Ahead of 2016: A redesigned home for Make

Ahead of exciting new features and improvements on deck for 2016, we’ve been busy this fall, brainstorming, planning, and visioning the future of the theme. Today we’re launching a fully redesigned home for the project. Check out the new Make site.

We’ve spent a lot of time chatting with community members, talking with other developers, and getting to know our users and their projects. A multi-purpose theme like Make can be a lot of things to a lot of different people. Make powers the websites of big corporations, local shops, educational institutions, startups, consultants, coaches, artists, writers, and even hobby bloggers. But even with all that variance among our users, we started to notice certain trends emerge. Uncovering those patterns has helped us refocus the future of Make around what matters most:

Your business.

To that end, we spent some time remodelling our branding, retooling our copy, and reimagining our product showcase and documentation in ways that help you find the most important information first. We also chose to redesign the site using cutting-edge Flexbox — a nod to the future of Make.

We’ve rolled out a fully functional demo of Make and Make Plus, so if you’ve been wanting to check out the admin side of things, you can now do so.

Last year we started using Twitter hashtags to connect with Make users and we’ve been blown away by the response! We wanted to feature the #iusemake community more prominently in our redesign, so we’ve created a dedicated page to the amazing sites you’ve been building with Make and Make Plus.

And finally, based on feedback, we’ve changed the name of our Make Plus Developer plan to Make Plus Professional — because we know that there are others in the WordPress ecosphere — marketers, designers, coaches, and implementers putting together client sites. Make Plus Professional has the same features and benefits, access to our Slack channel and partner discounts as Make Plus Developer did, it’s just a new name to better reflect the diversity of our users.

Make is the most exciting project our team has had the pleasure to work on, and looking ahead we only see good things — for both the theme and for the businesses that rely on it to market their work and connect with their communities.

Check out the new Make site and let us know if you have any questions, feedback, or feature requests for an upcoming release!