The New Newsletter

We sent out our July newsletter earlier this week and the newsletter sports a complete overhaul from previous iterations. Not only have we changed the design, but also the complete strategy surrounding our communication via the newsletter. So at this stage, if you’re not a subscriber, you need to sign up (there’s a box on the homepage) and get the awesomeness in your inbox next month.

But we realize that e-mails & newsletters is not everyone’s cup of tea… We have thus decided that we will also publish an online version of the newsletter on the website a few days after it has gone out to subscribers (they get to read it first). You can thus access July’s newsletter here: http://woothemes.com/newsletters/july

For further reading… Read this article about the problems with e-mail newsletters, as well as our strategy with the newsletter.

24 hours has passed since we posted yesterday’s “Guess our Bestsellers” competition and it’s about time that we get to announce the winners of some of those Developer themes…

First up, nobody could come up with the right guess for our best-selling themes in the last month, so nobody thus got both correct and the free 6 month subscription on offer has thus gone to waste… There are however 6 people who guessed our all-time bestselling themes correctly and we have decided to give each of these people a Developer copy to any of our themes. But before we announce the winners, we need to tell you what the winning combo’s would’ve been…

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We do love our competitions here at WooThemes and we’re definitely of the opinion that things would just get a little dull over here at times, if we didn’t spice things up with whacky, new contests & promo’s. The funny thing about these competitions is, that we never really spend a lot of time conceptualizing it; instead we just act impulsively based upon a creative spark. So excuse us if our ideas aren’t overly complicated, but we believe the freebies definitely makes up for the lack of “substance”…

So this time around, we were curious to see whether you could actually guess which of our themes were indeed the bestsellers in terms of their popularity & sales. This is especially intriguing, since with every recent release we’ve had negative comments about the theme, even though we obviously have the past sales data to back up our decisions. Here’s how this is gonna work…

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After our previous (free) icon release was so wildly successful and popular with you all, we figured that it might not be a bad idea to do it all over again…

This time around, we collaborated with South African artist – Alex Latimer – to create a very unique hand-drawn icon set which is reminiscent of Alex’ signature drawing style. The set comprising of 24 different icons, should cover most of the social networks that you frequent regularly and the default icon size has been set at 64 x 64 pixels.

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We’ve had the pleasure to collaborate with another hugely popular half-English web designer – this time the graphic designer, web developer, musician and Apple enthusiast Dan Rubin. This collaboration has brewed and matured over months and months, in fact we got our first preview of this theme in November last year! Hopefully this demonstrates to a lot of users that we don’t rush our themes in order to release two a month – quality and quantity go hand in hand here at WooThemes.

Dan is a genius when it comes to web design, he gives a lot of careful thought to his designs and with Big Easy his personal style shines through. For his alternate styles to Big Easy he scanned and tweaked an old (circa 1970s) leather case with some lovely stitching, and a book cover from 1934 to form large repeating patterns. For the neat typography Dan introduced us to Cufon and implemented it meticulously with some “graceful degradation of text-shadow” <– You know you are working with a hot shot designer when he throws in words like that!

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Unique Features

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

• A unique widgetized home page with 3 custom widgets displaying portfolio items, blog posts and category archives, ordered however you see fit
• An automated custom portfolio post display with a js tabber displaying screenshots.
• A completely widgetized sidebar with 6 custom widgets included in the theme packaging. No third party widgets required; and
• 6 amazing colour schemes to choose from!

So after last week finally delivered the intense Showdown (with the winner taking it by only 9 votes…) that we had all been waiting for (and the one I had predicted), we kick off this Monday with another bruising battle… This time, the theme in question is Fresh News’ big brother – Busy Bee.

The two websites that will be squaring off against each other this week is the money-making blog – IncomeDiary – versus the totally inspired, personal blog of Sarah Stanley. A quick look at the two sites makes you realize this is gonna be another close-knit affair, so let’s jump into our analysis right away… Girls up first…

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So we’ve been making quite a bit of noise recently about our Showcase and you may have been wondering why we think this is so important in relation to our other activities. We hope that after reading this little post about our goals & aims with the Showcase, you’ll come to appreciate the awesomeness it possesses a little more…

Here are some of the reasons for us punting the Showcase so fiercely of late…

1. It’s about recognizing your hard work. So first and foremost, we believe that the Showcase is there to recognize the amazing work that all of you are doing based on our default themes. This is important to us, because your work is really amazing and if we can just send a little traffic your way, we’d be very happy.

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For the new Better Startup post, I figured that you may find value in knowing what web apps we use (and right highly) at WooThemes. These are the applications / services that completely runs WooThemes on a daily basis and I don’t think it’d be possible for us to get this much work done without it.

The Website

WordPress (Link)

WordPress

We’d be hypocrites if we didn’t use WP to power our main website, right? Basically when we set out to design & develop the WooThemes website last year, we only knew how to use WordPress, so we never really considered any alternatives. But looking back over a very successful year (and massive growth), I think that WooThemes is evidence that you can build a very efficient business (website) on WP. It’s definitely not just a publishing platform…

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It’s not an every day thing for us here at WooThemes to give away wonderful free WordPress themes, built on our renowned theme framework, but today is one of those lucky few.

Last week, late one night, Adii spent some time with his good friend – a glass of whisky – and dreamed up Mainsteam in Photoshop – a vibrant blog theme for serious, yet personal bloggers. A couple days later, Cobus spent a day slicing and dicing the Photoshop file into neat standards compliant code, battling the odd Internet Explorer gremlin – minus whisky I might add. Then it was another day, building in our feature rich theme framework which eventually brings us to today where we can launch Mainstream upon the world wide web.

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Theme Features

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

• Integrated banner ad management;
• Widgetized sidebar, with some Mainstream-specific custom widgets to allow you full control of what happens in your sidebar; and
• 5 different colour schemes to choose from…

A while back we posted the first part to this post, where we kinda just got you curious about the themes that we were planning to release soon. Since then we’ve worked on quite a few other things, but these designs have now been finalized (and some of them have even gone into development). So now is the time to actually show you what why we believe that some of our upcoming themes will blow your mind.

Note… Whilst these themes’ designs have been finalized and some of them has been coded, there’s no clear ETA on any of their release dates. So it’s not gonna help if you ask us in the comments. All of these themes will however be pushed out in the next 3 months; so even though we’re being vague, you won’t have to wait too long…

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We’ve been releasing quite a steady flow of themes in the last couple of months (18 since the beginning of this year) and since this is (almost) the middle of 2009, we figured we’d take a little bit of a backseat and just consider our next move.

Whilst it’s our job to make decisions about what kind of themes to release next (and judging by the growth of WooThemes, we’re pretty good at that), we thought it’d be good to put this out there to all our fanboys and -girls and get your opinion / feeling on this… So just as a matter of recapping things, here’s all the “types” of themes we’re releasing at the moment:

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So after massive blowouts in the first two weeks of the Showdown, we really hope that we can get a very close battle this week around… I mean – how much fun would a nail-biting 51% vs 49% Showdown actually be!? Especially if the winner finally takes the last 10 votes before we close the poll, to snatch a very-late victory… So here’s to hoping that this week will be just that kind of Showdown…

For Week 3, we have thus called on our best-selling theme ever – Fresh News – to hopefully provide a close battle. In the one corner, we have a very recent awesome modification in WhatFest, which will go up against probably the first-ever, great modification of Fresh News – GoMediaZine.

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PSD? Huh?

So we get quite a few e-mails asking us what the value is of buying the Developer Package (which includes the PSD file) over the lower-priced Standard Package. First off, we need to explain what the PSD actually is…

All of our themes are designed in Photoshop, before they are coded into HTML / CSS and then into WordPress. So the PSD we refer to, is that original Photoshop design file, which we used to code the theme you end up buying. That PSD is also still layered, which means that all of the elements within the design are still separated and you are thus able to change those individual design elements much easier.

Now that you know what you may be buying, I guess we need to tell you why you’d want to buy a Package which includes the PSD file. Here’s a few reasons…

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