Nothing in life is ever free, right? Let’s debate that.

Since the very early days of WooThemes, we’ve always focused on releasing the odd freebie, which has normally been in the form of free themes, icon-sets and more recently our WooTumblog plugin. There’s currently 12 free themes available, from our total collection of 86 themes, which isn’t a bad ratio (one out of about 7 themes are free) we believe. And the beauty of those themes, is that they’ve been released completely free for you guys & girls. Built on the same WooFramework that powers all our themes.

But how much do those themes cost us?

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It’s been almost three years since we designed Fresh News, and since then it has been our most sold theme up until recently when Canvas finally passed it on our theme leaderboard. We have continually updated it to fix bugs and make it work with thelatest WordPress versions, as we do with all our themes, but time had come for a complete overhaul to bring it up to today standards.

We received some suggestions from one of our users on what was missing from the theme, which was a pity because the theme still had killer looks, but was let down by the seemingly outdated features. We listened to the suggestions and after almost a week of coding we can now present version 3.0 of Fresh News.

Fresh News 3.0

The theme has been re-coded so it isn’t bound by the strict 960 grid system it used before. It also has a more flexible header now which was restricted in height in the old version, which made it harder to customize. Here is a rundown of the major features, some that you will also see in our other new themes in the future.

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If you trying to sell a product or service we’re pretty sure that you would’ve read a lot of articles, both online and offline that talk about marketing campaigns and customer acquisitions, because these things are obviously the only way for you to grow your business and client base? Wrong!

Most marketing campaigns are focused externally and geared to market to prospective new customers. More customers = More revenue. But there’s also a much more lucrative marketing angle that you are forgetting: marketing to your existing customer base, and getting them to spend money with you again, again & again.*

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Even though WooCommerce and our commerce themes on WordPress have been delayed slightly, it doesn’t mean that they need to stall on other platforms as well…

A big homepage featured product/promotion slider

Mercato is our latest, amazing Magento theme and is absolutely perfect if you’re looking to put up an online store front. Designed by Jonno Riekwel (another designer we found via Dribbble and one we hope to have back with us for another design in the future), Mercato uses our perfectly balanced design recipe of keeping our themes clean, flexible, but still incredibly well-styled.

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We’ve been using the first month of the new year to chip away at a few bigger and more ambitious projects (like WooCommerce), which means that our strategy for theme releases this month have been aimed at replicating our tried-and-tested recipe.

We have already released an awesome new business theme, Biznizz, this month which we followed up with the niche, freebie theme for landing pages, Placeholder. For our third release this month, we again go back to our roots with a brand new magazine / news design, BoldNews.

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We’ll jump straight to the extremely honest truth: WooCommerce has been a massive development and public relations challenge for us. With this post, we hope to shed some light on those challenges, which has ultimately caused the delay of this ambitious project, and also resulted in many of you waiting frustratingly for us to finally release this much-hyped functionality.

This is how the story goes…

In The Beginning

The title makes this sound like the start of a fairytale, and in the beginning that’s how things started off… In mid-2010, we started toying with the idea of releasing themes with commerce functionality, as this had been on our radar for quite some time. Until that point in time, we had resisted using a 3rd party service or plugin because we felt that those available were inadequate in matching our ideas & vision for the stuff that we wanted to do. So we stuck to our guns and decided quality over speed and delayed making a move in that space for a very long time (considering that we bought a commerce design way back in November 2008).

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Placeholder is officially the fastest theme we’ve ever developed. From conceptualization to release was only a day. Not bad for a day’s work, right?

Counting down until the big reveal

Before the weekend started, the team prompted Magnus to consider designing a new theme, as he had not released a theme since Inspire (in May last year). Considering how well Maggie’s theme have sold, the WooTeam’s rationale & motivation was obvious. Heck, Busy Bee was a weekend’s work, so why couldn’t Maggie do it again?

Maggie consequently had the idea for Placeholder yesterday afternoon and 24 hours later it is released.

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We know that we’ve been criticized on a handful of occasions for releasing the same old, similar themes every now and again (over and above the unique, awesome stuff that we do), yet we’ve always maintained that there’s method in this supposed madness.

A quick look however at sales in the last 3 months (this gives you an indication) shows that there are 7 themes that feature in our Top 20 sales, of which 2 of those are almost 2 years old (Busy Bee & Fresh News). If you consider this, then you might understand why we keep maintaining these themes (and update our older stuff with new features quite often) and also releasing similar, but newer themes.

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In the 3 years of our existence, the WooTeam has grown from 3 (the initial co-founders) to 9. Every time we hired a new member to join the team we did so for a different reason, and we’ve come to accept that there’s no exact science in terms of getting the timing right in hiring decisions.

In our experience though there’s two considerations you need to take into account when thinking of expanding your team:

• In anticipation of capacity or growth. This strategy dictates that you’ll hire new employees before you actually need them, but you’re either expecting your business to grow in that direction (due to the pull by your existing customer base) or you’ve decided to branch out as part of an organic process.
• Already lacking capacity or skills. The difference being here that you are being more reactive and you only grow the team when you currently lack the added capacity, or additional skills.

The first approach is obviously less organic and more risky, as you are taking on new employees – and the overhead expenses associated with that – before you actually need them and you may end up not fully utilizing their capacity anyway. The alternative is to wait, grow your team more organically and tweak it as your business requirements. This more reactive approach though puts you at risk of missing the boat on an opportunity that comes along and passes before you can find a new team member (this is obviously compounded when you can’t find the right skills in the short term).

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A sweeping post title we know

WooThemes powers a lot of business websites, and we hope to educate more businesses on the benefits of our themes this year through more dedicated landing pages, video content and sales materials.

OnSwipe (partly) powered by WooThemes

Today we can proudly announce that OnSwipe (formerly PadPressed), who just raised $1m in funding, are using Auld, one of our newest tumblog themes, on their company blog.

We are quite proud of how we are helping contribute to the success and growth of an innovative startup through their brand material.

Since release last month, Listings has been a hugely popular theme partly because of the awesome Content Builder functionality that literally allows you to create any kind of listings website. And now Content Builder gets another upgrade.

In the previous version of Listings, you were only able to add Custom Fields to specific Custom Post Types. With the upgrade though, you are now able to add any Custom Fields (text, image upload, datepicker etc.) in addition to the standard fields normally associated with taxonomies: “Name”, “Slug”, “Parent” and “Description”. Here’s an example…

Added Settings in the new Content Builder

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In the 3 years that WooThemes has existed, our little team has grown to 9 ninja’s. During this time, we think we’ve done a pretty decent job of establishing a team of individuals who have managed to take the business forward in leaps & bounds.

There’s one main reason that has contributed greatly to this success: we’ve allowed the individuals on the team to specialize in the tasks & activities that they are most passionate about, and most skilled at.

In a conversation recently Jeff summed that up quite nicely:

Biggest lesson for me is focusing on your key area – Cobus is better at CSS and frontend than I am, whilst I’m better at PHP, backend, and JS. It ends up being a better product because of us playing to our strengths.

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Some might say the recent Denial of Service attacks WooThemes endured during the month of December were due to a bunch of bored WP hackers cottoning onto the WikiLeaks saga, or just pot luck being in a targetted IP range. The truth of the matter is their were some controversial secrets about the WooTeam that we’ve realised cannot stay hidden any longer and need to be brought to the attention of our users. So with much hesitance amongst us we present you with the WooLeaks.