2010 has been an amazing year for us and whilst it has totally flew past us, we’d like to recap on both our proudest and most challenging moments. Expect quite a few links to internal blog posts about the things that we did this year and know that we would not have linked these up if they weren’t really significant in terms of the journey that we undertook in 2010. 
As a bonus for sharing this trip down memory lane with us, we’ll include a few teasers of the stuff you can expect from us in 2011. So here goes…
Themes
We wouldn’t be WooThemes, if we didn’t consider our various theme releases and related developments as being the foremost of our story this past year. This is an overview of the most awesome stuff we did:
- In February we released Canvas, which has become both our flagship theme and also the best-selling theme in 2010. We invested a lot of time in Canvas this year and we will continue to do so in 2011, with BuddyPress support and child-theming being two things that we will be addressing.
- One of the most significant areas of development for us in the past year, was most definitely our tumblogging / microblogging themes. We first launched these themes in March, and since grew our collection to 7 tumblogging themes. This was followed by the launch of the WooTumblog plugin & Express.app in October, which has signalled our intent for some continued improvements / enhancements in this space early in 2011. And to cap off a great year of innovation for us in this space, we’re extremely happy to see a bunch of other theme developers building themes on top of the work we’ve done.
- In addition to our tumblog themes, 2010 was also the year in which we really went niche for a couple of our themes. A few highlights include the most advanced real estate WordPress theme, Estate, the DIY restaurant theme, Diner, and finally our build-your-own directory theme, Listings. All of these niche themes have been wildly successful and you can expect a couple more moves from us in this space next year.
- In August we announced our collaboration with WPBundle, and after months of incredibly hard work we finally launched WPBundle in December. We’re proud of WPBundle because it’s a whole new concept within the WP community and as a result we’re just happy to fuel more innovation within the WP theming space.
- 2010 was however also the year that WooThemes finally grew beyond just WordPress with quite a few releases on other platforms. In January it was ExpressionEngine, March saw us jumping on the Tumblr bandwagon, April we finally got around to the widely used Drupal and finally in late 2010, we managed to roll out a couple of ecommerce themes on Shopify & Magento.
- All-in-all, we released 27 new WP themes, 7 Tumblr themes, 11 EE themes, 10 Drupal Themes, 3 Shopify themes & 3 Magento themes in 2010. Not a bad haul we’d say…
Development
At the very beginning of the year, we promised to tackle both the small & bigger problems / features during the year, and we’d be surprised if anyone thought that we didn’t achieve just that. We’ve spent a lot of time doing the “ungrateful” & unnoticed work and our development processes have been affected by including more & more awesome features in our themes. Regardless though, 2010 has been a massive year for us on a pure geeky / development front:
- Contributing to the WordPress core has to rate quite highly on most WP developers’ list of “like to achieve, before I die”-things and we managed to do just that. We initially developed the WooNav which was eventually committed to the WP 3.0 core as WP Menu’s. This was such a big personal achievement for us and we’re still the only premium WP theme developer to have made such a significant contribution to the WP core.
- The WooFramework was a big focus for us in 2010 and we kicked this off by releasing V2 of the WooFramework to all of our themes in January. This was followed by the incredible SEO functionality additions in June and the even more incredible Sidebar Manager in September. Those are just a couple of things that WooThemes users received absolutely for free this past year and you can expect much the same in the new year.
- We also did quite a bit of work that surrounds our coding and in April we launched the WooCodex, to help you guys & girls bend, break and utilize the WooFramework. This was followed up by a big improvement to the Theme Documentation in May and the first batch of new tutorial videos towards the end of the year. Again, you can expect us to continue upping our game in this space in the new year and we’re incredibly keen to increase the value of our support resources drastically in 2011.
General
On the lesser noticed “general” front (hey, 90% of what we do is design & development related), we had quite a few highlights as well:
- Our mobile officing experiment was extremely successful and even got Woo on the Slopes featured on Mashable. Not bad for a company retreat, eh?
- We made quite a few waves on the mainstream tech front and this was highlighted most when we were featured on 37Signals’ blog in their Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud series. This is most definitely something that we cherish and it also signals our intent of being the most awesome company we can be.
- We also did our best in giving back to other awesome projects that deserves a bit of a financial boost. Both The Rockstar Foundation & the Kill the Spill campaigns received our backing in 2010. Two very worthy causes and we’d love to replicate such contributions in the future.
- Along with all these serious things, we also managed to cram in a few fun things… We redesigned our mascot, the WooNinja, and launched the WooVille cartoon series. You will most definitely see more of the WooNinja in 2011 and we’ll continue to give you an exclusive, behind-the-scenes & tongue-in-cheek look at our company via the WooVille cartoons. All work & no play makes Jack a dull boy.
So as you’ll see, 2010 was a pretty massive year for us and we definitely did a whole bunch of awesome things. And we’re sure you’d agree with us that the value of being of a WooThemes customer has just continued to increase.
That said, we definitely didn’t manage to achieve all of our goals in 2010 and we ended this year with quite a difficult month after the severe DoS attacks on our server. One of our biggest regrets for 2010 is the fact that we didn’t get to launch WooCommerce, which is currently #1 on our list of priorities for 2011 (more on this in the first week of January). We’ve also been working on a complete new membership backend with a few exciting additions, yet this too has taken longer than expected.
These are however the things that we’ll take on the chin, we’ll learn from them and we’ll be a bigger, better and more awesome WooThemes in 2011.
24 Responses to “2010: A Year in Review”
It was truly a great year for both WooThemes and WooThemes users alike. Keep up the great work and I can’t wait to see what 2011 brings (especially in the Framework). Happy New Year!
2010 was the year I found WooThemes so it was a great year for me as well! Thanks for your excellence in WordPress themes. You have made me look super intelligent by creating themes that make my sites look like a million bucks! Thanks
Blessings,
Wendy
That’s always been the plan: make our users look super-cool.
hi,
i’m just a regular person, who had some spare space on a hosting plan, and some spare time.
i’m so glad i found WooThemes, and i’m so glad you have amazing support on the forum.
i love my new site, moved away from a couple others while at it, and couldn’t be happier.
thanks and keep it up. hope you have a great 2011.
This is exactly the kind of testimonial we love to hear!
WooThemes is about empowering you guys and girls; and helping you create awesome WP-powered websites for yourselves and your clients.
I have tried 2 other quite popular framework themes, spent tons of money on other themes and finally decided to give Woo a shot a couple months back.
It was the best decision I made and found great themes, impressive features, excellent value and fantastic support.
I find myself checking your site almost everyday to see if there is anything new. Keep up the great work guys and I’ll definitely be buying more in 2011.
Happy Holidays!!
Congratulations on the huge year guys! You’ve done a great job at recognising your customers needs and creating fantastic products. Our business definitely wouldn’t be the same without them. Enjoy the rest of your holidays and have a sweet 2011!
It’s been very nice year with your stunning themes to work on for my clients.
Congratulations!
I have been following woothemes growth and success since Adii first launched his premium news theme. I believe woothemes has and will continue to push the theme / wpcore industry! I admire how you have built up your business through bootstrapping and evolved your team.
Great work and I look forward to what you bring to 2011.
Congratulations on the year guys! You have done some very impressive work. I hope you will continue to add new features to canvas keeping it as your flagship. I’ve enjoyed working with it. Looking forward to see what you guys do in 2011.
Thanks
Great Guys. Looking forward for more.
Best wishes for happy and fruitful new year.
I admire Woo’s team creativity and energy to deliver top notch results.
Within very short time my investment in Woo’s membership paid off multiple times.
I am looking forward for more inspiring stuff to be released by Woo team.
Having said that I would rather hope that Woo’s creativity will not get further derailed by obsession with tumblogging/microblogging and rather be directed into delivery of new creative and customizable themes that Woo could be so good at.
Happy New 2011 !
Gleb
Thanks for the kind words.
And note that our tumblog / microblogging themes are doing really well in terms of sales and are being used by a helluva lot of our users. So we will continue to invest energy in this. That said, we’re also planning a bunch of other things that are likely to please in 2011.
basically boils down to the old “you can please some of the people all of the time, and you can please all of the people some of the time but you can’t please all of the people all of the time” saying.
I have been very happy with my ROI here, more so that with any other theme provider I currently use. I do however agree that as someone with a developers subscription the tumblog / microblog themes bore me and I have yet to use one. Maybe I am a minority, hard to say but I would imagine that people who download those are more often than not using them personally and not for clients sites they are building.. To me they are about as useful as joomla themes lol… but again, this may only be my experience and while I would love to see nothing but themes like canvas, listings, woocommerce :p etc I do understand the need for diversity in your portfolio, as long as it doesn’t dilute the value of people who have been with you for a long time
I agree with all of what Jesse said.
No mention of WooCommerce?
we’ll give you an update soon
Great job, Buddypress for Canvas – now this would be amazing. Canvas has become a great theme for me and Buddypress is another goodie… when when when does it come?
We’re busy with this; ETA is hopefully sometime in January.
Wow – great, January is my B-Day month and I new Woo themes would come up with a great present!!!
Thanks for your work from Slovakia. I am looking forwad to framework and Canvas “superframework” updates in 2011. Child themes is great thing also. I think it is cool idea for your marketing.
1. Great work last year, and to you I wish the best of all worlds for upcoming year!
2. Greatly appreciated the continuous updates on the blogs to let us know what you’re up to.
3. Hope that there will be a giant Wootheme or giant woo framework release that combines the features from the different themes to be used as modules within any site.
4. Hope you will release a backend feature like Carrington build but from woothemes as part of the core framework.
All the best!
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