Hi Marius! Thank you for participating in this interview. You’re one of the co-founders of tagDiv, could you please explain our audience what is it all about?
tagDiv is a team-up project with a friend, Radu O. It’s a funny little story as we both needed a template neither of us could build by himself. In 2014, we joined forces and built a multipurpose theme. 🙂 Then, the question popped up – why not sell it? And tagDiv company was up and running. We identified a great opportunity on the news, blog and magazine niche and took it. Yes, we are building the News WordPress Themes! Currently, we develop Newspaper, Newsmag, ionMag, and MeisterMag. In less than 3 years we became a top author on themeforest.net and Newspaper Theme is the most popular and best-selling news theme on the market.
For me, tagDiv is not about themes. I think my job is about building customer experiences for website owners and their users. This was always the central idea of our company.
How did you go about branding?
The code is a strong branding tool! I never thought about branding as marketers usually do. When we started this journey, we didn’t have a strategy for branding or an elaborate visual identity manual. When we needed a logo, we’ve built one and moved on. 🙂 I’m not saying this is the right way, but this is the way it felt natural for us to do it.
We focused on developing and delivering the best possible product and make our customers happy. I “wear the shoes” of our clients, trying to face all the challenges they must overcome to build a successful website and implement ways that help our users achieve their goals. To make things even easier, we gradually built one of the best support systems in our industry. Those two actions were crucial and in time they actually helped us establish tagDiv as a brand despite our initial lack of intention…
You’re constantly working on the improvement of your two WordPress themes – Newspaper and Newsmag. Can you explain our readers their purpose – when they should choose one over another?
Newspaper and Newsmag are similar products. Both are excellent choices for any news, magazine, blog, or reviews websites. The main differences are the design and the grid’s width. The Newspaper theme is wider, while Newsmag Theme design is more compact. We usually recommend users to think about the design they want to implement on their website and pick the one that’s closer to their image of the future project. Depending on the type of project and the desired look you may find one or the other better suited.
So… Newspaper VS Newsmag – which one wins?
Would you prefer coffee with vanilla or cinnamon? 🙂 In the end, the users win! They will have a great theme on the website with the flavor they like best.
How do you promote your themes? Do you use social networks or you have an ace up your sleeve?
I believe that social networks have become part of our modern society and engaging your customers should be an important aspect of any modern business.
We are present on all major networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Instagram, Youtube. And, about the ace up my sleeve, if I showed it to you, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore…
From the themes you’ve designed so far, I concluded you have a passion for creating unique templates and graphic layouts which together make an amazing visual appearance. Is this your roadmap to success which other designers should follow too?
The design is one of our key ingredients but is not the only one. We focus on every aspect from using the latest technologies to making sure that the user experience is optimal. At the beginnings, we had designers that inspired us, and I think that we got to the point where we serve as inspiration for others, this is a natural process. Beauty comes in patterns that are universally recognizable by us humans, while fashion tells us which pattern is more suited for a certain moment in time. I think that the key to delivering a successful and innovating design comes from the careful observation of the flow of trends that come and go, and the ability to adapt instantly…
Since we highly recommend WordPress CMS to all our visitors, would you tell us your opinion of it?
I think that WordPress rocks! It’s a complex and wonderful machine that changed the way we build and maintain our websites. WordPress is like a huge playground making site building really accessible to anyone. It’s good for professionals and for people who are coming on the web for the first time all the same. I love the energy and the creativity of this environment. The best way to take the pulse is at WordCamps.
Do you have any favorite WordPress plugins that you could suggest to web newbies?
Plugins that we like and also use on our own sites:
WooCommerce – for selling products
SEO by Yoast – for SEO optimization
Revolution Slider – for building custom sliders
I recommend to any WordPress newbie to make sure that he really needs the functionality that comes with a plugin. I don’t recommend installing plugins that are not necessary, they might affect your site performance without bringing any useful functionality.
Let’s wrap up with a little bit of fun – if you could exchange ideas from anyone from WordPress or design niche, living, dead (or even historical), who would you go for?
I would go for Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic. It’s fascinating how he developed an open-source software and created a huge business around it.
Photos ©: tagDiv.com
