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!

FlexxTheme was created for people who want more versatility out of their blogs and websites. It gives you the edge with built-in SEO features, easy to ways to plug in graphics and backgrounds, and other features that will save you time or from having to learning code.

FlexxTheme is the ultimate WordPress blog theme that gives you the greatest potential for one sweet price!

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

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. 22 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. 22, 2012
6 p.m. Central Standard Time

Signup for the 2012 State of iThemes Webinar here:

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

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.

The Entrepreneurial Adventure by Cory Miller

In 2008 I started my entrepreneurial journey with the founding of iThemes. This month, in fact, is my four year anniversary of becoming a full-time entrepreneur and living my lifelong dream.

Throughout the years as we’ve enjoyed our definition of success and others have seen it, I’ve been increasingly asked by friends and acquaintances about how they can get started in entrepreneurship.

Thus, I started StartupSofa to be an online resource for budding entrepreneurs, done talks, webinars and workshops, and now am proud to release a short book called “The Entrepreneurial Adventure: Is It For You?”

Entrepreneurship is an adventure — a long, arduous journey like climbing one of the world’s highest mountains. As such budding entrepreneurs should know the risks involved, what an entrepreneur does for the world and ask themselves some tough questions before starting on the journey.

In this book I share my experiences as a startup entrepreneur and offer advice on aligning your life’s passions and purpose, and how to prepare for the entrepreneurial climb.

It’s short enough to read in less than an hour, but I’ve packed with lessons I’ve learned and resources I’ve found extremely helpful for starting a business.

In this book, you’ll …

• Learn how a compelling vision of the future helps keep the right motivations aligned
• Realize the risks and rewards of being an entrepreneur
• Be challenged with essential questions to unearth your life’s passions and purpose
• Understand what an entrepreneurship does for the world
• Get tips for starting a business without risking everything
• Find a blueprint of essential books and resources to prepare you for your entrepreneurial journey

If you’re an aspiring or budding entrepreneur, this book is for you.

Here’s how to get the book:

• Purchase it in the Kindle Store
• Signup for this email newsletter (or FREE PDF DOWNLOAD for iThemes Customers!)
• (Coming Soon! In print)

Here’s to those daring and ready for the entrepreneurial journey!

As I sit here on New Year’s Eve and reflect on the past 365 days or so, looking down a long list of things we’ve done, I can’t help but feel a sense of pride for our team’s work and how far we’ve come.

It’ll be four years next month that I started iThemes in my home office to offer high-quality WordPress themes. Today as I write this, we have over 20 employees (most of whom are here in Oklahoma City, but now in California, New Mexico, North Carolina, Virginia and overseas in Scotland, The Netherlands, and India).

We have four major brands — iThemes, PluginBuddy, and WebDesign.com and of course our joint venture at AllureThemes (and a couple more in the works)!

All of these brands and teams offer professional products and services to make people’s lives easier, better, more fun … and awesome.

Earlier this week, I asked our team (on our internal communications channel) to post things we shipped and did. I didn’t say “accomplishments” but to me (and us) that’s what it was. It was great to see various team members and leaders sharing what we’ve done and I want to share them here for you now …

Our mission is to Make People’s Lives Awesome … here’s some of the ways we did that in 2011 (full disclosure: I’m sure I missed something!):

• Hired new team members: Kristen Wright, Cody Smith, Ty Carlson, Bes Zain, Dustin Akers, Dan Harzheim, Jordan Wooley, Justin Kopepasah & Jeremy Trask in 2011 — business is about people and I’m honored to serve with these individuals as well as all the other iThemers here! (Check out all of our incredible staff here)
• Started joint venture with Lisa Sabin-Wilson called AllureThemes.com (March)
• Co-authored WordPress All-in-One for Dummies (March)
• Named Matt Danner the Chief Operating Officer (May)
• Launched a nonprofit tech education foundation called The Div (August)
• Chris Jean celebrated his three-year anniversary with iThemes (September)
• Started The Panda — aka live chat on brands for customer sales issues (September)
• Held two live in-person workshops in Oklahoma City for WebDesign.com to meet and train customers (September and November)
• Rolled out the iThemes Education Program — offering the iThemes complete product inventory for free to qualified educators (October)
• Named 7th Fastest Growing Private Company in Oklahoma City (October)
• Honored with Creative Oklahoma’s Great Inspiration Award (November)
• We shipped a lot of schwag: well over 300 shirts sent out in the mail! Also coffee mugs and WordPress for Dummies All In One books!
• We attended, spoke at and sponsored a whole bunch of WordCamps as well as SXSW Interactive (for the second year)
• Held several townhall webinars to talk about upcoming projects, get feedback and ideas from our community
• Created an Affiliate Resource Center with banners, done-for-you blog posts, tweets, emails AND paid out a 500% increase in affiliate activity from 2010!
• Created a PDF product catalog for download and viewing of all our products
• Transitioned to new forum software for a better customer and support team experience
• Created and released eBooks, including: 5 Keys to Rockin’ Websites, Getting Started with Plugins, Turning Contacts into Contracts, Redirection Plugin Guide and 7 Year End Tips to Put Your Financial House in Order (with at least four more on the way shortly!)
• Redeployed iThemes TV to offer free “getting started” and beginner-level webinar training each Tuesday
• Through our software repo, our dev teams made over 2,184 updates to our products, including 180 to BackupBuddy and 86 to iThemes Builder — going along with our philosophy of releasing good products and making them better and better over time and with customer input.
• Held iThemes Builder 2nd Birthday Bash and celebrated 12 Days of WebDesign.com in December, and throughout the year other numerous goofy fun!
• We also built a lot of Legos, including a Pirate ship, Millennium Falcon, the Space Shuttle and X-Wing Figher. Oh, and Ginger Bread Houses before Christmas.
• And for the last 3 weeks, we’ve done some major remodeling to our Oklahoma City office, building two new private offices, putting in some new doors and new paint … all in an attempt to tweak our office layout to be uber-productive for you. We’ll be posting pics soon.

Those are some of the general / overview type things we did … now I want to mention each team and make commentary on the specific teams and their hard work in 2011:

@iThemes

The iThemes dev team, lead by Chris Jean, rolled out over 30 new child themes for Builder (including Depot, one of the most comprehensive ecommerce styled themes I’ve seen). With the addition of Cody Smith and Justin Kopepasah, under the direction of Chris, lead developer for iThemes Builder, we’ve seen some great work rolled out and I’m excited for 2012 and what they do with Builder child themes. And I know Chris has some awesome ideas for making Builder even better.We started 2010 with Matt Danner and Brad Ulrich, alongside Chris, as our theme dev team … but mid-year transitioned them to broader duties for the company but not before they released over 10 themes.

One of the most exciting and comprehensive child themes I saw come out this year was Depot that currently supports three of the most popular ecommerce plugins out there. Capping off the year with this feature-loaded of a theme, I’m anxious to see what’s next from our theme dev team in 2012!

Along the way, Chris has made Builder core better and better with each update — now version 3.4.6. He works tirelessly for our team and our community and is often one of the first at the office and last to leave. His commitment to our team inspires me (and others).

Ronald van Weerd and Sridhar Katakam continue to serve our customers on the support forum in an unparalleled way. There’s almost not a week that goes by that someone doesn’t email me directly or I’m forwarded a glowing testimonial about these two long-time support veterns. Both came as customers first and both have been vital to what we do every day. I look forward to seeing them in-person in February for our Builder Bonanza live event in Oklahoma City!

Here’s a list of the Builder child themes produced and released in 2011: Rainey Day, Covell, Covert, Classen, Blueprint, Ionic Sky, Ionic Green, Americana: Interstate, Americana: Mojave, Americana: Libertas, Encased, Encased Light, Cubed, Scooter, Drafted, Heat Wave, Cool Breeze, Revised, Dockside, Keen, Thinner, City Church (with Church Block), Singular, Kepler, Acute, Traverse, Patterned, Expansion, Expansion Blue, Expansion Red and Depot.

@PluginBuddy

Lead by Dustin Bolton, lead developer of our hit plugin, BackupBuddy, our team at PluginBuddy released a number of plugins that extend WordPress and help you do more with it!

BackupBuddy 2.0 was released in March, updated with WP Multi-Site support (in beta, last fall) and we’re already working on 3.0 with some awesome new features. In October, we hit over 50,000 licenses in BackupBuddy alone!

I am so proud of our BackupBuddy plugin as it is truly helping making people’s lives awesome. The proof is in this testimonial I recently received from long-time community member Bob Randklev:

Cory, I’m so ecstatic I want to know the best way to give BackupBuddy and the team some huge kudos… our own site CyberInnovation.com went down when my wife was editing a page… ALL pages and posts gone… Backup Buddy restored it in about 10 minutes and we are live again! Thanks for all you do!

I’m super excited to see what the team at PB does this upcoming year in particular by Josh Benham and Dan Harzheim. These two guys have already contributed a ton of value for our plugin dev team by updating plugins, ensuring compatability with WordPress 3.3 and squashing bugs (and releasing their own plugins).

Additionally, our PluginBuddy support team of Jeremy Trask, Dustin Akers and Bes Zain have been incredible this year. As with our theme team, I continue to receive “thank you” emails all the time exuding customer gratefulness for these great, helpful, knowledgeable moderators. (Our dev teams can’t thank them enough for allowing them to focus on development while meeting the needs of our customers!)

Here are the plugins released in 2011: VidEmbed (February), BackupBuddy 2.0 (March), ThumbsUp (April), TailoredLogin (May), Accordion (June), LoopBuddy 1.0 (July) and Tipsy (October), in addition to numerous other upgrades and new features added in to existing plugins that make them better, more helpful to our community or easier to use.

I’m proud of our team at PluginBuddy and in particular of Dustin’s leadership and mentorship of our group there. With a new plugin framework and internal training resources, look for some really cool things from PluginBuddy in 2012!

@WebDesign.com

This year we surpassed 300 hours of 24/7 on-demand, professional yet practical training at WebDesign.com, most of which was due to the hard work of our lead instructor Benjamin Bradley.

Benjamin came to us as a customer first almost two years ago, and has served our community at WebDesign.com in an amazing capacity — helping you learn and grow and expand your skills and business at the same time.

I love hopping on the chats on his webinars and seeing the lightbulbs turn on as our community sees what they can do with WordPress web design. With over 15 hours of new content added to the library every month, we’re fulfilling our belief to “underpromise and overdeliver” at WebDesign.com.

In December, we celebrated our second anniversary of offering the premiere and most comprehensive training program in WordPress. The two live in-person events in Oklahoma City led by Benjamin were extremely gratifying to be a part of for our team (not just our community) as we got to meet them in person and hear their stories and field their questions.

Benjamin is leading three live in-person workshops in 2012 and I’m looking forward to what he and other guest instructors (including Lisa Sabin-Wilson and myself) will be offering our community! Additionally we consolidated our community forum at WebDesign.com with iThemes and PluginBuddy in order to create a better experience for our community and added over 100 written descriptions for 100 webinars.

As we say at live events, you’ll be drinking from a fire hose of learning in 2011 … and again from a real firefighter, Benjamin Bradley!

@AllureThemes

Lisa Sabin-Wilson and I have been great friends for several years now going back to the first WordCamp Chicago which she ran and organized brilliantly. Along the way, she’s participated in training at live events and on webinars for our community, gone on RV roadtrips with our team and hung out and laughed so hard we cried at WordCamps, MassiveCamps and wherever else we are together.

We were also super honored to be asked to contribute the theme chapters for WordPress All-in-One for Dummies (released in March) and so it was natural for me to want to find a way to collaborate on a business project with her … which finally happened this year at Allure Themes to offer beautiful WordPress themes for women.

Lisa, as many of you know who follow her, has had a very rough year with the passing of her beloved father. But despite running her own successful web design business at E.Webscapes and writing other books, she has rolled out 15 themes this year through Allure (with more to come!).

Several of her themes are available now as iThemes Builder child themes, as well as Genesis and coming soon — Headway.

Lisa is unofficially (yet truly) one of our team. We love and thank her for being a part of our geeky ragtag bunch. And look forward to seeing her in January for the WebDesign.com WordPress Developers Course.

@Support

Although I’ve mentioned them above, I wanted to single out our support team. You make what we do possible. You build our brand by serving our customer community in unparalleled ways. You make me proud. And I thank you for what you do.

Ronald van Weerd, our support team lead gave this report for 2011 as it relates to support:

“We had a total of 11,285 topics were posted (data from Dec. 30), these topics contained a total of 52,509 posts.

iThemes Support now has five moderators on board, Sridhar (8,232 posts in 2011), Jeremy Trask (3,022 posts), Dustin Akers (1,086 posts), Bes Zain (2,392) and Ronald van Weerd (5,538). Total posts by moderators: 20,270 (38.6% of all posts in 2011).

Our moderators managed to take care of all these users issues, which could have been anything from user error, a bug or code issue, an enhancement or feature request, and there have even been a few marriage proposals.

The Codex keeps growing and contains a large number of articles, troubleshooting guides and (video) tutorials. Internally, we have implemented new bug and issue management software, which is a vital tool to keep our support and development processes manageable.

Support is dedicated to provide at least the same level of services to our community in 2012, and is looking forward to doing so!”

To all that I say: #boom

@Central Team

As we have grown, we realized the need for a Central Team — one that would support and serve all our brands. Our Central Team currently includes: Kristen Wright, Nina East, Brad Ulrich, Jordan Wooley, Charleen Green, Ty Carlson as well as Matt Danner and myself.

This team is mostly responsible for our communications and marketing as well as maintaining our software and server infrastructure.

As this is the team I work with more directly (along with our team leads), I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to them. They do a lot of the work you may or may not see, responding to sales emails (almost 24/7), working to produce effective marketing promotions, new designs for shirts, affiliate ads and that fun holiday bling on the brand site navigation, new content (like all the blog posts and free ebooks we’re released), and keeping the backend software running smoothly.

Thanks guys and gals for gelling as a new team and working together to promote our products and keep things rolling smoothly so our dev teams can focus on what they do best!

The iThemes Lobby "Culture" Wall

Our Mission is to Make People’s Lives Awesome

One more thing if you’ve lasted this long … a couple months ago, we decided to do a cool display of our mission statement in our office lobby for everyone to see as they walk into our playground. We also made staff shirts with it too to be a reminder of why we exist and do the work we do above every day.

Without you — our customer community — all of the above could not have happened.

As you support us with your hard-earned money (by starting and then renewing your membership) we support you — by offering the best products and support we can each and every day.

So cheers to a great 2012!

At the Builder Birthday Bash, we had a pinata, 3-D birthday cake, Legos and a lot of good old fun, while streaming it to over 100 Builder customers around the world live AND meeting local customers who came by to say hi and be part of the fun (some of whom had bought last week).

We gave away a ton of shirts to our online crowd and Robyn Promotion who does all of our fun swag donated some in-person door prizes.

All of this reminds me of how thankful I am to our team and amazing community who support us … and it also gives us a chance to look back and see how far we’ve come with iThemes Builder and our little startup! (Thank you for supporting us as we support you!)

Here are some pics from the Bash …

A slideshow of the Builder Hat photo contest entries …

These two sites have needed an overhaul from my previously lame (self-designed) sites and I also wanted to have personal showcase sites for the cool things Builder can do. (We drink our own Kool-Aid at iThemes.)

I’m very happy with the design work that Ty has done! These new designs come just in time for Builder’s 2nd Birthday Bash.

What do you think?

My Personal Site

Because I am involved in a lot of projects, I asked Ty to design a static home page that was more business card than a typical blog. I love the font he chose for the headlines and various typographic elements. The top menu bar is universal and includes a search function.

I’m not blogging as often as I did on this site, but the blog layout is clean and readable and also showcases the projects I’m involved with.

Startup Sofa

Startup Sofa is a personal project where I share my passion for entrepreneurship with those aspiring to start their first businesses. He took the initial logo concept and designed it without much input from me. To see cool things he did with our tools, check out the header subscribe option (using EmailBuddy of course).

Also, in the bottom footer area, click on the “Browse by Category” and see the cool effects he’s included.

***

If you’d like to hire Ty for custom design services, hit him up on the Made by Wheat site.