The Internet, and blogs in particular, connect niche interests with global audiences. Adriaan Pienaar (a.k.a. Adii) caught on to this idea pretty quickly and taught himself how to work with WordPress, the “largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world”. He’s been clever with marketing himself online and along with partners Magnus Jepson and Mark Forrester, has built a business out of helping others do the same. Their business - WooThemes - offers premium quality WordPress themes to both novice users and experienced designers.

The choice to work on WordPress was not a strategic one, although it has proven fortuitous given the platform’s incredible popularity - as Adii points out “one percent of the world’s blogs run on WordPress”.

WordPress has a vast range of users with blogs that are both personal and professional – and their authors have an interest in having them read and taken seriously. Hence WooTheme's gap – “it’s supply and demand”. While many can’t afford more expensive custom designs, they will pay for a professional look.

So what defines these good (and lucrative) designs? In Adii's view, any design must be elegant to appeal to a large number of users, but the quality of the code is essential. WooThemes offers designs that can be used "out the box" by the novice user, but "hacked apart" by someone who knows what they're doing: “Design will always only cater to certain people, the code base is what’s important”. WooTheme’s user base seems to agree, and often commenting on their excellent customer support, are happy to call Adii by his self-styled nickname: WordPress Rockstar.

They are not universally popular however. There is some tension between the views of WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and the WooThemes business model, which made meeting Matt at last years WordCamp “intimidating” for Adii. While Adii doesn't think Matt will "ever be truly happy" with what WooThemes does, he found Matt to be a "humble and open-minded guy", and thinks they must agree to disagree. “With Open Source being what it is he has to be idealistic, but idealistic is not realistic”.

As long as there’s a demand for their themes the three WooThemes founders will keep producing them. "Blogging isn't going anywhere" in Adii's view, although it is at a stage where it must begin to define itself, in both the personal and corporate blogging spheres.