Listen to your customers: how our WordPress theme for recipes became a favorite for Instagram influencers
We’ve been making WordPress themes at WPZOOM since 2008, including one of the most popular video themes (our founder Pavel wrote about its journey).
We now maintain a library of 35+ themes. We’ve released over 100 themes over the years, but design tastes change and not every theme is popular, so a bunch have been retired.
In an increasingly commoditised and competitive market for WordPress themes it’s important to keep innovating and offering something nobody else has. Hence, we looked at new types of themes.
Pitching a theme at lifestyle bloggers
Our themes have typically fallen neatly into a couple of categories: magazine, portfolio, education, business and video. It was a slight change of direction, then, to release Monte at the end of last year. Monte was a magazine theme, but pitched squarely at fashion and lifestyle bloggers.
Monte proved very popular. Features like a responsive minimalist design, Instagram integration and newsletter subscription options provided everything lifestyle bloggers wanted. In a niche where image is everything, Monte offered a way to make your site and your content look really good; the attraction was obvious.
Or, so we thought.
What happened next was not totally unexpected or unprecedented, but intriguing nonetheless.
Adapting a food theme for lifestyle bloggers
Foodica was originally released mid–2015 as a theme for food and recipe sites. Like lifestyle bloggers, food bloggers are after lots of bold imagery and striking minimalist designs. However, features like custom shortcodes for recipe ingredients and directions made the theme especially suited to food blogs.
WordPress themes are versatile and often using a theme for something other than its demoed purpose just requires a little imagination. We recognised this and when Foodica was released commented it is “a WordPress theme for food-related websites, and especially for food recipes, blogs or even magazine sites.”
The potential to use Foodica for lifestyle blogs was there all along, but the theme wasn’t set up to make it easy. The theme offered a choice of displaying posts in a grid or a list with featured images on one side and an excerpt on the other, but there wasn’t the “classic” blog layout with much larger images lifestyle bloggers wanted.
It wasn’t until one of our customers told us Foodica needed a couple of tweaks to be great lifestyle theme that we released an update adding to Foodica the features lifestyle bloggers wanted.
How lifestyle bloggers adopted a theme for recipes
It wasn’t until one of our customers — who’d originally come to us because she wanted Monte on herlifestyle blog — made the switch and Foodica and saw the potential to make the theme work on lifestyle sites that we realised an update that introduced the features to make the theme work on lifestyle sites out the box. Foodica 1.2 transformed the original list layout to a blog layout with the larger images lifestyle bloggers were after. There were also a whole host of other improvements, including extra customisation options and a speed boost.
Foodica is broadly the same theme and design as when it was released, but getting real-life feedback from customers using the theme on their real-life sites gave us the insight to see where changes could be made to make the theme even better.
Following the release of Foodica 1.2 we’ve seen fashion and lifestyle bloggers come to WPZOOM and generally prefer Foodica to Monte — the theme that was meant to originally attract them in the first place. Both are outright popular and both look really good, but the themes together offer choice. This Summer we’ve updated Foodica again to keep the typography fresh.
Incoming Instagram influencers
As Foodica and Monte have attracted lifestyle bloggers to WPZOOM, we’ve seen people with huge Instagram followings (half a dozen customers have 150,000+ followers between them) launch their own sites using our themes and use them to further develop their personal brand — and in some cases start businesses.
One great case study is yoga teacher sassy yogi. Angie, who runs the site, started out with a popular Tumblr but then expanded to Instagram and her own site.
With her site as a hub for her audience where she can share much more in-depth content, Angie has been able to expand her fanbase and keep them coming back. She’s recently got to the point where she can launch her own yoga studio, a lifelong dream.
A second case study is fitness and fashion blogger Katie Morse. Katie has a huge Instagram following but has been hustling with her website since 2010. The more flexible platform the blog offers has allowed Katie to build a loyal following — and recently quit her job to start a social media consultancy business.
Angie uses Monte and Katie uses Foodica. Both have been able to create a following through a huge amount of consistency, hard work and hustle. A smart-looking site is the public face for their great content, and it’s been a pleasure to take our themes to new places after seeing what they, and other customers, do with their blogs and want from their blogs.
Listening to your customers: do it in practice
The obvious takeaway here is listen to your customers.
It’s really easy to say but it’s rarer to do it in practice.
We knew all along that we’d made a versatile WordPress theme that could be used for purposes other than what we were envisaging it for, but we needed prompting to see what changes we could make putting that into practice easier for our customers.
We didn’t have this insight at first as we hadn’t produced themes attractive to lifestyle bloggers before: it was only once we had one product aimed at the group that we were able to unlock the potential in the other products.
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