both were more than willing to keep looking at what we were working on and give input.

There were others. Even a couple of lawyers I had come to know in my previous life. Finis Price and Victor Medina both gave me a lot of input and later became very early testers and users of Headway.

Turning Point

I really think a key turning point for us was closely related to Clay and I going to WordCamp Dallas on June 27th and 28th, 2009.

This was my first WordCamp and I had no idea what to expect. While there Clay jumped in with both feet. The first night was a bowling party of all things.

Clay never leaves home without taking his computer with him. His work ethic is amazing and if more people had it, I firmly believe we would all be better off. Well, since he goes no where without his computer, he took it to the bowling alley. While there he sat down and started working on Headway. And before I knew it, he was surrounded by a number of other developers and WordPress types. I told him to take the opportunity to show them what he was building.

I stayed out of the way and off to one side and just observed what the reactions were.

The response was amazing and the results were too. I have no doubt this response to what this 16 year old kid was doing had a huge impact on giving him the confidence that what he was doing was pretty freaking amazing.

However, that wasn’t the end of what transpired at WordCamp in 2009. Clay was grabbing every opportunity he could to learn as much as he could about WordPress and developing for WordPress. Like almost every WordCamp I have been to, there is a WordPress Genius Bar where “experts” make themselves available to help people with questions about using WordPress. Clay sit in the Genius Bar for an entire day.

At this Genius Bar was none other than iThemes’ Chris Jean. I didn’t know Chris from the man on the moon, but apparently Clay had an idea of who this guy was.

Clay was excited and pumped up. I had pretty much stayed in the background at WordCamp Dallas that year as I wanted him to be the one who got the attention. And he did.

We had lunch that same day with this strange baby faced Okie who I now call a dear friend, Cory Miller. Cory is the main dude over at iThemes and who Chris Jeans works with too.

Chris has sense told me he went to Cory that day in Dallas and told him, ”you have to see what this 16 year old kid is doing.” ”We better hire him.” He didn’t know about our son and father company we were building which we later called Headway Themes.

Over the next month, we pushed hard to get Headway Themes out the door. We launched on July 31st, 2009 version 1.0 of Headway Themes. And we have not looked back.

The Launch

Next time we will look at how we came up with the name Headway. And we will take a look at how we launched an international business from our basement in a town of 4,000 people.

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Headway Themes – Layout Editor

Grant Griffiths — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Building tools for our own use

The original idea for the original Headway layout editor came about because of the need for an internal tool to quickly set the layout for sites we were building for our clients.

Clay was building the sites and wanted a way to quickly lay them out. He decided in late 2008, early 2009 to build a tool he could use in-house. What he was calling it was something like a sandbox. I am sure he will correct me if I have this one all wrong.

Keeping in mind he was not using tables to build sites mind you. But, the idea for the original layout editor and the Leaf system came about because of how we were looking at the building of sites.

If you think about it from a non-coder point of view. And this was how I had to do it. It was easier for me to look at things as laying out a “jig” table. And if you don’t know what a jig table is. It is what welders use to hold metal in place while they weld it. But, someone has to design that jig table based on a design before the welders could use it. And this was the easiest way for me to explain and understand what Clay was working on as he built this internal tool.

While I was still out there selling custom sites and doing consulting and coaching, unknown to me, Clay was also busy working on this tool he wanted for building sites. He wanted a way to do things quicker and easier. I really didn’t see his idea until he showed it to me roughly in the middle of the process of building it.

I was blown away!

I told him I wanted to show this to a couple of people I knew who also built sites for clients. One in particular was Michael Martine of Remarkablogger fame. Michael and I had come to know each other on twitter.

Needless to say, Michael and I are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Lets just say, I am a lot further Right than he is. However, meeting Michael and getting to know him the way I did illustrates the power of social media at the time. We started to get to know each other in 2008. What became of this was not only a friendship, but a business relationship too.

Michael and I started to work on a blogging product together we later called Blawging Lawyers. It was a good product which did OK. And it was a good learning experience for both of us on the how-to’s of building and marketing a membership type site. And of course, Clay built the site for us too. Michael and I did the content and weekly recorded chats we made available to the members. And Michael handled the down and dirty SEO for the site and the course.

Since I knew Michael and the fact I valued his opinion and input, I showed him the original layout editor Clay had built. I also showed it to a couple of others. And the general response received was the same. ”This is something you need to finish.” Another one was, “What you have here needs to be built out as a product or a WordPress plugin which you could sell to others.” And the one which really got my attention. ”This is too good of an idea to not finish and share with others.”

I told Clay about this and his only response to me was, “I can do that.”

What you need to keep in mind is the fact this was in April of 2009. Clay was 16 and still in high school and I was just a bit reluctant to say the least. But, this was a kid who was basically working a full time job. He was getting straight A’s in high school. Playing in the marching band as a drummer. And doing other extra curricular activities.

Clay was already doing way more than anyone his own age. Hell, he was doing more than the majority of the adult population of our small community.

So, I basically turned him loose to do what he told me he could and wanted to do. Like I was going to be able to stop him anyway.

April 26th, 2009 is a date I will never forget

That date is forever carved into my memory. This is the date Clay wrote the first line of code for what we now call Headway Themes.

More to come too. Next time I will let you know how we came up with the name for Headway Themes and some more good stuff as we took this idea and ran with it.

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Before there was a Headway Themes

Grant Griffiths — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Where did it all begin?

Where did Headway Themes get its start is one of the most asked questions we get when we are talking to people. Or when either or both Clay and I are being interviewed about Headway.

The genesis of Headway really started with our other business we use to do at G2WebMedia. Prior to Headway Themes, I was writing about blogging on Blog For Profit. But before that, i was using a blog to market and promote my own professional service firm.

I started blogging in February 2005 as a way to market and promote my own firm. We were doing this really before using a blog as a marketing tool was cool.

Before I started to blog in 2005, I had spent the previous 6 months researching and trying to learn as much as I could about blogging and how one could use it to gain a strong and solid presence online. I needed to find a way I could compete with the big dogs and not break the bank.

I had always liked to write and writing a blog and posting to it as often as I could was a natural fit. Where this led was to a place where I was getting emails and even phone calls from others in my field asking me how in the world I was getting such great placement in the search engines. I soon discovered the information I had and what I was learning myself by blogging was a commodity I could sell.

So, just prior to 2009, the birth year of Headway Themes, I started to do consulting and coaching for others who were interested in using a blog to market and promote their own business. Charging by the hour was something I was use to. But, another need from my consulting and coaching clients became very clear. They were starting to ask me to build their blogs and what I like to call, Blogsites for them.

Let me be very clear here. And I know Clay and others will completely agree, I could not code myself out of a wet paper sack if my life depended on it. Thank god I have people around me who can.

G2WebMedia, the beginning

Since I knew nothing about coding, I started to look around for someone who I could work with where I brought in the new design/development clients and they would build the site. I needed someone who was good and reliable. The problem I faced was also finding someone who I could work with and who I knew would get the work done.

In comes Clay, my 15 year old son at the time telling me he could do it.

Right, I was going to hang my hat on the back of a 15 year old to get sites built and launched. I don’t think so. What I forgot was the fact he had been messing around with this stuff since he was 11.

When Clay was 11 and even a bit younger, we use to go into book stores when shopping with his mom. Seemed like the logical place to go when she is in Old Navy buying clothes for him and his older brothers. Instead of heading to the children’s books which most children do, Clay would head to the computer book section.

I never will forget when he grabbed a book off the shelf, which if my memory serves me, was on php and javascript. Of course I did not want to admit to my 11 year old I had no idea what he was wanting or what php and javascript were. Being dad, I asked him if I buy you that twenty dollar book, are you going to read it? His answer was always, “yes dad I will read it.” And he usually followed that up with, “I have to have it.”

Seriously people, how do you tell an 11 year old he can’t have a computer or programing book in 2004? You don’t. You get out the wallet and buy the freaking book.

The book buying continued. When ever we went to the local mall, we headed to the bookstore and bought more books on Java, php and other programing languages. Clay continued to bring them home and yes he did read them. He had his own computer at this point and he would take the code he was reading in these books and use it to build things. He would build things, break things and fix them. If there was a different way to do it, he would. It is easy for me to brag and say how freaking amazing all this was to watch since he is my son. But, it really was. I have never seen a child’s mind work the way his did and continues to today.

The last book I remember buying him before he was an official teenager was a book which cost $85. I almost lost it when he pulled that one off the store shelf and told me he had to have this one. No if, ands or buts about it. This one was a must have.

“Are you serious, eighty freaking dollars for a book with crap in it I have no clue what it is.” ”You are seriously going to read it and use it” I asked him.

With no hesitation in his voice at all, “yes dad I have to have this one.” ”I have already figured out the stuff in the other books I have.” ”And this one has some new stuff I need to learn.”

Right, you need to learn this crap at 13.

So, what did I do? I bought the damn book.

By the way, I still have all of those books on a shelf in our basement office. Including the bookmarks made from tissue paper and sticky notes Clay used to mark the important stuff he was referring back to.

Where am I going with all of this you ask.

Back to my problem of not having someone who could build the sites I was selling to clients. Clay came to me and said, “Dad, I can build those sites.” He was around 14 I think. Most likely closer to 15 at the time. And you know what, I didn’t even question him. I knew he could.

So, I contacted that first client and told them we could build their site and here was the price. Needless to say, I did not tell them my 14 to 15 year old son was my designer and developer at the time. Which by the way reminds me, Clay also had his own copy of Photoshop and had been playing with it and designing stuff. So not only was he learning code, he was teaching himself how to use Photoshop.

This was where G2WebMedia got its start. A company started by a father and son team with a son that was only 15 at the time.

More of the story in a day or so as I don’t want each post to get too long. Comments are open if you want to join in on the conversation.

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People…Have you ever noticed…

Grant Griffiths — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:26:14 +0000

Have you ever noticed it is those who can’t who want to tell you how you should…

For whatever reason, this just stuck in my brain the other night.

If you have visit my own blog here at Blog For Profit lately, you will notice my postings have been almost nonexistent. Hell, I haven’t posted much at all.

I had the best of intentions to get my butt back in gear early this summer and get back on a regular schedule of postings.

However, as it happens, life jumped up and bit me in the ass. You see on June 8th, 2011 my father of 50 years died suddenly. Dad was young too, only 69. Damn young when you are fast approaching 51 yourself.

Why am I telling you this? To be very frank, and no I would not want to be Frank, and that is a whole other story. I have not had the desire nor the drive to write much of anything the last couple of months.

Until, the very first sentence of this post hit me in the forehead, I was kind of lost in what to even write.

A book?

Someone told me a few months ago I needed to write a book. A book about how we, my son Clay and I, built a WordPress theme company from the ground up with no outside investors and on a shoe string budget.

A company built by a father and son team. A son who is just freaking amazing too. A son who was barely 16 when he wrote the first line of code for this company called Headway Themes.

A company who has not gone a single day without making money since the first day we launched on July 31st, 2009. Needless to say, we have a great community of Headway users. And an amazing Team working with us here at Headway.

This story has as much to do about blogging and social media as anything. So, to that end, starting in the next few days, I am going to start to write this “book” on my blog here at Blog For Profit. While it might seem a bit unorganized to say the least. I plan to write the thoughts for this “book” as they come to me. Kind of using this blog as a way to put thoughts down and at the same time, how we did a lot of what we did to get Headway Themes going from day one.

How we used blogging and social media to do what I have been telling you to do for your own business for the last few years here on Blog For Profit.

I am going to give you the low points and the high points of how Clay and I, “Launched an international business from our basement in a town of 4,000 people with one tweet.”

And don’t be surprised if I don’t throw in a post or two about my dad. The best man I ever knew.

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