Today, this morning around 11:00, the era as Customer Support Manager of iThemes came to an end. For now, I’m shocked, hurt, and all of the other things that come with losing your job, but I do have good company as I am reminded of a post a while back from Bryne Reese, who was let go from Six Apart: A sad departure from Six Apart and looking to the future.

The good news first: we still have 12 months of COBRA left, my moonlighting is doing quite well, so while I look for another job, we hopefully aren’t going to drain much of our rainy day savings, and I got a decent severance package to allow me some time to get my bearings. With such news, there is usually an influx of work that comes in with news of one’s free time, so I hope that is the case for me as well.

The bad news is a tad more complex, as it primarily deals with emotions and history. I really don’t want to go back to my last employer for a number of reasons, but they had the best darn insurance and benefits package I’ve had. I also don’t want to be in that profession any more now that I’ve finally started to make a name for myself in the WordPress and online publishing industry. I’ve got clients, references, and testimonials out the wazoo, and I’m excited to exercise those with my full-time attention now, but feeling the responsibility to get a “real job” and get a salary again. Monster.com isn’t very likely as an option because I was working in an English degree, but still have about 20 hours left to go, and my area of expertise is computers, which often require a computer science degree to land a desk job.

My mind is going 1,000,000 miles per hour with plans, ideas, and ways to keep our heads above water. I’m certain it won’t be a problem… I just don’t know what path to take right now. Looking at this on the home page, it’s such a stark contrast to yesterday’s post, it’s unbelievable what a day will do.

In the meanwhile, if you have any site needs or know anyone who needs a professional, easy-to-use site, please head over to JessePetersen.com and check out my testimonials and services.

#1 FlexxTheme – 15 Versions to choose from, or get all 15 for $199.95

This is far and away the most versatile theme for a beginner or someone who wants to put together a site without digging into the code to change the sidebar layout. I used to spend most of my time looking for free themes that had the sidebars and content areas “just so.” If Flexx had been around back then, I’d have saved several full days looking at theme repositories and just paid the $80 for one theme that I can change or $200 for 15 themes that I could use for my freelancing. Well, it’s here now, and it’s my top pick due to its 1,056 possible site layouts, 10 widgetized areas, and the powerful header and background manipulators in the dashboard.

#2 Essence – 6 colors to choose from, or get all 6 for $199.95

This was the theme that attracted me to iThemes in the first place. It was actually their only theme at the time, but I absolutely HAD to have that shadow effect on the home page. I was totally enthralled with the presentation it created, and I’d never seen so many page templates before. Essence was my first introduction into the world of premium themes, and I’ve never looked back, as far as business sites go. I always tell people looking for a premium CMS theme, “You can’t go wrong with Essence.”

#3 Architect – Make this the cornerstone of your business or use it for development for $149.95

As our first theme release of 2009, I’m surprised at myself how quickly I took to liking Architect so close on the heels of our smash hit and our legacy bread and butter themes above. I suppose the reason I’m so surprised is how simple it is, yet how powerful its dashboard features are because it benefits from a lot of the technology we put into FlexxTheme. With a bit of know-how with images and CSS, you can modify the widget areas on the home page in some incredibly eye-catching ways and draw attention wherever you want on the page.

Of course, the best deals are the Combo Packs, which end up being under $30.00 per theme for the Multi-use versions that run $149.95-$199.95 per theme. There is the Website Combo #1 – 11 themes, including Essence for $299.95, the Flexx Combo #1 – 15 versions of FlexxTheme for $199.95, and the Media Site Combo #1 – 8 social media and photo themes for $299.95. The grand-daddy of them all is the Mega Combo of all 3 Combo Packs for $499.95 – over 30 themes with multi-use licenses.

That is how we split up last year’s 2008 Theme Club purchase, so this year’s 2009 Club is under way, which includes all themes we will produce this calendar year, pre-paid, with access to the 2009 Club site to download your themes at your leisure. At only $399.95, it is bound to be a better deal than waiting until 2010 to get the themes after they have been out and run around the block, as you can see by the Mega Combo price.

• Mac users with issues are usually just new to WordPress and are unfamiliar with getting things to work.
• Windows users with issues are usually totally inexperienced when it comes to getting anything cool done on the Internet.

I know that’s a broad generalization, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a Mac user on our forum who was using crappy FTP software, let alone people who were relying on their host’s file manager to upload entire folders. There are exceptions to both camps, of course, but in this market it also seems like there is a good portion of Mac users who have PCs as well and are either using both for web work or have advanced themselves to the superiorly stable platform and program market. Macs just have cool stuff, virus-free!

So, in an effort to aid the Windows users out there, here is a site I ran across that lists a ton of the best free Windows software that have been tried and tested to be what you need to use if you’re on a PC. I direct you to:

http://www.opensourcewindows.org/

(I would be remiss to not point out that there is a missing category: Anti-virus, which I suggest AVG Free Personal)

Not to neglect my fellow Mac addicts now, there is also http://www.opensourcemac.org/ just in case you want all of your favorite sites listed in one place (since you’re already using these programs).

We’re keeping pretty tight lips on exactly what HJ is and why you want it before you even know what it is, so you’ll just have to trust me that you want to sign up for his Twitter feed and sign up for his newsletter.

You remember what we did to the industry when we launched FlexxTheme… you ain’t seen nothing yet. I couldn’t be more proud to be working with our team on the iThemes brand, launching 2 themes in a week (well, we have some IE menu issues on the one that was scheduled for today), expanding into Movable Type, and now this… it’s all pretty amazing for just 5 guys spread across the country.

JessePetersen.com - ready for traffic!

I’ve been working hard, too hard in some family members’ minds, on my freelance site over the last two weeks. Now that it’s done, I can relax and reap the rewards for a job very well done.

I am in a very unique position at iThemes in that I am the front line of contact with our customers, not just one of the front line. There are only so many things that we offer for support that is included in the price of our premium WordPress themes. We can’t train someone from scratch how to use WordPress or learn enough CSS and HTML code to change their site. We offer answers to specific questions, but projects need to be directed elsewhere.

For the last couple of months, I have been directing them my way for some literal moonlighting. I typically start my second work day around 9-10pm and work until midnight on projects. It’s great money, creates networking contacts, and makes iThemes to be an all-around solution, even if one has to pay for certain services.

It became rather tedious, though, to reply to someone that they can contact a moderator or myself for services and write a long e-mail about my services and fees and hope they e-mailed me back on my personal e-mail. Since I’d been holding on to JessePetersen.com for about 15 months waiting to finally develop some content, I decided to make it about promoting me and what I do rather than me forcing myself into writing or producing material. Now I can simply refer people to my namesake domain (I sure hope they spell both names right later) and they can see that I am the real deal with testimonials and links to prove it. Not to mention the theme I’m running – /horn toot!

I’m quite proud of what I did at the bottom of my home page, though I openly admit that my wife had a LOT of very constructive and helpful suggestions about certain elements of the home page and it now passes with flying colors in her very distinguishing design opinion. Please check out that little area and the hover action on the guy, especially. I’d have to say I’m more proud of the bird and my graphic and code work putting that together, but the Image is Everything ad is definitely my best marketing work to date.

Customized code turned these from text areas to this!

This is actually our latest iThemes release, and the first of 2009 for our rapidly expanding group of 2009 Theme Club customers. By purchasing the Club package, customers are entitled to every theme we produce this calendar year, so the release of this theme, called Architect (demo site here), produced a new wave of sign-ups today. My fingers were quite busy creating new member site logins for their download access since the value of receiving our premium themes at less than $35 per multi-use license them is $100 off per theme! The more themes we produce over our promised number reduces the cost per theme to the customer even more.

Yes, that's 1,400 posts all by myself.

The increase in business we’ve experienced is amazing, and we’re very thankful for it. Last month, we saw an 84% increase in sales over October, but that increase was not without its side-effects. I was often working late into the night after Beautiful went to bed, while we were watching TV, and more time than I cared to do on the weekends. The one thing we don’t want to do at this point is hire another person because of the obvious dip in earnings per person, so it was time to think about efficiency.

I’m becoming pretty darn good friends with our Creative Architect, James Dalman, in the last few weeks. Since he ran his own business for the better part of 20 years, he knows what things will drag you down, waste your time, and generally suck the life out of you. We have been spending 2-5 hours per week on Skype and the phone going over routines, common issues, standardized wording for responses, and so much more. When I get in one of my “I’m going to rip that person’s hands off so they can never type again” moods, he responds in my place with something a tad (read: WAAAAY) more customer-friendly.

Today, with Cory gone and an empty inbox early in the day, I set off to improve our support forum. Between the forum and e-mail, that is where I spend 85%-90% of my time doing Company work. They are inter-mixed, too — I get e-mail notifications of forum topics, and I get topics resolved via e-mail when I have to request login information to peoples’ sites. It’s all very convoluted. My main gripe with our current forum software is that the notifications come through with just a link to the thread, whether it is new or a reply, and if you haven’t checked the thread before someone replies to (and possibly resolves) the thread, I don’t know until I click the link and go to the board. Also, the moderators didn’t have the ability to modify the threads in the same way as me to indicate that they were resolved. In the end, I had to read every single thread, even though I have 5 other moderators helping me.

Easy moderation controls

I found some new software to run our boards on, setup a new database on the host, slapped the software in a new folder and imported our existing forum database into it for a trial run. I had a major snag with the host permissions that I had to create a helpdesk ticket for, and I still can’t get the e-mails to send with the address I want them to, but it is already leaps and bounds better than our old boards. Even as I am typing this, I keep going back and checking my e-mail to see if they have a solution for my e-mail question. Nope. Nothing yet.

Just to make sure I’m on the right track with heading this direction with a change in forum software after almost 6,000 posts, I sent our moderators a link to the boards to check out and I already heard back from one of them who said he’s already a fan of the software and is fully behind the change if I go all the way with it.

4GB, Baby! 2GB more than my desktop...

I’m sure Cory expects me to work harder now, if that’s possible, but after reaching the conclusion that 1GB of RAM in my MacBook just wasn’t cutting the butter or the cheese (my specialty), I found him a great deal using a site I no longer recommend for 4GB of RAM for $45 after mail-in rebate. The next thing I knew, I was on there ordering an upgrade.

Before the upgrade, I was running on 23MB of free RAM according to my Dashboard. Checking now with Live Chat for iThemes, 12 Firefox 3 tabs open, and TweetDeck, I have 2.5 GB of free RAM. Let’s do some math really quick.

4GB – 2.5GB = 1.5GB used — CRAP! I only had 1GB before! I suppose that’s why the hard drive was always churning. For kicks and grins, I loaded up World of Warcraft and it’s running without a skip or snag. I’m in computing heaven not waiting for windows to wrap up a few more cycles before responding. I will say Mac does a much better job of memory management than Windows, but it still has limitations with a finite amount of RAM.

Here are some samples of how the theme can look with various headers, backgrounds, and layouts – all of which are done without touching a line of code. Trust me, our graphic designer didn’t know squat about WordPress a while ago and is just cutting his teeth on this theme as far as going into the dashboard. This is not simple stuff for a newbie, but it is with FlexxTheme.

Today, it has been non-stop requests to upgrade to our 2008 Theme Club for our limited, one week only offer of including FlexxTheme in the Club downloads. After midnight of November 19th, we wil be moving FlexxTheme to its own developer’s pack and it will no longer be a part of the Theme Club. I know this sounds pretty sales-pitchy, but I’ve seen some pretty cool sites pop up in under an hour with the use of FlexxTheme.

The result of our company retreat in September was a whiteboard that detailed our theme goals and dreams of usability-enhancing features, along with the framework of a layout options page to allow for 96 unique layouts. Within a couple of days, it looked like we were going to have around 700 layouts. The final tally is an industry-leading 1,056 unique, functional, and ultimately desirable design layouts.

That was not the point of FlexxTheme, though. We wanted it to be easy to change layouts, because the ability to change things around doesn’t mean jack if it’s confusing or cause support issues. So, we developed our next revolutionary feature by creating a visual, point and click, wireframe layout builder with a wireframe preview. No – code – needed.

Let’s count widget areas over to the right: 10. Ten widgets of content galore! You don’t have to use them all at once, and even go all the way down to no sidebars or widgets to create a wide content area with no distractions.

To further customize a site, a huge part of that process is to change the background image and how it behaves when the scrolling. Chris Jean has developed a background manipulator that allows you to upload an image, select how it repeats, and whether it scrolls apart from the content or stays locked down. If you use an image that only repeats one direction, you can also select a background color that fills the rest of the background area. To purchase FlexxTheme now without seeing the rest of its great features, click here now.

We’ve got a whole goody basket of features and bling:

• header image slideshow with image order controls
• 1,056 layouts with a GUI selector
• massively customizable background image/color controls
• embedded contact form
• page and category menu builder
• easy stat code placement
• easy automatic SEO options
• header height control
• embedded “live” tutorial links that never go out of date

Now you’ve seen most everything, so you can head over to the purchase page if you want to get your hand and keyboards on it.

Here are the packages:

FlexxTheme – Bold Live Demo

Single-Use Package: – $79.95 $99.95

This package is for the person who intends on using this theme on a single website.

Multi-Use Combo Package – $199.95 $249.95

This combo package, which includes both color styles, is for the person who intends on using this theme on multiple personal and client websites.

FlexxTheme – Canvas Live Demo

Single-Use Package: – $79.95 $99.95

This package is for the person who intends on using this theme on a single website.

Multi-Use Combo Package – $199.95 $249.95

This combo package, which includes both color styles, is for the person who intends on using this theme on multiple personal and client websites.