You might be aware of weak spots in your business, but are you being honest with yourself about them?

When you first start a business, it’s usually just you, or maybe you and a co-founder. You do almost everything: sales, marketing, product development, design, customer service, budgets, hiring, etc.

To have a moderately successful business, you need to be good in at least a few of these areas, but it’s really rare for any person to be great in all of these areas. It’s a common scenario: a developer who builds great software and provides stellar support, but doesn’t know much about marketing. A marketer who knows how to sell and drive business, but really doesn’t understand product development or design.

To be a great business over the long term you need to be great in all of those areas. Otherwise, you’re struggling against your competition with a hand tied behind your back. This is one reason why multiple co-founders with complementary skills can work so well. But, what if you’re a single founder or you have co-founders with similar skills?

Most business owners eventually become somewhat aware of their business weak spots over time. For me, this meant going through two distinct phases.

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You might be talking about what you do, or how you do it, but are you talking about how you do it differently?

Earlier this week I was confirming a sponsorship for The Theme Foundry. I was responding to this question over email: “What are the key things you want me to say about your business?”. I gave it some thought and came up with the following:

• We’ve been selling WordPress themes since 2008 and have over 30,000 customers. We’re obsessed with building the best WordPress themes, and plan on being around for a long time.
• We work with world-class designers like Jon Hicks, Veerle Pieters, Dave Ruiz, and Ryan Essmaker. It’s rare to have your website template designed by one of the best in the world.
• We take pride in the details and value quality over quantity. That’s why we have a small focused collection of WordPress themes. We truly care about building great products.
• We’re an exclusive partner with the official hosted WordPress provider, WordPress.com, and we sell our themes on that platform. This means each and every theme goes through a stringent audit process from some of the best themers in the world. You can rest assured our WordPress themes are well coded and secure.
• We practice whole team support. You’ll get fast and friendly customer support in our Help Center from the people that actually build our themes. You won’t be interacting with a part time support rep. If you have a question about the new Backbone.js powered fast page loading in Collections, you’ll likely chat with Zack, the guy who actually built it.

After sending the email, I sat back and thought about it for a minute. Wait! Why aren’t we talking about this on our website!? Each one of these unique characteristics is a selling point. It’s a difference maker. It could convince someone our themes are right for them.

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Here at The Theme Foundry we sell WordPress templates and host quite a few tutorial videos over in the Help Center. We use the excellent SublimeVideo player to power the videos. Unlike YouTube or Vimeo, SublimeVideo lets us host and serve our own video files and keep them white-label. You add the player via one line of JavaScript and you can write native HTML5 video syntax. SublimeVideo provides a clean and flexible player that automatically picks up the video and also handles playing it via Flash when a browser doesn’t support HTML5.

HTML5 video is great, but to support all the modern browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE9/10), you need to serve two versions of your video files. For Chrome, IE9/10, and Safari, you need MP4 video files, and for Firefox and Opera, you need WebM files.

Most video applications can export videos in the MP4 format, but they usually can’t export in the WebM format. You need a tool to convert those MP4 files to WebM.

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Your WordPress website is ready to go, but you really need that special piece of extra functionality your theme isn’t providing. You need to search for a plugin. WordPress plugins add extra functionality and features to your WordPress website.

In search of a plugin, you visit the WordPress plugin repository or try some search terms from your WordPress dashboard. You find results, but how do you know when you’ve found the perfect plugin? Are you even looking in the right place?

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When I first decided to convert a static HTML design to WordPress I did some searching for a tutorial to help me get started with the basics. Surprisingly, I didn’t find anything that was very complete or easy to follow. So, I decided to write a very basic tutorial on how to convert a static HTML template into a WordPress theme. If you are an absolute beginner at developing WordPress themes then this should help you get started.

This tutorial assumes you already have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. It also assumes you have a website built in HTML and CSS and have it ready for conversion to WordPress. For those who need a basic introduction, refer to this helpful introduction to WordPress themes. If you already have something in WordPress (maybe you bought one of our WordPress templates), you might be interested in learning how to customize a WordPress theme and the WordPress child theme basics.

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Sharing buttons seem like an obvious way to increase engagement, but do you really need them?

We often hear from customers who want to integrate sharing functionality into their WordPress powered website. They’ve heard it’s important to give readers options for sharing their content. This often takes the form of countless buttons plastered on every blog post. This makes some sense on the surface, but I seriously question how important it is to provide sharing options.

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Your navigation is an important part of your website, and it might be hurting more than it’s helping.

You’ve got lots of important information to share on your website. Organizing it all can be a challenge. So you slowly start adding more and more menu items. Drop down menus become your best friend. More menu items are better, right?

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Are part-time employees handling your customer support? If so, you might be ignoring an important competitive advantage.

Let’s say you’re selling a product or service. You love the work, your customer base is growing, but support always seems to take up everyone’s valuable time.

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I don’t follow many WordPress news sites. They’re usually too noisy for my taste, and much of the content is just recycling existing news from elsewhere in the community. One exception, that’s slowly become my go to source, is Post Status. The founder of Post Status, Brian Krogsgard, has developed a reputation for covering WordPress over the past few years. He’s written close to two-hundred articles for WPCandy, and posted some great content on his personal site. He’s also developed a discerning eye for WordPress news and knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Brian’s taking a new approach to WordPress news with Post Status. Rather than repurposing existing news as new content, he’s linking directly to the original source and including brief and insightful commentary. Brian’s unique experience and involvement in the WordPress community makes his insight especially clear and refreshing. He’s also started to work some excellent long-form articles into the mix over the past few months, which has added a nice balance to the site.

Post Status announced a refreshed design and focus earlier today. As part of that announcement, The Theme Foundry is now an official partner of Post Status. Brian and I want to do something different with this collaboration. We want it to be a long term partnership. The exact opposite of a quick “ad buy”. We want to keep the focus on the content, and make sure we integrate mentions of The Theme Foundry in an unobtrusive way. I couldn’t be happier with how the initial launch turned out. Post Status is great for the WordPress community, and it’s also something we’re proud to support and associate ourselves with.

You’ve got a website or blog, but have you told your story? If the answer is no, you might be missing a big opportunity.

Have you ever watched a major professional sporting event on live TV? Here in the United States, I’m referring to a playoff football, basketball, or baseball game. Notice how the network will usually profile a player or coach, and tell a story about that individual? This builds viewer engagement with the broadcast. If you know more about someone, you’re more likely to be interested in the game they’re playing in. Not to mention, most people like a good story. It’s human nature.

You might be thinking — my story isn’t interesting or good enough. I don’t want people to know that much about me, and it could reflect poorly on how they perceive me or my business. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people don’t expect perfection, and they’d rather engage with someone they see as genuine, regardless of that person’s accomplishments.

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