Meet Baker, a 30 years old creative director. He works at Acme Corp where his main responsibility is to direct a team of creatives to deliver an output in a manner given by the art director.

During his spare time, he enjoys watching movies (old movies in particular). Among the titles that he owned were One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shawshank Redemption and Cinema Paradiso. Other than movies, he also enjoy listening to an array of musical genre (Britpop, alternative rock, jazz and sometimes classical). His playlist consist of bands mainly from UK like Coldplay, Radiohead and Portishead.

He had a deep interest in arts, specifically in typography, grids and infographics. Over the year, he develop a favors over a well kerned fonts and logos. Which leads him to his reading material that varies from magazine like Monocle and Newwork, to newspaper like New York Times and the Guardian.

Like his movies, he loves a vintage stuff and leather. His favorite color is black.

What is a Persona?

Persona is a realistic personalities that represent one of the possible theme user. By creating a persona, we’re actually laying a groundwork and the whole story first, about a person that is going to use the theme.

Persona building is one of 2 planning phase that we went through before we starts with the development. Another would be prototyping (information architecture and interactive prototype), but we’ll elaborate on it later.

How does Persona helps in WordPress theme development?

• Help us to build the right theme
  By creating the persona, we’re actually creates one of many potential users of the theme and tone it down to one. This will avoid us from mistakenly build a theme for another type of person or maybe for ourselves.
• Highlight the function/feature that the theme have.
  For example, we have a transparent feature on Fable. To demonstrate this, we’re using a background that consist of typography arts (to portray the persona interest) and set the container transparency so that user can view the background image. Therefore, viewer will notice the transparent function, and the persona interest at the same time.
• Defining the hierarchy of the website, clearly.
  For example, Fable lifestream was used to list out things that the persona wants to highlight. Same with second point. viewers will notice the use and hierarchy of lifestream and also the persona’s highlights selection.
• Ease things up.
  Isn’t is easier to develop anything (theme in this case) when you have a, story? ツ

Summary

There are myriads of ways to develop a WordPress theme. One can jump to development stage right away without proper planning (persona development, information architecture and such) or vice versa.

As for us,we think that it is crucial and important to take time to plan. It may consume extra time but it’ll definitely brings an advantage in the long run. If it’s done properly, it’ll even cut the development time. Furthermore, it also show the signs of experience and professionalism.

We believe that our users want a value on every penny spent on our themes. We also believe that they’ll appreciate it if we put extra effort and take time to deliver a theme that will satisfy them at the end of the day.

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