Recently, Stephen shared an interesting site with me – User Onboarding – in which, as the site states, seeks to do the following:

User Onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.

Learn some lessons from how popular web apps do it!

It’s a really simple, straightforward site that highlights how various applications sign up, sign in, and continue using a product. Not only that, it also looks at what’s bad about the process, too.

In short, it’s a great site to peruse (or to throw in your RSS reader) if for no other reason to check out some of the ways in which other companies attempt to garner customers.

But principles, by nature, tend to be transferrable (not always, but many times). This means that some of the lessons explored throughout the various teardowns the site does are applicable to onboarding users with WordPress.

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Last week, I shared a few thoughts on how I think that major updates to an existing WordPress theme are actually more analogous to a new product rather than an update of the existing product.

That is, if a theme is identified by the way it presents the content of the blog, then it stands to reason updating the look and feel of the theme is changing the very thing that gives the theme its identity.

So, from there, it’s reasonable to ask the question: Once a theme’s design is locked in, should it ever change?

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Designers and developers, by their nature I think, are attracted to new things if for no other reason than to see how it’s designed, how it’s put together, how it functions, and so on. I don’t consider that a positive or a negative – it’s just a trait that some people have (and certain types of people exhibit it more than others).

That curiosity matched with the desire to constantly be improving at one does do for a living (or for a hobby) is what separates those who see the gig as “just a job” and those who see it as what they’re dedicating their lives to doing.

Yes – it can be expensive: Some like to purchase new devices as soon as they are released or new products as soon as they are released in order to familiarize themselves with them, and then to try to bring back what they’ve seen, learned, and experienced and build it into whatever they’re focused on creating.

But when you bring this approach into something like WordPress theme design and/or theme development, it has the obvious potential to improve future work but it can also negatively impact existing work.

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