“WordPress will have something valuable to offer for a long time to come.” Interview with Ellen Bauer (Featured WP-Professional)

Today we have Ellen Bauer as the guest in our WP-Professional of the Month series. She is the co-founder of ElmaStudio, the co-creator at AinoBlocks, a front-end developer, blogger, and a video creator.

You can connect with her on Twitter.

You are well-known in the WordPress circles. How did the journey start? How did you get introduced to WordPress and start ElmaStudio?

I started to build small project websites in uni and got introduced to WordPress once my partner Manuel and I started to build small client websites as freelancers. We created ElmaStudio as a way to keep working together as an independent team. We started to blog about what we learned, and the blog became quite popular in the German-speaking WordPress community. As themes got quite popular at the time as well, it just seemed natural for us to offer themes on our own website. So that’s how it all started.

Where are you based? Does your location influence your work?

I’m from Germany, but we moved to Aotearoa New Zealand and now live in a town in the north, which is the warmest part of the country.

Yes, I think our work is influenced by our location quite a lot, even though most of the inspiration happens online. We have been working out of different locations over the years and our travels have definitely influenced our work. We like to keep things minimal and sustainable in the sense that we like to build things that can be used for a long time. 

New Zealand has taught us to be calmer and as it’s not so busy here, it has always been a place where I can concentrate really well and get good work done without distractions.

Please share some projects you are currently involved with.

Coming from the theme/design space, I got excited about blocks early on, and we have been creating our own little blocks collection. In order to maintain creative freedom, we knew we wanted to be able to build our own blocks. So I learned more React and JavaScript and got more comfortable building blocks. 

Since last year we added block themes to our collection and are currently deep into working on block themes, patterns and blocks for WooCommerce. We never really deeply worked on WooCommerce previously, but now with blocks it gets more exciting, and we just released our first Woo block theme the other week, called Mugistore.

What makes WordPress so special to you?

The flexibility and the freedom to create what you need with it makes it special to me. WordPress is so versatile, and it can work for so many completely different projects. Plugins are the best as they power up WordPress in whatever way you require. And of course, that it’s open source and has this amazing community that is connected through WordPress from all other the world. It’s a very inviting and friendly group of people, and I have made a lot of dear friends over the years.

What is your favorite a) Plugin b) Theme c) Hosting and why? (other than your own works)

As I’m working on WooCommerce block themes right now, I will say WooCommerce as a plugin. I know it’s not perfect and there is a lot to be improved on, but seeing the transformation happening from what WooCommerce used to be and how Woo blocks are changing this right now. It’s really exciting for me to see and something cool to work with. Of course, there still is a long way to go, but it’s exciting to see it break open like that. 

For themes, I will go with Rich Tabor’s theme Wabi. I think it should become one of the new default themes. Especially as it was talked about creating more than one new default theme per year. It’s so calm and clean and just the perfect WordPress blog theme in my opinion.

I really like everything they do at WP Engine, they have a lot of cool projects like Atlas for Headless WordPress and learning and community events going on. Also, the support you receive at Kinsta is just something you have to love.

What do you think about the future of WordPress?

Oh, that is not easy to answer, I mean I’m just one person and WordPress is so diverse and a giant ecosystem. But as I’m always an optimist, I believe WordPress will evolve, and it will have something valuable to offer for a long time to come. Of course, there are options that work better for one or the other thing, but there will be a lot of projects to come, in which WordPress is still the perfect or at least the best solution.

I think we will see a lot of different ways WordPress will evolve. More like spreading in different directions instead of being this one WordPress. I think this is a strength, as WordPress is just so incredibly flexible, and WordPress is also sort of what we as creators make of it. And I think this is pretty cool and valuable.

What would you like to see implemented in WordPress as a Core feature?

Ok, now this is simple, multilingual.

As a person involved with several premium themes, please share some marketing tips. Also your thoughts on the unfair marketing practices we see in the WordPress ecosystem today.

I think there are many ways to offer great marketing for WordPress products and what works for one audience might not be the best idea for another. So listening to your customers and finding out what they really need and want is key, and then to focus on this and ignore all the other options out there. It’s easy to feel like you need to offer everything to everyone, especially as the WordPress user is not really defined, and many people use WordPress for very different things.

I think having an audience and a voice out in the open is very helpful. It doesn’t matter if it’s video, writing, live events or any social media platform. Where ever you feel comfortable and can meet your potential customers. You can share your knowledge and earn trust doing so. In my opinion, this can be very powerful.

What do you think about women’s participation in the WordPress ecosystem? Can the community do anything to encourage more female founders?

I feel like we can create more safe spaces to come together and share, talk and learn from each other. Slack groups, meetings at WordCamps and local Meetups or a voluntary coaching system would be fantastic. I recently discovered the #diverse-speaker-support Slack channel, initiatives like this are amazing and so very helpful.

We had so many acquisitions in WordPress in recent times. What are your thoughts on it?

I think it’s just natural to see this, as WordPress evolves and gets older. Many have started as small companies and have done incredible hard work for a number of years. So I feel it’s natural that at some point you might look for an opportunity or a change. The ecosystem is also changing, and in some areas it is not as easy to start out as in others. So I think seeing this kind of movement is the natural consequence of the way WordPress is evolving.

Some time back, there were discussions about the death of themes but now the focus is on Accessibility themes. What is in store for themes in future?

I think it was never meant to be the death of themes, but rather the end of themes how they used to be. I mean, every person installs a theme and as it holds the design, it’s always been an important part for users to choose. 

But themes did become a bit of an overload with too many options, settings, and design variations squeezed into one theme. It was never meant to be this way, but it was just profitable, so theme creators pushed more and more into one theme to make it popular. And I think, and thankfully though, this is changing and has changed already. 

Now, with block themes, themes are slim and just hold your main design decisions, like the fonts in use and your colour palette. Then you can add blocks, patterns, templates to build a website. These components are not built into the theme, so you can move them to use in another project or add for instance, patterns to a website if needed. 

I think block themes don’t really shine to their full potential just yet, as some things are still missing in core. But we are getting there and from a theme builder’s perspective, I love what I’m seeing. It’s built in a much smarter and more flexible way. It’s such a breath of fresh air and a very exciting development.

Life has both success and failure. Please share one mistake that you made earlier in your career.

I think in the very beginning, we underestimated support a lot. We thought if we build something simple, the user won’t need much support. So we did not really calculate that. 

Another thing we just learned along the way and are still learning how valuable your long term supporters and customers or product users are. Even people who use the free version of your product.

 If your users like your product and support you by recommending it to others and reach out to buy from you instead of your competition, that is the most valuable thing that can happen to you. Especially as no competitor can take that form of trust away from you, even if they copy your product, they can’t copy you as a person. So being honest, and yourself and open with your users, really appreciate and value them, and talk and listen to them, is a big lesson to learn.

What is Ellen like away from WordPress? What are your ways of chilling?

I like to get away from the computer and do just simple things. Camping or hiking and anything on the water. I also love cities and explore and wander around, or sit in a café or in a park or at the beach with a picnic. You can also put me on any train, no matter the destination, and I will have the best time. There is just something about train travel that is so much fun and so relaxing; I just love it.

The WP-Content team wishes her all the very best for her future endeavors and hopes to see her make more contributions to WordPress.