All the latest news and announcements, straight from the WooThemes HQ!
Meet F01.01
06. Oct, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
The new theme teasers are coming thick and fast these days; and a WooWeek just wouldn’t be a WooWeek without us posting new teasers, would it? 
Today’s teaser however has a little more significance…
When we first decided that we wanted to support International Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we approached Veerle Pieters (who we had previously worked with on Abstract) to design a theme that would not only celebrate women, but also support our own awareness campaign during October. And so F01.01 has been born…
F01.01 - Homepage
F01.01 - Inner Page
From the above screenshots, you’ll see that the design is perfectly suited for all our girly personal bloggers out there, as it sports a pixel-perfect (and custom) illustration in Veerle’s signature style. But beyond the obvious awesomeness of that illustration, the whole design carries a sophistication that you would only experience in designs created by designers of Veerle’s quality; it definitely looks like every piece of text, every link and every button has been hand-crafted to perfection to make F01.01 one of our most stylish themes to date.
If at this stage, you’re wondering how the girly illustration will relate to your own personal branding, we’ve devised two possible plans at this early stage:
- We will be making it easy for you to simply exclude the illustration from your design and thus only use the rest of this amazing design; or
- We hope to work with other illustrators to customize the illustration enough to be representative of more women (hair colour, ethnicity etc.) with a few more colour style options in terms of clothing.
And in terms of the guys, we haven’t forgotten you either… Whilst the focus of the theme is definitely on enhancing our “We Love Boobs” campaign, Veerle has also created F01.01’s sibling aptly titled M01.01…
M01.01 - Homepage
M01.01 - Inner Page
So what do you think? Excited about this release (which will happen in the next week or two btw)? We’re really hoping that we can count on your support for both this theme, as part of our awareness campaign, so shoot with those suggestions and ideas which will hopefully make this another top-notch WooThemes release…
6 October 2009 at 8:22 am #
It’s looking very good, fresh, funky and fantastic!
Veerle’s work is always great to see.
6 October 2009 at 8:33 am #
I like the color profile: It represents Veerle’s own site and I’ve always liked visiting it;
Nice collaboration Adii
Cheers
6 October 2009 at 8:37 am #
yuppers, it will sell like hot cakes.
6 October 2009 at 8:38 am #
Man I love this. The line up for theme releases is fantastic. Keep up the great work guys.
6 October 2009 at 8:49 am #
Ilove the color used in both templates looooks very nice
however you guys showing teasers than releasing
i suggest just one theme then release it not more than 3 or 4 theme teasers and no release to any
Regards
6 October 2009 at 8:55 am #
We’re releasing almost a theme / week from now until the end of the year. So don’t see why we shouldn’t show you teasers as well!
6 October 2009 at 9:41 am #
Love it! I am so happy you guys worked with Veerle again. Her style is very clean, beautiful and refreshing. This is great! Thanks!
6 October 2009 at 10:31 am #
When I saw the first image I thought “This screams Veerle Pieters all over the place”, awesome design (although not everyone looks like the chick or the jock, that could be a deal breaker).
Cheers
6 October 2009 at 11:50 am #
That’s why we’ll be working with another illustrator to eventually create some alternate styles that would be more representative of a variety of people…
6 October 2009 at 11:58 am #
Oh yeah, I skipped over the pretty blue box
my mistake
7 October 2009 at 12:43 pm #
Could you also offer a style without the illustration ? I really really love the theme. It is really great but not sure about this illustration…
6 October 2009 at 1:14 pm #
nice:)
6 October 2009 at 1:25 pm #
Nice personal theme. When will it be released? Instant buy theme!
6 October 2009 at 2:02 pm #
Hopefully as soon as next week!
6 October 2009 at 1:31 pm #
Just one suggestion. In some countries Flicker isn’t used that often. Is it possible to extract just images form posts for the right top section?
6 October 2009 at 2:03 pm #
Sure… The whole sidebar will be widgetized, so we’ll include a few alternative widgets.
6 October 2009 at 2:04 pm #
Her work looks awesome, like always!
6 October 2009 at 2:32 pm #
This seems to be a awesome theme. Hope will be released soon!
6 October 2009 at 2:58 pm #
Amazing design! It’s a breath of fresh air for blog designs and I can see this one being instantly customizable.
6 October 2009 at 6:27 pm #
Impressive design. Something fresh and interesting without being distracting from the content. It’s this sort of material that makes me very glad I’m a member.
The illustreation is not something I’d ever use, and would never consider using such a distinctive “theme default” image. But the ability to replace that image with your own transparent png32 is very powerful indeed.
I think it’d be extremely useful if that space was able to take its own image in the same way that your standard framework allows for a new header logo. Just indicate some basic parameters of width etc and allow people to load up with anything.
Suddenly that area is then up for all sorts in creative uses and varied businesses. Imagine that side area showing a thermometer-style “donation level”, with the image replaced as donations rise toward the target.
Great stuff.
7 October 2009 at 1:38 am #
Some awesome suggestions there!
And that was definitely our plan with regards to changing out that image for anything else… It will make the theme totally customizable and flexible.
6 October 2009 at 8:08 pm #
To be honest, I didn’t like this theme because of the illustration. If it is removed/changed, it will represent almost no customization at all.
And without the illustration, the design is nice but Woo already have many superior designs to choose from.
Flamers/haters: this is just an oppinion.
7 October 2009 at 1:21 am #
Fair comment, even though without the modification this design just oozes sophistication and pixel-perfect attention to detail! Plus, it’s for a good cause, so it’s never intended to be our most popular design ever…
6 October 2009 at 11:01 pm #
just wondering, could we change the girl/guys image on the left to our own? (‘-’ ) ( ‘-’)
7 October 2009 at 1:20 am #
Sure… You’ll have a few options: A) keep the illustration; B) remove it; or C) change it to your own.
7 October 2009 at 12:43 pm #
Oopps… Should have read the comments until the end !!
I have the answer now ! 
7 October 2009 at 12:41 pm #
I don’t think I like it much. All these themes are really starting to look the same, just different colors and move a few elements around.
8 October 2009 at 1:50 am #
Huh!? You must be joking, right?
None of these themes we are working on at the moment are looking the same to me.
8 October 2009 at 2:01 am #
The only place you might find more variety is ThemeForest. But what you WON’T find is the support that comes with a WooTheme. Plus with the 2-for-1 deal here, it’s a better investment economically. I know this firsthand!
8 October 2009 at 3:44 pm #
To make myself a little more clear, theme support on WooThemes is top-notch and above the rest.
8 October 2009 at 1:14 pm #
I can sort of see where David is coming from. To me, it’s not that they collectively look similar, just some themes look like other themes is all. Design tweaks with the same functionality shuffled around.
What I’d like to see is more themes designed as CMS. It seems many of the WooThemes have the blog as the main feature of the site, or the content area is filled with blog posts with dates, comments, tags etc. I believe many people are just looking for an easy to manage, slick website powered by Wordpress without letting every visitor know, “Yeah, it’s a blog template site”.
9 October 2009 at 12:44 am #
We have a whole array of CMS like themes where the blog part is not prominent on the home page (widget), and more to come… http://www.woothemes.com/themes/business/ in case you missed it
9 October 2009 at 12:53 am #
You can find the upcoming themes here just btw.
8 October 2009 at 2:36 pm #
I would find it pretty incredible that several designers would make the exact same design. What I think they all have in common is that they are designed for a user in mind, and they have the same framework. If having a great UI and a framework makes them “all look the same”, so be it. Personally I don’t like a site too out of the box … if you veer too far from the standards that most web surfers are used to, you end up losing your audience. This is a commercial operation, not a design school … they are making themes that work and that are effective for the purchaser, not ones designed for design’s sake.
7 October 2009 at 9:17 pm #
I really like this. Simple, clean — different that a lot of the other themes. I wish it was available… last week.
8 October 2009 at 1:48 am #
Hehe, our most loyal supporters are so hard to please these days. We show you new awesomeness and you expect it to be ready like yesterday…
It’s coming soon though…
8 October 2009 at 10:30 pm #
I’m just excited for its release! I swear.
8 October 2009 at 3:48 am #
Woo themes definitely has a specific type of design style, clean, readable, slick, not too over the top even when it’s grungy. But that’s a good thing not a bad thing. I think there’s enough variety in there and if people wanna mod these themselves they can make it whatever they want it to be.
You can also tell the social media influence, which is what the blgo is all about, being a central hub for your online activities.
I’d say Woothemes could do with a few more company suited themes, you’d probably get alot of buyers for themes like that. What I mean is less blog and more site.
8 October 2009 at 10:01 am #
I second that. I’d like to see some themes pitched very directly at small real-world businesses, NOT web businesses, photographers, or social media nuts. For example, tourism businesses are always looking to improve their web marketing, but are not web businesses. Something for small hotels, tour operators, wineries, B&B, small resorts etc. Big pics, short blurbs, summer specials etc.
9 October 2009 at 12:56 am #
I’m a bit surprised by the comment, because any of our business themes accomplish just that. As Magnus mentioned higher up, these themes only features the blog on the homepage; and that as an optional widget which doesn’t even need to be there.
Not entirely sure what other features you’d like to see from our business / CMS themes…!?
BTW… I don’t mean this in a condescending way at all… Instead I’m trying to figure out what you guys mean / want, because that’ll enable us to meet your needs better.
9 October 2009 at 2:22 am #
Well, I think it becomes obvios what’s needed (and not needed) in a design when you try to mock it up for a certain type of business. For example, a small tourist hotel. We need some big pics (not Flickr), spaces for some text about the hotel, the surrounding attractions, and a current special or two, and a random testimonial area.
Maybe an interactive map, and a video welsome from the manager. No blog elements, no comments, no Facebook or other social media. Light, happy colours – no dark slabs or panels of gloomy black. Clear, serious typography for a slightly older and richer crowd than the usual web geeks.
9 October 2009 at 2:33 am #
I hear you, but consider it from our point of view: how many small tourist hotel templates are we gonna sell? If we’re not gonna sell enough of those, then we’re essentially getting closer to custom design / development work which is what we veered away from when we started WooThemes.
So the challenge for us is not to design niche themes, but design flexible themes (which I think we’re doing btw) which can be adapted for any niche. To do this, both the layout (diverse options across our entire themes collection) and optional elements (theme-specific widgets) need to add the variety of options to turn any theme into a small tourist hotel template.
Am I making any sense?
9 October 2009 at 4:46 am #
I understand that. I just used small hotels as an example to show the type of elements that I think would and wouldn’t work. The template is not specific to hotels, but elements like testimonals, gallery, map etc could be applied to all sorts of businesses. A mockup using a hotel was just a way of highlighting various elements.
The point I’m really trying to make is to see theme themes mocked up to a much wider range of business than just web fanatics and bloggers.
In that I suppose the question is whether you’re primarily selling to individuals setting up their own site, or small web businesses making fast sites for shopfront business clients.
As must be obvious by now, I’m in the latter group.
8 October 2009 at 12:15 pm #
I’ve had it with this. Woothemes continues to churn out the same cookie cutter themes and just expects it’s users to use them?
I mean come on already, there is like 40 themes and every single one has a header at the top? Where are my menus at the bottom?
And what is with this continuing prominence of content in your designs? What are you guys trying to do make us read more now to? I use twitter, I cant be bothered with reading anymore. Wheres my big sidebar with focus on my twitter content?
And another thing, the comments, you put them below the content in every single theme. Sometimes comments are better than the content and deserve better placement.
haha just kidding.
Seriously, the themes don’t look any more similar than that they follow classic blog conventions. This is a wordpress theme club people and although WP and woothemes are capable of being oh so much more than a blog(just take a look the showcase) your going to find that the default design is usually geared toward blog.
The fact that wordpress is a blog engine greatly effects the designing process. Designers working on a wootheme will tend to gravitate towards a blog design.
There are a few exceptions but for the most part the default looking wootheme is usually going to be a blog one. So if you need more get a developer license, use the psd and extend the design. Then either use a wooninja or make the code modifications yourself.
Woothemes are excellent for tweaking and geared towards those who plan to modify them. Woothemes are some of the most well coded and easy to use themes around, take advantage of that.
Thanks for reading my long comment. And can you please modify the woo blog so that my comments are placed above or in the content? just kidding, although seriously can you? I would really appreciate it.
Note: All bookworm comments are considered non-serious posts and are not to be taking too seriously. Take them with several grains of salt or a tablespoon.
9 October 2009 at 12:57 am #
You almost killed this post with this lengthy comment. Must admit though that it was great fun reading it!
8 October 2009 at 2:59 pm #
Whenever I create a site using woothemes, it is often necessary for me to delete all the comment tags, dates, etc on the front page to make it more CMS like. A lot of the great themes in the showcase have done just that – deleting all the bloggy type content. Maybe Woo can consider offering 2 template files for the front page. 1. Blog style 2. CMS style with none of the bloggy tags.
9 October 2009 at 12:58 am #
I don’t think *all* of our themes make this necessary. Some of our themes only include bloggy content on the homepage as an optional widget.
Obviously some of our themes are totally blog-orientated and from my viewpoint they wouldn’t make a lot of sense if you removed the bloggy-type meta data and content. Not?
8 October 2009 at 11:58 pm #
Great idea for a “CMS only” option.
I know Wordpress has its genesis in blogging, but I think the platform has moved past that now. Just as “wireless” is now FM and digital radio, and “horseless carriages” are F1 racing cars, so Wordpress is beyond the simple “blog only” concept.
14 October 2009 at 6:08 am #
curiously waiting it’s release to use it’s demo.I have some expectation from this theme.
9 October 2009 at 5:16 am #
We value your feedback, and you are right that our themes aren’t directed at shopfront businesses, so we’ll try to take that into account for future theme ideas, as I can understand that it would probably be quite popular.
14 October 2009 at 12:43 am #
Hurrah ! Thanks. If I see much more “social media” I’m going to have a psychotic fit.
14 October 2009 at 12:45 am #
I think you’ve made your views on social media clear on a variety of posts already, but that doesn’t detract of the fact that social media is actually popular and is being used by many, many people. So as long as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook & the likes are supported, we’ll be supporting integration of those in our themes. It just makes sense…