“You’ll never have a second chance to make a good first impression. That’s why a stunning and user-friendly theme is what you need, with several features to create a unique design. And IssueMag Pro has them all.” says our customer.
It has been only a six months old journey and we have received an overwhelming response for our every product whether it is Manage Issue Based Magazine – WordPress Magazine Plugin or IssueMag – Free Responsive WordPress Magazine Theme or IssueMag Pro – Premium WordPress Magazine Theme. But as it is said “Rome was not built in a day!”, our products also took quite a while to get in shape as you are seeing them today. This journey has been a remarkable one and we want to share it with you all.
Striking the first Nail!
It was December 2013 when a client emailed us with a request. It was a standard business inquiry asking to develop a WordPress Site with an issue wise magazine. We looked around for a plugin with the required functionality. Nothing quite fit the client’s requirement, so we took up the onerous and stimulating task of creating a plugin for the client who was pleased with the results. We thought of creating one such plugin for every publisher and blogger as the concept was quite new and a basic requirement for every publisher who wanted to create an issue based magazine
The work started to create a Free WordPress Plugin and we came up with Manage Issue Based Magazine Plugin. As the news spread and our plugin become popular, our clients wanted more magazine options.
Need for a Responsive WordPress Theme
The plugin was a great success and now we needed a theme on which the plugin can be laid properly. The users who worked with our plugin had to get a theme from WordPress or had to buy it and then design it by themselves. But to make it easy going for our clients and to give back to the WordPress and blogging community, we lined up the creation of themes.
- Commencing with a Free WordPress Magazine Theme:
To make our stand in the magazine theme industry, we started with developing a Free WordPress Magazine Theme. But it was not a day’s task! It needed a lot of research, understanding the market, work on coding standards and most importantly building a confidence and trusting our guts to make through this new industry.
- Exploring the target audience:
Analyzing the target audience is the primary work for laying the foundation of any new task as ultimately they are the people who will be buying/using the theme.
Ask some of the question as below to decide your target audience.
1. Who can benefit from your product?
2. Who is most likely to buy your product?
3. Who is your ideal client?Once you are sorted with these entire questions, you can move to the next step.
- Creating the Task List:
After having the target audience decided, we started with the actual development of theme. It had 4 main parts:
1.Planning : It is a pre-requisite before starting with your coding. What all functionalities are needed, what is the target to complete the project, what obstacles will be faced and how to tackle them were planned so that the theme could be launched on target!
2.Designing : Our world is absolutely visual, almost everything is made of images and users, customers or followers are meticulous in their choices. They will tend to buy the theme which seems eye pleasing. Hence, our designing team tied up their laces and came up with best of the designs that can very well go with the magazine concept. Also they took immense care that the theme looks equally beautiful when viewed in tablets or mobile devices. And thus, responsiveness – an important feature was covered in this theme.
3.Development : What functionality suits the best to the concept of magazine theme was in the hand of developers. WordPress integration of HTML, following the coding standard of theme development and developing a well formulated theme was the next task on list.
4.Testing : Every design has holes in its design or functionality which by chance, gets missed during the development stage. So a Quality Assurance is required to serve the buyers with the best theme!
- The first Success:
The free issue based WordPress magazine theme was finally approved by the WordPress.org and we made our name as a theme author.
Today it has a successful 21,000+ downloads!
But we are not stopping here.
We wanted to grow more.
And so, we came up with the thought of creating a bigger, better and beautiful version of an issue based magazine theme!
Catch out the perseverance, hard work and creativity that we put in creating the premium issue based magazine WordPress theme in our upcoming episode!
