Rough Pixels is a WordPress theme shop based in British Columbia, Canada. They design and build attractive WordPress themes with the focus their themes should be easy-to-use, no plugin or page builder dependency, and the themes should work right out of the box.

Rough Pixels has a dozen attractive WordPress themes in their portfolio. Furthermore, all their themes are Gutenberg block and Classic editor ready. I must say I am a big fan of their themes, especially their latest theme – Prologe.

André Jutras is an experienced web designer with over 14 years of website design and has worked with content management systems such as Movable Type, Joomla, and WordPress.

He later started Rough Pixels, a successful WordPress theme shop with elegantly designed themes suitable for all kinds of blogs and websites.

To find out more, I reached out to André and asked some questions about Rough Pixels. Let’s find out more about Rough Pixels and André. Shall we?

10 Questions to André Jutras from Rough Pixels

Q1. Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is André, and I’m the owner (and jack-of-all-trades) for the WordPress theme site called Rough Pixels. Being the only individual running the show, I’m the designer, developer, manager, accountant, support team, and everything else in between!

On average, I work 7-days per week and up to 10 hours each day, so I really don’t get official days off, but I try to give myself enough breaks throughout the day.

I work from my home office, which is a great way to work – especially living out in the country because I’m surrounded by trees, mountains, ranches, and yes, even wildlife! One of the best things about being out here is being able to sit out on the back deck with an iced caramel coffee, overlooking the scenery as far as the eye can see. What could be better?

Q2. How did you first get involved with WordPress?

A long, long, time ago, before I even knew about WordPress, I was designing Joomla templates as I was transitioning away from being an independent website designer. I did this for about three years at which point I soon become aware of other content management systems.

Movable Type was one, but it was also around this time that I was discovering an up-and-coming blogging platform called WordPress.

Back then, I was fascinated with Movable Type for its professional attributes and extensive capabilities. However, I believe it was around 2005 when I can attribute the discovery of WordPress from a website client I had at the time. He needed some work done to his blog, and if I remember correctly, he was using the Kubrick theme. I guess you can say the rest is history!

Q3. Rough Pixels build themes for WordPress; tell us why you chose that niche?

When I saw how popular WordPress was becoming, I realized there was a lot of potentials if I were to expand my business endeavors with it. For obvious reasons, it didn’t take long for me to come to the conclusion that this was the direction to go. I mean, look at where WordPress is now!

I’ve been lucky to have experienced the many facets of WordPress. Of course, when learning anything new, there were many failures over the years, but I was determined to learn from my mistakes.

Designing for WordPress will always involve something new to learn and the more I dug deeper, the choice of pursuing themes became both evident and a reality.

I could have stayed with Joomla templates, but with the insane growth of WordPress and the opportunities it brought; it made sense that WordPress was the solution.

Q4. What challenges did you face in building Rough Pixels?

Rough Pixels wasn’t the first and only theme site that I’ve owned. In fact, over the last 14 years, I’ve had a couple of other sites, each having their own set of challenges. The most common problem is the intense competition within the growing market saturation of themes.

For Rough Pixels, it’s been especially difficult because when I started to build it, the competition from other theme sites, authors, and theme marketplaces had already reached the pinnacle of saturation.

For anyone wanting to get started in this market now is going to find it almost futile. However, I consider myself luckier than most because I’ve done this for so many years, I am familiar with the industry and can apply the experience that I’ve gained. Unfortunately, there is still a challenge compared to what it used to be just 6 years ago.

Another challenge is trying to dedicate enough attention to the blog that I have on the site. Being the only person running the show, most of my time is taken up with theme development, so the blog suffers.

When I first built Rough Pixels, I wasn’t sure if I would have a blog, although I think having one is necessary for these types of sites. I still need to organize myself to get in the habit of writing blog posts. I’ve even considered having sponsored guest bloggers…but we will see.

Q5. What makes Rough Pixels stand out from other shops? Why should people use a Rough Pixels theme?

That is a really good question because I think most theme shops stand out from others in one way or another.

For Rough Pixels, I can easily claim the simplicity of how I build my themes. For example:

1.    My themes are made without bloated code as I have seen so many others do. This is a huge benefit when we talk about load times, stability, compatibility, and even security. The more you put in, the more chances something will break.

2.    Common sense theme options that make using the theme and customizing your website easier.

3.    No plugin or page builder dependency; my themes work right out of the box! One of my biggest frustrations is how many themes require and lock you into using a page builder. Don’t get me wrong, their demos are impressive. Unfortunately, you need a page builder to make them look like they do. I can probably write an article just on that topic alone!

4.    WordPress standards are an absolute necessity. My history of building themes involves submitting them to the WordPress theme directory where they get reviewed and MUST pass 100% before they go live. This also means that my premium themes are based on WordPress coding standards to ensure stability, compatibility, scalability, and having no worries when WordPress releases an update; your theme still works.

5.    Support is just as important as the theme itself. My philosophy for providing quality support is paramount when it comes to my themes. Customers are often shocked when they get a fast response compared to other sites. I also believe that if you cannot provide good support, even for free themes, you should not be in this business because a big part of doing this involves helping those who need it. A customer should not have to worry about waiting days for support, or worse, being totally ignored.

6.    Rough Pixels makes it easier to adapt to the ever-changing aspects of WordPress. A good example is the Gutenberg block editor. I make my themes compatible for both the block and classic editors, so if you are one who still wants to use the classic editor, I’ve got you covered!

6. You recently redesigned Rough Pixels – Can you tell us why, how the process went and what difficulties you experienced?

It’s funny to say this, but I can design themes for others, but when it comes to my own site(s), I’m never happy with them. Throughout 2019, I kept staring at my site and thinking, I need to change this; I don’t like the layout; my theme tutorials are not as organized as they should be, and so on.

There were even a couple moments in time when I considered changing the site from WordPress to run on Joomla because of the direction WordPress was going. For a complex website such as Rough Pixels, Joomla makes sense. However, the problem with switching to a new CMS when I’ve already been running the site on WordPress for over a year made me scrap the idea.

Even more so when you consider how many customers and members would be grossly affected by the change. Not to mention the fact that I honestly cannot fathom doing that to them because they are more important than what I want for myself.

I still had to make major changes. So throughout the summer of 2019, I made copious notes on what needed to change. What things were needed but not required, and what were wishful changes. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the ball rolling until mid-December because of other projects I had going.

Another problem that I encountered was to figure out what to do about my free themes. Should I keep them on the WordPress.org theme directory or make them available right from the Rough Pixels website? For the most part, I wanted to keep them at WordPress. But they have a serious problem with their theme review queue (a waitlist) that was getting as long as 7 months.

On top of that, theme authors are only allowed to submit 1 theme to the queue and must wait until that one gets reviewed and goes live before submitting another. This meant that it would limit how many free themes I can give back to the community. In this case, it would be 1 theme per year. That’s insane!

Needless to say, I decided to make my free themes downloadable from Rough Pixels. So, I had to integrate that concept into the redesign of my site. Even to this day, I am still making adjustments. In the meantime, I’ve created a special membership to access all my free themes.

But there was still at least one more challenge I had to face…I was going to rebuild the entire site using the Gutenberg block editor. It’s funny because I design themes for Gutenberg, but I was never really a fan of it, so I figured, hey, let’s try this out and see just how well it performs for a site like this. It turned out to be OK. I’m also planning to write an article about my personal experience tackling this; things I liked, things I didn’t, and how I succeeded with it.

Q7. What is your typical working day at Rough Pixels?

Working from home is an amazing experience, especially because I live in a log house on 7 acres of forested land. So, I make it a habit of getting out in nature as often as I can. I’ve mentioned that I work 7 days per week and up to 10 hours each day, so it’s nice to get outside.

My days can be long, but I generally get up in the morning, have breakfast, make tea or coffee, check emails. Then if the weather is nice, I will sit out on the deck and prepare myself for the day. Eventually, I head downstairs and metaphorically plug myself into the computer and begin work.

There are very few if any support requests. Which I think is a good sign. So I will usually spend the rest of the day and evening designing, coding, jumping on Twitter. Continuously thinking “how can I improve the next new theme?” I often check out WordPress articles on blogs to keep up to the changing times and to find out what is trending for themes.

There are still home duties to attend to, whether it’s cleaning, splitting firewood, landscaping. Shoveling snow (in winter), or heading into town for food and supplies. Overall, I keep busy.

Q8. What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working with WordPress & Rough Pixels?

I have a habit of sitting at the computer all day and night. So it feels like I don’t have too much free time. However, being where I am, I try to get out and about. Even relaxing on the back deck in the summer for a half-hour is nice!

One of the biggest problems when you work on the computer, you are sitting long hours in front of a monitor which is not overly healthy. I have a few inches in the middle to prove that. Doing some form of exercise is critical for this work-style!

Q9. What are your future plans for Rough Pixels (or any other upcoming/ongoing projects?)

My original plans were to release a new theme every month to build a massive portfolio and offer tons of themes. The problem with this ideology of “more is better” is the wrong way of thinking because the quality is often sacrificed.

When rebuilding Rough Pixels, I had to give serious thought on the direction I wanted to take the site as we approached 2020. I decided that quality and ease-of-use were the two most important factors for the mission statement of Rough Pixels.

My goal now is to refocus on improving existing themes to make them even better while designing new ones over the course of this year.

One additional project to work on is the Rough Pixels affiliate program. I’m not sure how many people know about, so the plan is to put some effort to market the program to anyone that loves writing about WordPress. Even more so if they focus on themes.

Q10. Whom should we interview next & why?

WOW, hard question to answer because there are so many to consider. Not sure I can name just one. But I can mention a couple, Ben from LinkWP.com.  Jeffrey with his EditorsKit plugin (which is in my top 5 list of plugins) and another growing project called ShareAblock.

Final Words

I thank André Jutras from Rough Pixels for taking the time to attend and answer all the questions for this interview. Much appreciated. I wish André Jutra’s best of luck with Rough Pixels. Your WordPress themes are awesome.

Read more interviews – Interview with Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins.

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Barn2 Plugins (formerly Barn2 Media) based in South Devon, England, are the UK’s longest established WordPress company. Already in 2009, they started their business.

Since then, they have grown tremendously and now have an entire team of colleagues around the world, including two full-time plugin support engineers, a developer who works on the Barn2 website, and a marketing team.

Barn2 Plugins now sells WordPress and WooCommerce plugins to over 111 countries worldwide.

As the curious soul, I am, I contacted Katie and asked some questions about Barn2 Plugins.

10 Questions to Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins

Let’s find out more about Barn2 Plugins, Katie and Andy Keith. Shall we?

Q1: Can you please tell us a bit about yourself and Barn2

I’m Katie, the business half of Barn2 Plugins. I run the company with my husband Andy (the technical half!). We’re based in a small town in South West England and have an 8-year-old daughter called Sophia.

Q2: How did you first get involved with WordPress?

I started building WordPress websites for clients back in 2009. While we started as a general web design company, we always chose to build websites with WordPress and ended up being one of the first UK companies to specialize in WordPress. It allowed the business to grow very quickly, as there was a shortage of WordPress experts back then.

We always wanted to sell WordPress products and switched to selling plugins in 2016. We now sell plugins to over 111 countries worldwide.

Q3: Barn2 build plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce; tell us why you choose that niche?

When building a product business, it’s essential to play to your strengths and focus on what you know. Since we already ran a successful WordPress agency, we were deeply immersed in the industry. We knew where the gaps, opportunities, and pain points were, which would allow us to build a successful plugin business.

We were aware of how fast WooCommerce was growing. How people are willing to pay more for plugins that will increase their sales – for obvious reasons! It naturally led us to focus on WooCommerce. This decision has proved to be correct, as the WooCommerce versions of our plugins sell much better than the general WordPress versions. For example:

• We have sold 5x more copies of our WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin than its generic equivalent – Password Protected Categories.
• We have sold 2x more copies of our WooCommerce Product Table plugin than its generic equivalent – Posts Table Pro.

This is particularly interesting given that the generic Password Protected Categories and Posts Table Pro plugins can be used for ANY WordPress post type. Whereas the WooCommerce versions only work with WooCommerce products.

When we launched WooCommerce Product Table and Posts Table Pro, I was convinced that Posts Table Pro would sell more because it has so many more potential use cases such as creating a WordPress document library, blog post index, member directory, audio library, and much more.

I think this shows the size of the market for WooCommerce products and the opportunities it brings.

Q4: What challenges did you face in building your business?

Our three biggest challenges have been time, time, and time!

Our daughter was born shortly after we started the business. As a result, we have grown the company against the backdrop of making sure we had the right work-life balance, and have never worked ridiculous hours. We do work hard, but not at the expense of family.

In many ways, we wish we had started working for ourselves much sooner when we had more free time. Andy and I are both perfectionists, and it has been hard to free up more time by building a team. We’ve never wanted to spend our time managing people, as that’s not what we enjoy.

While we still don’t have any in-staff. We have now built a team of colleagues around the world, including two full-time plugin support engineers, a developer who works on the Barn2 website, and a marketing team. When needed, we also bring in additional skills as required, for example, design work.

We have recently experimented with having other developers build some straightforward plugins for us. We hope to be able to get more help with the plugin development in the future – we’re very careful about this because it’s important that our plugins continue to meet our high standards.

Q5: You recently rebuilt and rebranded Barn2 – Can you tell us why, how the process went and what difficulties you experienced?

When we started selling plugins in 2016, we sold them on our existing website, which was previously used to promote our web design services. We added Easy Digital Downloads to the site, but never actually rebranded as a plugin company.

We had known for a long time that we would need to rebrand and launch a new website to take the plugin business to the next level. However, given the challenges I mentioned in the previous question, it took us a long time to prioritize this. We knew it would be a huge project which would distract us from building more plugins and improving our existing ones!

In the end, we started the project. It took us a long time to find a designer we were happy with because while we’re not designers ourselves, we know what we like – not an easy combination!

We weren’t happy with the work of the first designer we hired for the project and ended up using 99Designs for our new logo and website design.

The logo design went well. We were very pleased with one of the competition entries to design our new website. But, unfortunately, their work got worse and worse as we commissioned them to produce additional designs.

We later discovered that the original designer left the designer part-way through the project, which explains why the later designs weren’t as good as the original ones. We only got them to the standard we wanted by providing long lists of feedback and doing some of the work ourselves, which was the last thing we wanted to spend time on.

While the design part of the project was a struggle, we got there in the end and are delighted with our new branding. We were lucky to find a fantastic developer to build our new website. As we now work with on an ongoing basis.

You can read the full story of our rebrand in a transparency post I wrote – The Story Behind Barn2’s Rebrand & New Website.

Q6: What is your typical working day like at Barn2?

Andy and I work partly from our home office, and partly from an office. We rent at an ex-factory, which has been converted into a work hub.

After walking my daughter to school. I typically spend about half an hour cleaning the house and tidying up, before starting work in the home office.

Mid-morning, we will often drive to the work hub and work there. Since I work with my husband, we usually take time out to go for lunch or a walk in Dartmoor National Park. Which is right behind the office. We then return to the office and work until it’s time to collect Sophia.

While we rarely have face-to-face meetings with anyone other than each other. We work closely with the other members of the Barn2 team via email, Slack, and Helpscout. Due to time zone differences, the support team start work first and finish at about the same time as us. Our developer continues working after we have finished. There’s always some overlap, which is great.

Q7: What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working with WordPress?

Since being desk-based isn’t very healthy, I try to find the time to do some exercise each day. The only exercise I particularly enjoy is walking. We’re lucky to live in a beautiful part of the English countryside with the coast and a national park very close by.

I also use the treadmill in the garage (while watching Netflix) a couple of times a week and do yoga sessions on YouTube.

Q8: What does the WordPress Community mean to you?

The WordPress Community is hugely important to me. Like most home workers, it’s easy to become isolated and work in a silo. The WordPress community provides a broader perspective, lots of ideas

I’m proud to be quite active in the WordPress Community, particular in relation to other plugin companies.

I’m an active member of several Facebook groups relating to selling WordPress products, WordPress product support, WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads. It has been a fabulous opportunity to get to know other people who run similar plugin companies. I often exchange messages and ideas with people who do similar work to me.

This morning I was invited to join a new group of people who run similar plugin companies so that we can learn from each other.

WordCamps are my favorite part of the WordPress community because they’re the only time that I meet other WordPress people face-to-face. I don’t have the opportunity to attend many WordCamps. But I make the effort to go to WordCamp London and WordCamp Europe where possible.

Now I know more and more members of the WordPress Community. I try to contact people who I know will be attending and arrange to meet them in person.

For example, for WCEU in Berlin this year. I helped to arrange a meetup with the owners of several WordPress plugin companies. It makes networking opportunities more relevant, although it’s fun meeting random people at WordCamps too.

Q9: What are your plans for Barn2 in the future?

I love selling plugins and plan to continue doing this for the foreseeable future. More specifically, we plan to continue growing the business by improving our existing plugins and launching more new ones.

We need to continue focusing on expanding our development capacity. Recruiting some highly experienced WordPress developers who we can trust to add new features, build new plugins, etc. – while being very careful not to sacrifice on quality. This will involve continuing to fine-tune and formalize our processes so that less is dependent on Andy as the sole developer.

Right now, we’re building what will be the best plugin on the market for adding EU VAT support to Easy Digital Downloads. This has always been a significant pain point for EDD stores, such as ourselves.

There are no high quality, well-maintained plugins available, so we’ve decided to “scratch our own itch” by building our own. As well as using it on our website. We will be releasing the plugin to the wider WordPress community, and we hope it will be useful to other Easy Digital Downloads store owners.

Q10: Whom should we interview next & why?

James Kemp from IconicWP. His company is quite similar to Barn2 as he is building a small team and specializes in selling WooCommerce plugins. I’m always impressed by his professional and business-like approach to building a plugin company, so he’s a good person to interview.

Final Words

I thank Katie from Barn2 Plugins for taking the time to attend and answer all the questions for this interview.

The post Interview with Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins appeared first on WP Pluginsify.