Coming of age

I’d like to tell you a quick story. A story about a website, actually. You might even call it a “coming of age” tale.

Behind every good website there’s a person (or people) and, in many cases, a business. And behind every rework and redesign, there is a reason – a “why” before the “how”, if you will. I wanted to touch on that a little bit. Don’t worry – we’ll get to the custom post types, bleeding edge this-and-that and JavaScript whizbangs for you propeller heads before long!

But first, let’s review the story up to this point.

Back in 2008, Drew and Jennifer started what would eventually become The Theme Foundry with plenty of blood, sweat and tears to mark the trail.

Since then, the business has grown and moved from

1. Drew and Jennifer going it alone, to…
2. Working with a handful of contractors, to…
3. Hiring two full-time employees (Scott and myself) and looking for another

We’ve also expanded our themes to the WordPress.com marketplace and moved into a totally new and foreign (and exciting!) realm with Memberful, our still in development SaaS offering for selling digital products.

2012 is an exciting year for this company. And with all the growth going on, it was time to not only add a fresh coat of paint, but completely rework the website that powered the business.

The old website grew organically out of need – a handful of static pages, WordPress powering the blog, bbPress 1.0 Alpha powering the forums, and aMember (*shudder*) managing the selling of themes.

If our old website were a bicycle, it might look something like this (with Drew supplying the Fred-Flinstone-esque leg power).

As of February 18th, 2012, we’ve officially “switched over” to a more powerful and elegant solution, featuring:

• A single WordPress installation
• bbPress 2.1
• Memberful integration (yep, we’re dogfooding it!)

I hope you’ll join me in the coming days as I do my best to chronicle some of the decisions we made and discussions we had along the way.

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