Following up with a quick 1-2 after yesterday’s release of Unite, we have another awesome theme that’ll be with you soon.

Our business themes are by far the most popular range of themes on WooThemes (did I just use “themes” 4 times in the same sentence?), which means that a month without a new business theme almost feels kinda weird…

Sealight (by Chris Rowe, who also designed Spectrum) is our shiny new theme which is geared at being the beacon within your business. So expect to want to change your business website when Sealight is released soon. And then here’s the teaser so long…

Adii, Magnus and myself are all reading “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Hsieh of Zappos at the moment, and we are all avid fans of Tony’s personal/hands on approach to business.

At WooHQ we all keep a close eye on the emails we receive, whether they be good or bad, happy or irritated users. In that way we can continue to add value, find purpose and direction, and in turn deliver happiness to our users.

We love receiving glowing testimonial emails from WooTheme users dotted around the world, it makes our pixel-pushing, computer-bound work more personal knowing we are delivering our products to actual human beings, not just zip files that we deploy to the interwebs.

We received this one from Mark Simmons on his experience with the Aperture theme and we thought it would be great to share these occasional “happiness” emails we receive with you our site visitors.

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Microblogging is still catching flame like a house on fire. After our foray into this type of themes – and the popularity of  Retreat amongst others – we’re now venturing into that field again with our latest theme, Unite.

Unite was collaboratively designed by the pixel perfectionist Rogie King and it offers you a sweet, minimalist canvas on which you can create and showcase your content. The minimalist design is unobtrusive, which also means that your content can do all of the shining (here’s a reminder to implement a great “content is king” strategy). So we’re saying that this makes Unite great, but from your viewpoint this may all seem a tad dull… Maybe this would’ve been true had we not spent a lot of time adding some new bling to other aspects of the theme…

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If you are anything like us, you like two things: 1) Apple; and 2) learning from other great companies & entrepreneurs. So when we came across this post about Apple’s recent success (and their strategies in this regard), we figured it’d be a great idea to latch onto that and explain some of our strategic decisions in the last year.

Taken from Jason’s post, here’s how we have applied some of those strategies in a very similar way…

1) “You don’t need to be first.”

You should know by now that we have a “release when ready” mindset with regards to putting out new stuff, which means that sometimes things simply take longer to see the light of day. We also love innovating and pushing unique awesomeness your way, but we have never tried to be the first to market with everything.

This is probably most evident in our recent real estate theme – Estate – which most definitely isn’t the first to market. We’ve been more than happy to bide our time and develop something that will blow your mind, instead of trying to rush a product simply to be first. Quality takes time; sometimes you’ll be first, other times you won’t.

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When we are not designing themes here at Woo Headquarters we are tweaking and improving the process of delivering those themes to you. At least that’s what we were doing last week.

We thought it would be a good idea to document the changes we implemented last week with the honest reasoning behind the user experience tweaks. First let’s have a look at the theme listing page, as it was last week:

The theme listing page, prior to the UI tweaks

After much deliberation we decided we weren’t entirely happy with the user interaction process required when buying our themes, and the confusion of having four call-to-action buttons taking you to the checkout page.

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We’ve always been massive advocates of enabling WooUsers to customize the heck out of our themes. Customizability is one of the key selling points of our themes – thanks to the solid codebase that is our WooFramework.

This tweet by a WooThemes fangirl, Lara Dickson, sums up our mission in this regard quite elegantly:

Dear @woothemes, I love you. I can tear you apart, build you up again, and you never complain. Love, Deepdish

We never complain, in fact we encourage it. Our Showcase is a major source of customization inspiration for WooTheme owners, we are hugely proud of enabling our users to do whatever they want with our themes.

You should try it sometime…

Here’s another teaser of an upcoming theme that we are extremely excited to release very soon… Unite was designed by the uber-talented Rogie King and it’s been unfortunate that this one has been sitting in our backlog for so long, BUT it’s only because we’ve had to develop something superbly unique to make the theme truly special.

When Rogie initially designed the theme, he had a vision for a commenting system that would change the way that readers commented on a blog post. To say that this was a challenge integrating would be an understatement, but Jeff has done amazing work to make this a reality.

For now though, you need to be content with a graphical teaser instead…

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More than just a theme!

Estate (formerly known as Realtor; R.I.P.) – the WordPress real estate theme solution is finally here!

The WooTeam (especially Jeff & Cobus) have spent months in perfecting Version 1 of Estate and we’re so excited to now hand this over to all the awesome WooFans to try it, experiment with it and obviously: build your next WP-powered real estate website using Estate.

One of the main reasons that Estate took a little longer, and required more love (in comparison to our other themes), is the fact that we’ve included quite a bit of niche functionality that we had to develop specifically for Estate. So it wasn’t just a case of mixing & matching code from our existing themes; nope, we had to develop Estate from scratch. The other reason for this development process relates to all the new custom post type & taxonomy goodies in WP 3.0 that we’ve utilized, because we wanted to release a real estate theme unlike any other WP theme that you may have encountered up until now.

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You would’ve noted recently that we’ve added support for two 3rd party WordPress plugins – GravityForms & ScribeSEO – to all of our themes and when we announced it, we also included special promotions from the developers responsible for them. You would’ve also seen that we included affiliate links (in our favour) if you decided to take us up on the promotions on offer.

So whilst most of our users jumped at these promotions and were very complimentary about the value that we had added to our themes; some of you were more reserved in those opinions and felt that our strategies in this regard were a bit spammy. Considering that we’ve never been a company to shy away from criticism, we wanted to take some time and explain our strategy in this regard:

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The Daily Modified Edition

When we recently came across Michael Hyatt‘s heavily modified version of Daily Edition, the whole WooTeam agreed that this was a modification done right. Extensive changes + beautiful execution = one of the best WooThemes modifications you’ll ever see.

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City Guide has probably been one of our most successful themes this year (evidence here). Considering that this is a very niche theme, we feel this is quite an accomplishment.

So this means that after an initial round of major upgrades, we’ve gone ahead and added even more functionality to the theme. Here’s just a few of the updates in the theme…

Coloured & custom PNG markers per category

A Few Pretty Colours

You can now set these per category- either just change the colour of the default Google Maps markers, or you can upload your own PNG version.

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Mr. Jon Hicks

Over the past couple months we’ve had the pleasure of working with the pixel surgeon, and icon designer extraordinaire that is Jon Hicks.

We commissioned Jon to re-design our popular ninja mascot that you would have seen busting moves all around our site. Our ninja was originally traced and vectorized based on a freely available icon design. However, we got so many people emailing us, and kindly informing us, that our ninja was being illegally used on other sites across the interwebs that we thought it was high time that we sat down and designed our own, unique mascot that epitomizes WooThemes ethos.

Let’s hand over to Jon for more information about the brief we gave him, and his creative design process.

Jon's doodles in his sketchbook that I'm sure a lot of designer's would like to take a peak in

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We’re very pleased to say that our 2nd Birthday Celebration & Giveaway generated quite a bit of interest and we’re happy to welcome many new club members to the WooCommunity. We’re 100% sure you won’t be disappointed!

But anyway, let’s move onto the important news…

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Some things take time as a result of indecision and inefficiencies. Other things deliberately take time, because they are aimed at being perfect, and developed specifically to outperform anything else that could be deemed as competition.

In recent months, you may have been able to criticize us for a *supposed* lack of updates, theme releases at a fast rate & maybe even innovation. But we have been quietly working on things that will absolutely blow your mind, and the best news is that these will be available to you within the next 6 – 8 weeks.

First up, we have a brand-new real estate theme that will revolutionize the way you are building these type of websites with WordPress at the moment. On show today, is Realtor:

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