Here we are at the start of the new year, and with it comes a look back on 2017. It has been an amazing year in both things we’ve learned as well as company growth. Moving forward, we’re hoping this can be a yearly tradition of ours to take a minute to breath and reflect back on what we’ve accomplished.
Thank you to all our clients
To start, we wanted to thank all of our clients who’ve worked with us this past year whether you’ve been a long-time dedicated client or someone new. We are incredibly thankful to have such great clients that continually push us to be better at what we do.
Branding ThemeHouse and new website
This new brand and website wasn’t just a passion project for us but a necessary re-organization of the way we position ourselves to customers. A lot has changed over the last five years since our previous website, Audentio, launched. Aside from company growth, we have constantly evolved our brand and processes for better scalability and we’ve arrived at a solution we’re happy with.
We’re still the company that you’ve known from the start, but we’ve refined our brand into distinct branches for a clearer experience.
Growing team
We’re proud to say that we’ve grown to a team of fourteen talented individuals — all bringing their own personalities and skill sets to really build an A-team. This past year, we’ve brought in new members such as:
- Dalton Prock, Digital Product Manager
- Jeremy Wilder, Marketing Engineer
We’ll be posting more about our team and giving a closer look into who we are and how we work with some “meet the team” posts.
Entering the app world
Many of you know us as forum specialists and that is true with over 10 years in the market, seven of which has been spent in the XenForo community. We won’t be going anywhere and will continue to build quality products for the community.
However, we were lucky enough this past year to be given the opportunity to design and build two apps — LaundryMate and Daps. While both are more in a beta period now, it was a great learning experience and we plan to build more native apps this year.
XenForo 2
Over six months in the making, countless iterations and some serious developer ingenuity — we launched UI.X 2 framework. We set the standard with UI.X and knew we needed to not only meet expectations but surpass them. This meant a fairly large undertaking for the team with over a thousand developmental hours poured into the framework (and counting!). Quality requires passion, understanding, patience, and yes a lot of time. UI.X isn’t a fly-by-night framework, just like its predecessor, it is here to stay and be actively supported. You can learn more about UI.X 2 here.
To have UI.X 2 pushed out the door, with UI.X 2 Pro in the works as well, is an incredible feeling and we are grateful to the team members who devoted their time and energy to the project as well as all our customers who have supported the product — some since it was originally released end of 2013. Thank you so very much.
Refining our skills
2017 was a year of refining and enhancing our team’s skills. We’re a small team that offers a multitude of services which meant we needed to keep our team incredibly agile and our roles fluid. As we continue to grow and take on new opportunities, our team needed to learn and adopt new skills.
Jessica, our Media Director, who primarily dealt in the design world before has now delved into HTML/CSS and currently helps create websites for our clients with the development team.
Tushar and Kyler, our resident JavaScript developers, took on an array of projects from React-based apps to back-end applications with Node.js. Ian has been diving into more JavaScript-based roles as well as refining his UX skills.
Jake refined knowledge in the Ruby on Rails framework as well as a bit of Node.js.
Sarah has stepped into a bit of project management and marketing roles as well.
Everyone on the team has really stepped up to expand on their skills and we’re very excited for what 2018 will bring.
What 2017 looked like visually
We were able to be a part of some amazing projects — from big board forum designs to building out a delivery system. Here’s a quick look at what we’ve been doing for the past year.
Goals for 2018
Now that we’ve wrapped up 2017, we’re already looking forward to what we can accomplish in 2018. We hope to do the following:
- Relaunch Audentio website with a new facelift that includes more portfolio content, our services, and other details that have shaped our story
- Continue building out the ThemeHouse XenForo 2 library of solutions with Topics for a Flarum-like experience, Covers for profiles, Slack, Trending threads xPress our Wordpress bridge, and of course UI.X Pro on the very near horizon
- Offer a line of consultation services - which has been one of the most sought after solutions last year
- Refine our app building process and some of our native app solutions such as LaundryMate
- And much more, with an emphasis on going back to our roots, fundamentally sound solutions, breathtaking quality, and outstanding support
