After a day of frantic coding to get the last little bits of The Station done, I’m proud to present you with my latest theme offering – The Station. As you know, I don’t design much on WooThemes, but this time around I’m really excited to see what you will do with my creation!

At this stage, I must also give a lot of design credit to FRESH01 who polished the theme for me. He basically took my basic, unpolished version and turned it into something really eye-catching and hopefully special in all your opinions.

So what’s it about?

Without shame, I’d like to admit that The Station drew a lot of inspiration from the various Ellis Lab websites (such as Expression Engine). The main reason for this influence was their great (and trendy) manner in which they publish important information on the homepage, along with an extremely good information / navigation structure throughout their website.

So that is 100% where my focus was in designing this beauty. You can also be assured that this theme is intended to handle a helluva lot of information about your company, without a single bit of that falling off the way-side. A lot of thought and effort has gone into the different navigation spaces. We have also included quite a few options to allow you to actually customize all of these spaces.

The Goodies

Beyond the customizable navigation spaces, we’ve also included a spiffy new featured tabber, which allows you to emphasise the most important content (your most important messages). The rest of the homepage is also page-based, which gives you complete control over every character, paragraph, image & video that you want to include on the homepage.

I’ve also experiment with a new sidebar system, where you can choose between three different widgetized sidebars to be published along with the homepage, inner pages and blog-related pages. I hope that this will add value in terms of the choices that it presents to you: the user.

The Rest

Personally I’d love to evolve this theme and I can only do that with your feedback. So once you’ve played around with the theme, I’d be more than happy to listen to your suggestions. In the meantime, you can read up on the details of the theme, view the demo of The Station and consider signing up for our amazing club.

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• Integrated Woo Framework Backend (view video screencast);
• Featured Tabber section on the homepage to emphasise your most important messages;
• Alternative Featured Slider section (view screenshot or video screencast);
• Use this theme for a Magazine / News website (view screenshot or video screencast);
• Page-based homepage which enables you to control all of the content on the homepage;
• Integrated Content & Sidebar Video Player (view screenshot);
• 3 different widgetized sidebars;
• Integrated Breadcrumbs, PageNavi and loads of different navigation spaces & options with regards to those navigation sections;
• 3 Additional custom page templates (Archives, Sitemap & Full Width);
• 8 Custom Woo widgets (Flickr, Twitter, Search, Campaign Monitor, Feedburner, 125×125 Ads & Video Player and Recent Posts); and
• 7 great colour schemes to suit your site identity.

Download the WooTees design kit

Stop the press. We’ve decided we’ve had enough of wordpress themes and we are now going to be venturing into the t-shirt design business instead.

…… that’s a joke, don’t worry.

April is going to be a monumental month for us at WooThemes as it will be the first time all 5 of us of the WooTeam will be in the same room at the same time!

A few months ago we all decided we would get together for Future of Web Design 2009 in London, England. What better event to attend together to soak up some design goodness from the industry’s best designers.

We’ll hopefully be taking some t-shirts to the event to giveaway and that’s where we need your help – in designing them. We are looking for a kickass design that people want to wear, not your typical promotional tees that get thrown into a cupboard never to be worn. Your design can be trendy, humourous or professional, or even all three – we open to suggestions.

Prizes

- The winner will receive $500, a 6 month developer license, and their name on the collar of the t-shirt gaining you huge street cred.

- The runner up will receive $250 and a 3 month developer license.

- 3rd place gets you a 6 month developer license.

Terms and Conditions

• The design submitted must be entirely your own work.
• By entering this competition you consent to your design concept being used by WooThemes and possibly even avaliable for purchase at a later stage. First, second and third prize will, as already stated, be awarded a cash prize for their work.
• The winners will be required to deliver their design in the required format before payment is made, determined by an inspection of the design source file.

If you follow our Flickr pool, you would’ve noticed that we’ve been adding quite a few new theme concepts in the last couple of days. Now along with my own The Station concepts (the theme will be available next week) and Dan Rubin’s theme concept we posted this past week, we’d like to share three more upcoming theme concepts with you…

Feature Pitch

I have been enjoying putting on my design hat of late and ever since FRESH01 & Foxinni joined the WooThemes team, I now have some amazing skills to assist me. So for Feature Pitch (which will still get a more unique logo), I came up with the concept and then had FRESH’s help to polish the design and truly turn it into a top-notch WooTheme.

The theme’s purpose is simple: to sell your products / services. This is a promotional site, influenced largely by the way Mac Applications (see Things.app and Versions.app) are being promoted and sold. Also – to serve this purpose, we have actually gone for a much narrower design and the width is only about 800px.

I feel that this theme is something unique in terms of our current business theme offerings (only Productum comes close in purpose & focus), which means we’re only trying to offer you an even bigger variety when it comes to using the right theme, to promote your business in the best possible way. Here’s some teaser images:

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As I designer, it is always a privilege collaborating with designers that you admire.  For me, one such a designer is Dan Rubin, whom I started following way back in my early days of exploring the interwebs along with my own design abilities. You just need to have a look at the list of books that Dan has authored (or co-authored) on CSS, web standards & design; to get an idea of how well-known Dan is…

A while back we got him to do a collaboration with us on a new theme and we’re no nearing the end of the design process (Dan has already started coding it). The concept is a personal profile space and includes sections to publish your portfolio, along with your other online activities. We’ll also be using Cufon (first time for us) for the custom fonts, which will add a nice typographic style to the theme.

So here’s a bit of a teaser… The theme (which is yet to get a name) will probably be available in the next 2 / 3 months… But we’re open for persuasion on developing this earlier…

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Web Designer Magazine - Issue 155

That’s right Issue 155 of Web Designer Magazine features us yet again, but this time we have a more prominent feature with a full page dedicated to a Q & A with Adii and a look at the WooThemes headquarters in Cape Town, South Africa.

Issue 155 focuses on WordPress’s impressive and biggest upgrade to date - version 2.7. The magazine features explanations of this version’s highlights, the dashboard editor explained and designer tips and opinions.

We’ve teamed up with Web Designer Magazine and launched three of our popular WooTheme wordpress templates for free on their promotional CD.

That’s about £200′s worth of WooThemes goodness!

Which themes are available on the CD you may ask?

One from each of us. Adii’s Geometric business/portfolio theme, Magnus’s Freshfolio portfolio theme and my magazine theme – Foreword Thinking.

Head on over to your local UK newspaper shop to get your copy or buy this issue online.

Take a tour of WooThemes HQ

Groovy Video - Perfect for video bloggers

So we finally got our groove on and finished the first theme in the Groovy Series (from the WooContest)… After releasing WooTube (our first video theme) last month, we’re feeling very comfortable with further extending our range of multimedia themes and the newest addition to our collection is Groovy Video, which was designed by the talented Izuddin Helmi.

(We know this has taken long to release, but we’re sure that the end result more than makes up for this!)

Groovy Video carries a similar style to our free theme – Irresistible (also by Izuddin) – but is much more focused in terms of its functionality. Groovy Video is exactly as the name suggests: a video theme with a very trendy and fun design. Coupled with some nice jQuery here and there, you’re bound to enjoy browsing through all the videos on a site using this theme.

We’ve again made including any videos as easy and quick as possible; you literally only need to copy / paste the video’s embed code into a custom field and Bob’s your uncle. We’ve also already integrated the WP-PageNavi & WP-PostRatings plugins for you – so no need to worry about those either.

This theme does what it says it does; and it does that well. It doesn’t pretend to be anything that it’s not and if this theme could talk, it’d probably tell you that it only wants to be groovy…

View the demo of Groovy Video here or consider buying into our awesome club. Feedback welcome as always here at WooThemes…

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• Super-easy functionality  to create video posts;
• Videos are resized automatically and Groovy even publishes the embed code for your readers;
• Integration of the WP-PostRatings plugin for some added fun & interactiveness;
• A completely widgetized sidebar with custom widgets included in the theme packaging. No third party widgets required; and
• 17 amazing colour schemes to choose from!

I just wanted to give you all an update on the development progress of my new theme – The Station – since we’ve been quiet on the matter since I posted the previews a few months ago. We’ve been doing quite a bit of upgrading work to our existing themes, whilst we’ve been trying to push through the backlog of themes concepts; which has meant that we haven’t had time until now to attend to The Station.

But with time, comes wisdom (or something like that); so FRESH01 and I have given the theme mockups a once-over to give it a much more polished and vibrant look. The theme has also officially gone into development this week and even though we won’t put an exact date on its release, we can now safely say that it won’t be too long before its release.

So here’s the updated mockups for preview… Let us know what you think!

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So we know we delayed this announcemenet slightly, but we’ve been tied up elsewhere… But without holding this up any longer, we’d like to tell you who the lucky winners are…

wpressd.com

For this one, we really, really liked John O’Nolan’s suggestion to create a Digg-style platform for niche WordPress content. There are a whole bunch of WP content aggregators out there, but none that offers a little bit of community contribution & involvement; so we’re sure that this will be a great idea. Congrats John!

wpmag.com

For this one, we had to think a little longer as there were many great suggestions… In the end, we decided to award it to Mark Bailey for his in-depth plan of action. We just got the feeling that he’s going to do a great job of building a community around wpmag.com and the community is really lacking some top-notch WP content sites.

So congrats to both John & Mark… Please drop us an e-mail on info[at]woothemes.com and we’ll get those domains moved over to you ASAP.

The stylish marketing tool for your company

Today I can finally announce the launch of our new business theme dedicated to stylishly marketing your products or services, Productum.

Why the name? Productum is latin for “something produced” and seeing we usually fill our theme demos with latin “lorem ipsum” dummy text I thought it was pretty appropriate.

The custom home page makes good use of the prime real estate with a javascript image switcher packing in 4 dedicated images, an about section with linkable buttons, a content area dedicated to one of your wordpress pages, a scrolling carousel dedicated to a specific category of posts, 4 widgetized footer modules and on the inner pages 2 widgetized sidebars with 6 custom woo widgets to use. All of this comes bundled with our wonderful usual theme options panel and 11 colourful styles to chose from.

Ariel and the Southern Media crew helped splice and dice the photoshop work into neat, beautiful code relying on the customizable 960 Grid System. Magnus then helped with his php wizardry skills and we implemented the wonderful woo theme framework.

As always we’d love to hear your feedback.

Find out more about the theme or demo it here.

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• Home page image switcher to help promote your latest products
• Home page scrolling carousel dedicated to a specific category
• 6 widgetized areas (2 x left sidebar,4 x footer columns)
• 6 custom Woo widgets (Flickr, Twitter, Search, Feedburner, Most commented posts, Recent posts)
• 11 great colour schemes to suit your site identity.