2011: Year In Review

2011 was a big year for The Theme Foundry. Some highlights:

• Hired our first two full-time employees, Andy and Scott.
• Released 4 new themes: Linen, React, Anthem, and Duet.
• Helped WordPress.com launch their premium theme service and released 6 themes on the platform.
• Released Forge, an open source tool for building themes using Ruby and Sass / LESS / CoffeeScript.
• Welcomed thousands of new customers to The Theme Foundry community.
• Over 15,000 new posts in our theme support forums.
• Handled over 6,000 emails from customers and potential customers.
• Closed over 1,000 tickets on our internal bug tracking software and released free updates to our themes in January, March, July, September, and November.
• Attended WordCamp San Francisco in August (Andy, Drew, and Jennifer) and WordCamp Lisbon in September (Drew and Jennifer). Drew spoke at both events.
• Made lots of progress on our up-and-coming Memberful product.

Needless to say, it was an awesome year for our small company, and we couldn’t have done any of it without you. Your purchases, your trust, your great ideas, your words of encouragement, and your recommendations to friends and colleagues — you made everything that happened this year possible. Thanks so much for the support, it means the world to us.

What’s next?

As a company, we plan on continuing to do what we do best – delivering beautiful, handcrafted themes and top notch customer service and support. We may also have a few tricks up our collective sleeves – so keep an eye out, because we think this 2012 is going to be special 🙂

In conclusion, New Year’s resolutions can be a bit cliché, but we thought we’d each share a few things we plan on working on and learning in the coming months.

Andy

• Dramatically improve on my JavaScript/CoffeeScript weakness by studying up on best practices and implementing a project completely in CoffeeScript.
• Better my understanding of Test Driven Development and bring the TDD approach to WordPress themes.
• Be able to dunk on a 10-foot hoop.

Drew

• Focus less on coding, more on enabling our team to do great work.
• Read more books, both for business and for fun.
• Successfully help launch a yet-to-be-announced project in the first half of this year.
• Write more, especially on our blog.

Jennifer

• Continue working on and improving my knowledge of WordPress.
• Gain a better understanding of coding basics through reading and practical application.
• Give our members a better experience by helping improve our theme documentation and frequently asked questions.

Scott

• Work on my coding skills, and particularly focus on developing WordPress themes that are intuitive and easy to use.
• Develop an eagle eye for the details in design, by studying design theory.
• Improve my icon and logo design for use in our themes and projects.
• Practice the art of hand lettering.