And we haven’t stopped there.

Each week we continue to add more and more educators to this program that gives educators access and support to our entire WordPress inventory — our WordPress Web Designer’s Toolkit — for free.

(By the way, if you’re a teacher and haven’t applied, go submit your application here.)

Then, we rolled out the Student Toolkit, which includes our entire inventory, just minus the support (i.e. like Adobe does for its academic discounts). And most recently an ebook on Best Practices for Web Development Instruction that was a hit in our classroom.

Today, I’m delighted to announce our new Education Pricing for qualified schools, career techs, colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. Many of our educators have asked for discounts on our resources to offer in their classrooms. 

Check out the iThemes Education Pricing and Discounts here

This is our way to offer a complete library of WordPress web design tools — along with over 350+ hours of web design training — for schools, educators and students at a significantly discounted price.

We envision this being used like textbooks (only its software and online content). We can either work out the details for your entire classroom or campus … or you can ask your students to purchase separately from us (if we have a list of your students, we can streamline the sales process).

To get started with Education Pricing Discounts in your classroom, hit our Education contact form, tell us what all you need or are considering (and how we can help) and we can get the process rolling along. If you need to order with a check or purchase order, please let us know and we can work that out.

We at iThemes want to be your education partner!

In the last couple of months, we’ve seen an increase in hacked sites in our customer community and we asked our good friend and security expert Dre Armeda, CEO and co-founder at Sucuri, to share security tips for locking down your WordPress site via a free webinar on Wednesday, April 25 at 1 p.m. Central.

Signup for the WordPress security webinar April 25 with Dre here

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to do basic garage cleaning on your WordPress site, what security hacks Sucuri is seeing infected and tips on helping reduce your site risk.

We’re super pumped about Dre sharing these tips as we’ve had the Sucuri free SiteChecker in BackupBuddy for almost a year now and has helped our community immensely.

And yes, we’ll be posting the recording afterward if you can’t make it. But in the meantime, be sure to check out the Sucuri Security plans here and to check your site’s security with the free SiteChecker tool.

It is our way to invest in you — our community and our team. It is one way for us to give back and give of ourselves and I hope you will join us in doing so.

Throughout the year (or next 10 months), we’ll be rolling out training through webinars and blog posts on certain life themes I feel have been instrumental in my life and helping me maintain happy and health relationships.

These are the things I’ve gathered over a lifetime of seeking to learn and grow and improve my life. As such I’m championing this endeavor for iThemes but will be recruiting guest experts to come and share with us.

My goal is to have 200 people signed up … but I think maybe I was thinking too small now.

The commitment to be a part of LifeDev is pretty small honestly. We want you to commit to read one book a month (either from our list or your own); share what you are learning with someone else; and report back to us how you’re growing (so we can measure the impact we’re hoping to make).

It doesn’t cost a thing. It’s our gift to you. But it will cost you time and energy, but it’ll be well worth it!

All in all, there are 6 ‘Make Waves’ Manifestos for us this year … and LifeDev is just one. You can learn about the others on the MakeWaves2012.com site (and be sure to sign up for others that resonate with you).

But in the meantime, I hope you’ll join us for LifeDev this year and let us invest in you and your success!

Last night I shared our 2012 strategic plan, goals and theme with our customer community in my annual State of iThemes address. This is always a special time to connect with our community and share our vision, passions, values and philosophies … oh, and projects we’re aiming at.

(Full webinar recordings are embedded at the end of this post, but you can view Part 1 here and Part 2, as well as the Presentation Slides here.)

Our mission is to help make people’s lives awesome … and this year, our goal is to Make Waves in 2012.

Make Waves means as a team and company, like a ship moving through water, we want to be bold, be daring, to innovate, to kick butt and make things better for our customer community. To evaluate what we’re doing and see how we can disrupt the status quo on the web and in WordPress.

So this year we’re flying the pirate flag …

(I know it’s ironic for a digital downloads company such as ours.)

Here are some of the team-specific goals we’ve set to achieve by June 1.

WordPress and the market changes so fast that it’s hard to anticipate

iThemes.com
At iThemes, our goal is to make web design fun and easy by offering easy-to-use website builder tools with a complete design palette at your disposal.

• Our focus is on More Themes, Better Themes with More Features
• In 2012, already released two Ecommerce Themes with popular plugin integration styling & several more child themes
• Total Builder Child Themes: 63
• Working now on BuddyPress Themes
• Next up is Events Block
• Chris is working on next big theme innovation project from iThemes (Release scheduled for mid-Summer)

PluginBuddy.com

At PluginBuddy, our goal is to make web design fun & easy by letting you do more cool things with WordPress.

• BackupBuddy 3.0 in the works (late March release)
• To celebrate, March is BackupBuddy Month - we’ll have contents, giveways and more fun leading up to the launch of 3.0
• PluginBuddy Developer Suite is our Hottest Package & Best Value
• Total Number of Pro Plugins Released: 18
• Looking at version 2 releases of our most popular plugins
• In 2012, already released Slides & Frolic Plugins
• New BIG plugin project started after BackupBuddy 3.0

WebDesign.com
At WebDesign.com, our goal is to make web design fun & easy by offering professional, cutting-edge training in WordPress web design.

• Currently have roughly 340+ Hours of 24/7 Training in Vault
• Already held 2 live events in OKC this year
• Working on 2 more non-OKC live events
• Adding 15+ Hours of Fresh Content a Month
• Talking to New Guest Experts to Add Value, Topics
• Planning a Kid’s Programming Camp this summer

Each month, we’re going to cover these types of webinars:

• Members Only Chat – where our members get to ask their burning questions fielded by Benjamin
• BluePrint Basics – Building a styles and types of sites from scratch
• PluginFocus – An in-depth look at a WordPress plugin
• BluePrint Advanced – A design related course
• CSS – A further look at working with CSS
• jQuery – How to work with jQuery, tips, tricks examples
• SEO – Learn more about different aspects of SEO
• BizDev – Tips on different aspects of running your own business
• Monthly Peek – A look at the upcoming webinars and what to expect.
• “Getting Started with WebDesign” – How to get started and how WebDesign.com can help.
• Educating the Educators – Monthly session with educators with helpful ideas and lesson plans

Other Projects and Endeavors

• Ebooks - For the past couple of months, we’ve been rolling out new ebooks on hot topics. All 7 ebooks are now downloadable in your member’s area (look on the sidebar). We will be releasing one ebook a month to demonstrate our experience and expertise in vital areas. These can be used in your freelance business as well! We’ll have a special landing page and library to showcase these soon.
• Friends of iThemes - is our Customer Ambassador club for those awesome customers who want the “inside” track on what’s happening at iThemes. We also post photos you upload to our in-office Customer Wall. So signup today for FOiT!
• Education Program - We launched our Student Toolkit edition in January and are still looking for educators and students to be a part of the program. For qualified educators we offer our entire inventory with support at no charge.
• iThemesTV - We have redesigned the iThemesTV site as a free education center for beginners and those just getting started with our products and WordPress. We’ve posted a regularly updated schedule of upcoming webinars as well as the webinar recordings from past ones in the archives. Be sure to signup for the iThemesTV email newsletter to get updates on upcoming free training opportunities.
• AllureThemes.com – is our joint venture project with Lisa Sabin-Wilson, launched last year to build and release WordPress themes specifically for women. Look for new themes coming soon!
• Creative Services by iThemes - is our services division offering professional WordPress design based on all of our products. Led by designer/developer Ty Carlson, we have several packages for those wanting professional design and assistance getting their sites launched.
• BuildAWebsite.com - is our joint venture project with OKC-based hosting veterans Web Hero to offer easy WordPress hosting with all our themes and plugins. Web Hero has been offering hosting since 1994 and know their stuff. We’re excited about this project launching this month, first to a select Beta group from our iThemes customer community.
• The Div - is the nonprofit web tech foundation we helped start last year, and ran by my wife Lindsey Miller. We’re looking at doing a Kid’s Programming Camp this summer in OKC and currently looking for grants and funding to make this all happen. Our mission is to inspire the next generation of web geeks. As a 501c3 foundation, we’d love your donations to support this cause!

THE MAKE WAVES MANIFESTOS FOR 2012

After reading the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek, and thinking about 2012 and what we wanted to accomplish, I felt this year should be about more than just products and services. I want to share and show you we believe in something more.

Our business is about more than making money (which we must do). We also want to be about making meaning in the world. Making a lasting impact. Being able to look back and see how we’ve made waves and blazed trails.

So we put together 6 ‘We Believe’ statements that we’re calling the Make Waves Manifestos for 2012.

Each can be traced back to what we spend our lives doing here at iThemes. And each have goals with specific objectives for how we’re going to accomplish this.

We believe they are both bold and impactful. They have measurable results that should demonstrate these beliefs. So throughout 2012, we’ll be constantly seeking to achieve these goals and make these belief statements real in our lives and those we impact.

But here’s the deal …. we want and need your help achieving this ambitious goals that come with each statement … and maybe we’re not thinking big enough and you need to tell us.

My goal by presenting these to our customer community is simple …. we want to enlist you in the journey! We want to rally our fleet, you — our beloved customer community — to Make Waves together in 2012.

So let me share those with you …

1. We Believe Web Design Should Be Fun

I remember building my first website in 1998 or so. I was using Claris Home Page. It was so time consuming but I got to build my first website for the world to see (or just my mom). It was exhilarating to publish to the web and stake my claim online.

Fast forward and WordPress plus all of our tools are designed to help make it even easier and thus more fun to do so for thousands of others.

We want that same experience for others — from kids, students, professionals, small businesses, nonprofits, to seniors — to have the thrill of building their own websites or starting their own blogs.

Thus, we want to help 5000 people build sites on WordPress.

In addition to building websites, we want to help 2000 people get started learning web design. We believe web design should be fun, but it can also be profitable, not just in starting a web design business, but enhancing your career and helping you earn more money.

I saw this quote recently: “Code is the new literacy.”

It’s true.

The web is the present and the future. The more people who become digital natives, or web natives, the better. So we want to help students, teachers, kids, designers, artists get started on learning the web and basic web design principles.

2. We Believe in Web Entrepreneurship

I love to offer advice and help to budding and aspiring entrepreneurs with the right mix of drive, initiative, talent and vision. It’s a passion of mine that I’ve used StartupSofa as an outlet for as well as WebDesign.com.

We all love the web. It is the digital frontier. And it offers unparalleled opportunities for earning a living or starting a business.

In 2012, we want to help others start and grow their businesses online by helping 200 freelancers get their first clients.

I remember getting my first client. All the fear, worry, anxiety that went into it until I closed that first deal and successfully delivered my services to them.

Getting that first client is often the hardest thing to do, but also the biggest catalyst in getting your fledgling business off the ground and rolling. We’re going to offer training opportunities that help you land that first client. (And then the second and third).

We also want to help 10 freelancers go full-time or pro.

It takes a lot of time, money and effort to get a business off the ground – let alone go full-time.

In the next month or so we’re going to roll out a unique coaching and mentoring group format through WebDesign.com to help you do just that. This first group will be our beta and it will be separate from the training membership — and focused solely on helping a smaller group of people on their journey to being full-time.

Right now, Benjamin and I are going to be heavily involved in this as well as asking guest entrepreneurs and iThemers to participate from time to time.

But at the end of the year, we want to see 10 freelancers go pro and live their dream full-time. We think it’s ambitious, but we believe we have a great group of freelancers doing it part-time right now who with the right counsel and guidance can get to that by the end of the year.

3. We Believe in WordPress

We love WordPress. We believe in the open source philosophy of giving back. WordPress has made all of our lives awesome … and we want to give back and help you do so also.

Our goal is to enlist and equip 500 people to contribute something back to WordPress — whether that be a blog post tutorial, writing and editing for the WordPress Codex, submitting patches to core, testing it for the devs, starting a local WordPress Users Groups in your town and beyond.

We’re going to be sharing practical ways you can do that in the coming months.

4. We Believe Every WP Sites Should Be Safe and Secure

At iThemes, we’ve all personally lost data and whole sites and had to rebuild them. Out of that pain came BackupBuddy.

But in the last couple of months, the increase in hacked sites we’ve seen and heard about has risen substantially and alarmingly to us ….

It’s absolutely vital that your website — all your photos and writing and settings — be safe and secure.

That means checking your site for malware (through our partnership with Sucuri you can do that from within BackupBuddy), making sure you’re running the latest versions of WordPress, and having a holistic backup strategy for your site, among other things.

Although we believe 100% of WordPress sites should be backed up, our goal is to get 250,000 sites protected with a backup plan.

Now that doesn’t mean we sell 250,000 licenses …. it means you in your business or otherwise help others get a solid backup solution.

We’ll be talking about how to make your site safe and secure … and by extension other people’s sites you know …. through blog posts, special webinars and more this year.

5. We Believe in Investing in People

One of our core values at iThemes is … learn and grow, then teach and share.

We believe in investing in each of our team members … and say that no one should be plateaued … we should have no “flatliners” on our team … each of us individually should be on an upward path of learning.

But it occured to me that a lot of the core values and philosophies we hold dear internally can be equally applied to our customer community’s lives. So this year at iThemes, we want to invest in your personal development.

Just like we do with our team, we want to see you learn and grow … then teach and share.

We’re going to be sharing the things that have made the most difference in our lives to you ….. from helping you learn your Strengths … to challenging you to read one book a month …. and then sharing the things you’ve learned on your blog or somewhere.

Like we do with our team, we also want to challenge you to set SMART goals for the year.

So we’re looking enlist 200 people committed to learning and growing through what we’re calling Life Dev 2012.

This is the one of the specific areas I’m going to be championing as we Make Waves in 2012 and I’m super excited about it.

You’ll be hearing about that in the next month … but needless to say I’m looking forward to investing in your personal growth.

6. We Believe in Web Freedom

We all take our web freedom for granted, honestly.

But this year with SOPA and PIPA, legislation seeking web censorship, which got tabled for later discussion, brought this directly to our attention and one of the beliefs we need to champion.

The online blackout in protest to these pieces of legislation on Jan. 12, 2012 were said to be the largest ever online. Some of the biggest sites in the world like Wikipedia and Google participated as well as us if you came to our sites that day.

It was a historical moment for web freedom. One I hope none of us who enjoy the web forget. I wrote a post called Score One for Web Freedom here.

At iThemes, we believe in freedom of the web.

But if we don’t rally together, we’ll loose this fight to well funded, super slick lobbyists representing the dying industries who failed to change their business model to adjust to the web.

They want to take this freedom away. We need to fight it. We need to be ready for the next fight — and it will come soon.

So we want to enlist 500 to fight for web freedom … meaning essentially that you get on a special mailing list and commit to contact your representative and help defeat legislation or other acts that seek to limit our freedom online.

Part of leading …. is protecting. And SOPA and PIPA would have affected each of you.

I hope you’ll join us as we watch on the horizon for the next act of censorship … and are ready to do something about it.

So those are our 6 Make Waves Manifestos:

1. We Believe Web Design Should Be Fun
2. We Believe in Web Entrepreneurship
3. We Believe in WordPress
4. We Believe Every WP Sites Should Be Safe and Secure
5. We Believe in Investing in People
6. We Believe in Web Freedom

MAKE WAVES WITH US IN 2012

We’ve got a special website dedicated to the Make Waves Manifestos. Go there now and pledge to help us in our adventure in 2012 and Make Waves with us!

VIDEO RECORDINGS FROM LIVE WEBINAR

Here is the first part of the State of iThemes webinar talking about iThemes background, mission, team specific goals:

Here is the second part of the State of iThemes webinar talking about the Make Waves Manifestos:

As such our forum support response times may be slow during these days — Feb. 14-15 — while we plan and talk about goals and objectives for the upcoming year as a team in Oklahoma City.

Please be patient, kind, understanding with us during this time … and be a community — be helpful to each other as much as you can in the forums. In other words, just be who you are — the most gracious, awesome people in the world!

Our awesome support and dev teams will do our best to keep up during this time, but if you are planning a big project, or in need of help, please seek help head of time on the support forum.

By the way, we’re super excited for 2012 as we’re looking to Make Waves.

This is an enormous event for our company as we get together to improve what we’re doing, plot what we’re going to be shooting for … and dream big.

You, our customer community, will see great results from this time in the coming months and I hope you’re as excited as we are about it for what we’re going to do for you this year!

Here’s to an epic 2012 together!

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Now you can get all 18+ themes for only $97 to build your blog the right way.

Also, we’re holding a free training webinar on How to Maximize the FlexxTheme Feb. 7 so be sure to signup below:

Maximizing the FlexxTheme
Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 5 p.m. Central Standard Time
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/642453658

Flexx is the ultimate WordPress blog theme that gives you the greatest potential …. learn more about this powerful blog theme in a free webinar below by WebDesign.com Prof Benjamin Bradley.

Maximizing the FlexxTheme
Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 5 p.m. Central Standard Time
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/642453658

As we’ve grown and expanded, I’ve found it essential to begin sharing our strategic plan and initiatives, vision, and core values with our customer community each year. (We do this annual and quarterly with our team as well – which will happen Feb. 14-15).

I do this because we want to be a transparent and personable company … we also want you to know where we are heading so you can join with us. (You can see last year’s State of iThemes webinar replay here and my 2011 Year in Review post here.)

We don’t want to just be a company that has a transactional relationship with you. We want to be more. We want to be a partner and friend to you. That’s why we say you are part of our “customer community” not simply just customers. And why we also launched our Friends of iThemes customer ambassador club (to let those of you who want an even closer relationship with our team and business to have the opportunity to do so).

This year, our annual theme is “Make Waves.” We have several campaign initiatives around this and I’m super excited to unpack them for you at the 2012 State of iThemes webinar on Feb. 29 at 6 p.m. Central Standard Time. (I hope this time is the best time for the most attendance.)

I hope you’ll join me for this special time as I point the way our ship is heading this year … and enlist you on the journey!

2012 State of iThemes Webinar
Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012
6 p.m. Central Standard Time

Signup for the 2012 State of iThemes Webinar here:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/222585554

]]> http://ithemes.com/2012/01/30/2012-state-of-ithemes-feb-22/feed/ 5 http://ithemes.com/2012/01/20/score-one-for-web-freedom/ http://ithemes.com/2012/01/20/score-one-for-web-freedom/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:03:33 +0000 Cory Miller http://ithemes.com/?p=8795 The good news is … SOPA and PIPA have been delayed by the House and Senate.

The bad news is … they will come back with brand new clothes, a shiny new name, and more teeth soon. In fact, they could come back with a venegeance because of the forces behind them.

Millions of people rallied together to tell those who represent us that we will fight to protect our freedom on the Web — the greatest communications tool ever invented.

These are historic times. People coming together to present a unified voice. I am inspired. I think we all are.

The protests were billed as the largest online protests in history with sites blacking out. WOW!

I know this for a fact though: People will come together only when something seeks to destroy what they hold dear.

SOPA and PIPA did that for those of us who enjoy, respect and cherish our web freedom. It rallied us all together.

But the fight is not over.

YOU, like us, must be ready to let your voice be heard …. and the power of your vote known to those who represent us. The message must be clear:

Seek to take away our web freedoms by legislating crappy bills, and we’re going to put you on the unemployment line.

Looking at these numbers … I think some people in Washington started to take notice.

We can and we will vote them straight out of office. So I hope the lobbyists helping to create these flawed bills have a job open for them when that happens.

So this week is an epic week, a historic week … one we cannot forget. They will simply wait for our fervor to die down, and sneak something sleazy in again.

We must be ready for the next wave.

In the meantime, here’s a quick thought for the industries who have sought to buy (I mean “lobby”) the votes to get this legislation created and passed:

Instead of protecting your once cash cow, now withering business models and spending millions of dollars to legislate it back to relevance … HOW ABOUT REINVENTING IT INSTEAD?!

Make [whatever you produce] BETTER for the world. Not just your pocketbook.

Think about value instead of how fat your vault is.

For examples, please look to iTunes for the music industry. Netflix for the video rental industry. And Google for the entire advertising industry.

If you don’t … we’ll continue to vote you out of business with our pocketbooks … and as you recently saw, the people who represent you.

They are Software Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act.

And you should contact your senator and representative today to tell them you OPPOSE them.

Fight for Future has all the gory details (aka a great resource site) for learning more at AmericanCensorship.org.

What does this mean for you, really?

I haven’t been a politically vocal person, but when I see someone suggesting that I help kill a bill or stop some kind of new legislation, I always want to get past all the noise and right down to the rub … and that means answering what does it mean for me? How does it affect my life?

This is about freedom and the opposite of freedom — censorship — on the Web. And it can affect you.

These pieces of legislation have far reaching and dangerous consequences and costly ripple effects that can damage the amazing freedom we have on the Internet to do business, expression our opinions, and much much more.

And trust me … if even SOPA and PROPTECT IP get tabled … they will come back under new clothes.

Those of us who care about the web and our freedom on it need to rally together, with a single voice, and let those who represent us that we care enough to vote them out of office.

Make your voice heard … or you won’t have one to share it! Get in the fight!

[ Learn How to Stop American Censorship at AmericanCensorship.org ]

In the meantime, here are some graphics that you can post on your site by our designer Brad. Be sure to link to http://americancensorship.org.