So here is another interview of website template MOTOCMS founder Demetrio Fortman. Demetrio Fortman is one of the most outstanding personalities in the world of web design and development. Founder of many projects (MotoCMS is the most successful one), volunteer, marathoner and extreme sports aficionado, he agreed to give an interview and tell us more about his life and ideas.
Lets start with the interview !
First of all thanks a lot for accepting my interview proposal. I and my readers are very pretty glad to have you . Please tell us about yourself and your educational background?
Hi guys! And thanks a lot for your invitation – I’m very happy to be here. As for my background, I guess I’ve always been into all those technical and coding stuff. I started learning website development in college, and I always knew I would make it my life-time project. My first-time college attempts were in some sense childish and awkward, but I polished my skills and always looked for improvement. And I got a lot experience with these first projects. I went through so many highs and lows. But today I can take a look back and see that all these efforts weren’t in vain.
I have a couple of live projects today. MotoPress Editor for WordPress was one of my first creations, and it’s still up and running. I also launched MotoCMS website builder. And today it is one of my pet projects that takes over half of my time and attention (the other half is always with my beloved family!)
Speaking of MotoPress, how do you see the short to medium term future of WordPress as a platform?
WordPress is a great platform. It is one of the most user-friendly CMSs today. Except MotoCMS, of course 🙂 I thinks, WP will develop its service to make it even more open to users who are a far cry from all that technical stuff. It already adopts modern frameworks (like Cherry Framework) to make website managing easier. And I believe WordPress will take a big move to mobile use of the platform soon.
Tell me about a project that forced you to be innovative and creative ?
It’d would be one of my older projects – Defrozo. It appeared as an idea to create a platform for photographers where every one of them will be able to create a portfolio website without any help. I’m fond of photography myself, my camera is always with me. And I just thought I would love to have a website where I don’t have to put much efforts into customization. Me and my team, we worked hard to make this system to look and perform great. We introduced a WYSIWYG editor into this platform and added many photography-focused features.
Then we launched a campaign on Kickstarter.com. We gathered many backers and built a great community around Defrozo. But the project didn’t reached the goal and we thought like we should turn it into something else. Today Defrozo is still alive as a part of my other pet project – MotoCMS. It is now one of the bestselling themes in the Photographer Portfolio section and I’m extremely happy we managed to save it!
When you started with MotoCMS what kind of complication you faced and how did you solved it?
In fact, when started with my favorite project, I didn’t face too many issues with it. It was the time when FLASH ruled the web and our flash templates with a handy admin panel were selling like hot cakes. The complications appeared later when FLASH was officially discarded and we felt like we have to change all our views and beliefs.
That’s how MotoCMS 3 was born. It is the project I am proud of! It’s not just the next version of an outdated product. My team made it a perfect platform for anyone to start their business or personal project with no efforts and no coding knowledge. We are exploring the website building market everyday, getting feedback from our existing customers to new features to it that users of other similar website builders can only dream of! Thus, we are introducing blocks into the admin panel that allow building a website much faster.
Can you tell me about a time when you almost gave up, how you felt about that, and what you did instead of giving up?
Well, that was that time when we spotted a significant drop in sales of a FlashMoto templates. It just came to me that we should have been either re-build the entire system from scratch or shelve the whole project.
We have chosen the first way. My team is a community of high professionals and they are not afraid of challenges. So we worked hard during two years to create a fully-new website builder. MotoCMS 3 was born in June, 2015, with fully-reconstructed admin panel, responsive out-of-the-box templates, SEO-friendly features and modern designs. Later we introduced Ecommerce plugin to our system, and now MotoCMS store also offers Ecommerce templates with all the features to launch a successful online store.
What do you think of current developments in our web design industry? How could they affect your business development efforts?
Oh, I’m thrilled to see how many developments that we read about in Sci-Fi fiction novels are coming to life now! Artificial Intelligence idea is developed heavily by Google now. Its RankBrain algorithm is the future of SEO and I we are focused to make MotoCMS themes ready to satisfy the requirements of the Google’s algorithm updates.
Chatbots are also in the pipeline and more and more companies already use bots for messengers to support their customers. I hope at MotoCMS we will be able to provide chatbots integration within our templates!
What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?
My work, my family, my passion to life! I treat life at a precious gift, and wish to try as many things and complete as many projects as possible. I run one of the most challenging projects in the web design world. Me and my team, we create websites that are easy-to-use for everyone: from non-professionals to skilled web developers. We believe that everyone deserves a perfect website that doesn’t require many efforts, time and investments. And the thought that we have such a product makes me happy.
My family supports me in everything I do. My wife helps me to manage my projects. And my precious little daughter inspires me to crave for more and aim for more to create a better life for her and people around us.
What do you hope to accomplish within the next year?
I hope me and my team will continue polishing our block-based website building system. This system is already introduced to our flagship templates and we gathered a lot of user’s feedback about it. We are constantly improving to make MotoCMS the best platform for building your website on. And our ready-made content blocks are not the last step we are to set about our products.
Thank you, Demetrio, for such an inspiring talk! I hope all your projects and ideas will be embodied into the real life opportunities!
I hope you guys like this interview with MotoCMS CEO Demetrio. Feel free to ask any questions below ! Keep checking more interviews at BloggersIdeas to learn from marketing experts.
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