Welcome to the madness. So this our attempt at spicing things up here a little by featuring a showdown between the absolute best of the best in a bit of a blood, sweat and tears affair…

Ever since we first started WooThemes, all of you have shown us that you love modifying our themes, ripping them apart and creating incredibly beautiful websites. You just need to spend a few minutes on our showcase to understand what we mean.

So what’s the showdown then? Basically we’ll select two of these incredible user-modified versions of our themes every week and then have them square off against each other for the title of Showdown Champion. We’ll select the contestants based on submissions on our showcase and we’ll always select two contestants who used the same theme as the basis.

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Making Money Online

I deliberately decided that the title of the post should be “Making Money Online”, purely because it’s still such a buzz-word for everyone looking to profit from an online venture. So the thing with our latest theme – Feature Pitch – is that it was designed to do just that: make you some money.

One of the things that probably frustrates me most – online & off – is that the salesperson doesn’t seem to get the recognition that he / she did in the years gone by. So whilst marketers (probably) have seriously devalued the skills and expertise of top salespeople, we still believe that selling yourself / your company / products / services is an art. With Feature Pitch we have thus tried to add a simple, yet effective tool to increase your conversions online.

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Unique Features

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

• Integrated Woo Framework Backend;
• Page-based homepage which enables you to control all of the content on the homepage;
• Integrated Content & Sidebar Video Player;
• Widgetized sidebars;
• Integrated Breadcrumbs, PageNavi and loads of different navigation spaces & options with regards to those navigation sections;
• 2 Additional custom page templates (Archives & Sitemap);
• 8 Custom Woo widgets (Flickr, Twitter, Search, Campaign Monitor, Feedburner, Ads, Video Player and Subscribe); and
• 9 great colour schemes to suit your site identity.

Fresh News is the all time most popular theme here at WooThemes, so we thought it should deserve to be one of the first themes to receive the new Woo Framework update treatment (see video of new framework). What this basically means is that the theme is now easier to setup and use because of the improved functions in the framework (options panel, new widgets, easier image upload, easier to update in future etc.).

We also reworked some of the coding on the front page of the theme, so it now acts more like Busy Bee in functionality. To be more specific:

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We surely couldn’t launch a whole new website (and change just about everything around here), without also upgrading our affiliate banners, right? Well, if you’re a WooThemes affiliate, your wishes in terms of some spiffy, new banners have been answered…

So what did you do? Well, the previous set of affiliate banners – which have been around since we launched WooThemes for the first time in July 2008 - still had our “old” identity, instead of the slightly, polished new look. With the new banners, we’re also trying out some new tag lines / marketing messages, so we hope that those will prove worthwhile for your users (and ultimately increase your earnings from affiliate sales)!

To get an idea of what the new banners look like, have a look at these previews (the complete set includes 32 banners in 10 different sizes):

• 125 x 125
• 300 x 250
• 120 x 240

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Okay, so we probably wouldn’t be able to call ourselves WooThemes if we didn’t continuously get you all excited about future theme releases, by releasing little teasers of upcoming themes. And even though we know we just make your wait so much more painful (because we all want those awesome designs to be delivered right-away), we know you love these posts!

So the last time we posted some teasers, was way back in March this year (here & here) and from those lists we still have Feature Pitch & “Big Easy” (from Dan Rubin) in the backlog. Feature Pitch will be released next week and then Big Easy, along with Groovy Photo & Blog (from last year’s WooContest) have been scheduled for release next month. (Don’t hold us to that, because we’re a fickle bunch hehe…)

For this post then, we’ve got 4 amazing new theme concepts that we’re working on. You’ll see that we’re only showing you very small teasers in Part 1, but as soon as all 4 concepts are completed, we’ll be publishing more in-depth teasers of the upcoming themes. So here we go (in alphabetical order)…

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Our second Woo Worker Interview is with a freelancer the other side of the pond of another Woo Worker who we interviewed last week (Josh of Cubicle Ninjas).

Tell us a little about yourself, your design / development skills and how this translates to your (freelancing) business.

I’m Kirstin, a 25 year old full living on the Isle of Skye (a small island off the north west coast of Scotland). I’ve been a webdesigner specializing in wordpress for the last 4 years and I’ve been a full time freelance designer since January. Although I’ve used a number of platforms, I homed in on wordpress as it offered a lot more flexibility and control. Most of my freelance work is tweaking and coding themes, writing plugins etc although I also do a lot of work with integrating forum and gallery softwares. I’m definitely not the best graphic artist out there, so I tend to be drawn more towards the coding and tweaking jobs.

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You’ve come to know us as some crazy kids and we like doing stuff like just giving you some free themes. So as has become fashion around here, we’ve got to celebrate the launch of WOO2 with another 4-for-1 special. I’m tempted *not* to tell you how it works (because if you don’t know how we roll by now, we dunno on which interweb you’ve been living), but here’s the details:

You can basically buy any Standard or Developer Package theme (from our collection), and get any 3 themes of your choice completely free. This offer is available from 17 – 24 June 2009 and we won’t either backdate it to previous purchases or extend it past the 24th.

Enjoy the new themes!

Along with the launch of WOO2, we’re also proud to announce that we’ll be officially embracing the General Public License (GPL) on all of our themes going forward. How did this happen? Here’s the story…

The Story

So back in August last year, I met up with Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder) at WordCamp South Africa and we had a good chat about what we were doing at WooThemes. At that stage, the GPL issue was still highly contentious with a lot of contradicting opinions on whether themes needs to be GPL or not. But anyway (that’s not important), I told Matt one thing and that was that Magnus, Mark & myself have always believed that we were contributing a helluva lot to the core WordPress project and that licensing our themes with the GPL was always on the horizon. That statement did however come with a provision that we’ll do it when we feel comfortable making that decision.

Fast forward to February of this year, when the whole WooTeam sat down and discussed where we’d like to go with the future of WooThemes. It was there that the whole re-design (WOO2) was conceptualized and along with that decision we decided to license our themes under the GPL. We have therefore had to keep this incredibly exciting news secret for almost 4 months now, but we’re very happy that it is finally here and that we can announce this to the world.

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So after a few months of hard work, we’re finally ready to roll out the new WooThemes, which we’ve quite successfully dubbed as WOO2 over the last couple of weeks. We’ve tried to create a lot of hype surrounding WOO2 and we hope that everyone is just as excited as us to read the rest of this post…

(BTW… If you’re reading this in a RSS reader, get yourself over to the site, because everything is new & shiny!)

We won’t want to keep you too long (because you should explore the website yourself and discover all of the awesomeness that way), but we figured it’s a good idea to give you a bit of a summary of the new things that WOO2 brings. Here we go…

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We all know that you guys & girls want to update to the latest & greatest version of WordPress ASAP. So we’ve been testing our themes (yes, all 35) in the final release version of 2.8 all day and have found a few minor bugs.

List of known bugs that still needs fixing:

• No known bugs.

This list was last updated: 16 June 2009,11 :18 GMT+2.

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At this stage, WooThemes is like a teenage boy that just chows through stacks of food to fuel their immense growth. This means that we needed to expand our team (yet again) to fuel the next phase of our growth.

So I’d like to take a quick few minutes to welcome Simon North to the WooTeam. Simon joins our support team (aka becomes a WooNinja), where he’ll be helping out our forum master, Tiago Noronha, with day-to-day customer support. Simon is initially joining us for 2 months and if everything runs smooth & dandy, he’ll join our team on a permanent basis.

This move allows Magnus to spend a bit more time developing themes, and at the same time should increase our resources available to improve our support offering even further. We believe that WOO2 will surely showcase a progression in our support resources and we’re sure that all of our customers will be very pleased indeed!

What about a new look?

We thought it was appropriate to title the post the same as the “famous” saying from everyone’s favourite character Barney in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Why? Well, because it’s time to dress up your business website with a trendy new look.

Suit & Tie is our brand-new business theme and not that anyone is counting (hehe), but it is also our 35th theme to be released on WooThemes (this is also the last one to be released, before we officially switch over to WOO2). The theme was designed by well-known designer, Bryan Veloso, and we’re very pleased to be adding a little dash of his signature style (in 13 amazing colour schemes btw) to the WooThemes Collection.

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Unique Features

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

• Integrated Woo Framework Backend;
• Featured Slider section on the homepage to emphasise your most important messages;
• 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;
• 2 Additional custom page templates (Archives & Sitemap);
• 9 Custom Woo widgets (Flickr, Twitter, Search, Campaign Monitor, Feedburner, 125×125 Ads & Video Player, Recent Comments and Recent Posts); and
• 13 great colour schemes to suit your site identity.

Changing your wordpress permalink structure not only makes Google love you a whole heap more, it also helps in setting up some parts of particular WooThemes. If you haven’t done it before watch this tutorial on how-to and get it done asap.

Changing your WordPress Permalink Structure from WooThemes on Vimeo.

So on Friday, we asked you to help name our new content / news blog on WOO2 and we got quite a few, really cool suggestions from all of you. We’re really surprised with the creativity of your ideas and we’d like to thank all of you who threw an idea into the hat.

In particular we’d like to thank Jake, Gould, Steve Robillard, Prashant and Brad Potter, who (in our opinion) contributed the best ideas and makes it into our little shortlist.

And now we just need you to vote for your favourite suggestion below…

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