The exciting news is that the whole WooTeam will be in the UK (London & Newcastle to be precise) in early June, where we’ll meet up, spend some time chilling and amongst other things, attend DIBI. The most exciting part of this is, that this will be the first time in our 3-odd years of existence that the whole WooTeam (all 10 of us!) will be able to share a couple of beers together. Fun times ahead indeed.

So we were thinking about extending these fun times to the UK-based members of the WooCommunity that perhaps wanted to share an evening of beers, WordPress & Woo with all of us… The basic idea would be to organize a little venue for a get-together on one of the evenings that we are in London and then we’d open it up to anyone that wanted to hang with us, have a couple of beers and talk WP & Woo for a couple of hours.

What do you think? If you’re in London (or the rest of the UK if you’re willing to travel a little further), would you be interested in a little get-together like this?

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Sometimes we release themes that have a knack of immediately shooting to the top of the Theme Leaderboard and then staying there for months to come (thus becoming an all-time bestseller in no time at all). This is exactly what happened when we released Simplicity last month and when this happens, it’s too tempting not to follow up that success with a similarly awesome, new theme.

So we approached Orman Clark, who has been making quite a few waves in our circles recently with all the freebies he’s been giving away via Premium Pixels, to design a brand-new business theme for us. The result is the beautiful and uber-trendy, Kaboodle.

(Kab)Oodles of Sexy.

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We’ve been wanting to release a theme specifically for charities & non-profit organizations for ages, but in the past we’ve just not been able to prioritize time to do this. Plus we’ve always known that any of our other themes (especially our business themes) could be adapted and use for this purpose. Yet somehow this just sit right with us and then we got the opportunity recently to work with the incredibly talented Matthew Smith on a new design.

Matthew’s portfolio just lent itself perfectly to this charity / non-profit design that we had in mind and within only a couple of days of working with Matthew, he beautifully finished a design which is now available as Saving Grace.

The visually striking homepage design is geared towards getting you donations

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A culmination of quite a few things that has happened in & around WooThemes in the last couple of months, has seen us trying to take a step back from all the huffing & puffing and just take stock of where we are at as a company and a team. Across all of the spheres of our business, we’ve come to one conclusion: we’ve grown much faster than expected and our internal systems hasn’t been grown at the same pace.

So what we’ve done is to do internal “audits” of our various activities trying to identify any gaps or inefficiencies, along with tweaks & improvements that could result in us being a better WooThemes. From these audits and extensive internal discussions, we’ve made a wide variety of decisions which will be implemented in the next couple of weeks.

Since these decisions directly affects the WooCommunity, we wanted to be as transparent as possible with our goals & aims during this process. As a team we’d like the WooCommunity to hold us accountable and keep us on our toes, so in this 2-part post, we’re hoping to share our goals with you.

Here’s what we had in mind for support…

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It’s Easter Weekend and we’d like to spread a little love of our own as part of your celebrations. And we’re gonna make it easy for you too; instead of hiding a bunch of Easter eggs in hard-to-find places, we’ll give you a massive discount on our themes & clubs, which’ll make it easy for you to pull the trigger & join the WooCommunity!

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We were acknowledged in a Detailed Comparison of Premium WordPress Theme Clubs, which was published over at Smashing Magazine. For the WooUsers that haven’t seen this report yet, we wanted to re-iterate a couple of things that caught our attention:

• We have the biggest collection of themes (paid & free) available, whilst we’re also averaging 2 new theme releases per month in the last 6 months.
• Our minimum cost per theme (that’s if you are simply subscribed to the club for one month) is only $2.60 per theme. Whack to think the kind of quality you’re getting at that price…
• In straight monetary terms, an annual subscription with us is expensive, but more than justified when considering the oodles of awesomeness you’re buying into.

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It may not seem like it, but we’ve been working incredibly hard the last couple of weeks, revising & streamlining internal processes, code & projects; basically doing the behind-the-scenes stuff that we don’t necessarily blog about.

Don’t worry though, we’ll obviously never let a month pass without us releasing some new goodies (which we *will* blog about). Here’s a couple quick teasers for new themes which you can expect to drop in the next couple of days…

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As with all industries, WordPress theming has it’s fair share of trends, flowing in and out of popularity as the WordPress product and community evolve. Through these trends, needs for supplementary resources evolve, where users aim to enhance trends via additional products or services. A trend that has been growing in popularity in recent years is that of “Theme Frameworks” or “Advanced Parent Themes”. These themes, while bundling in large amounts of valuable code, can become confusing to modify and upgrade for the end user. This, following the flow of trends, grew the awareness and need for the use of child themes.

Child theming has been around in WordPress for a considerable amount of time, allowing users to create a smaller theme that piggybacks off of a larger theme, with it’s own CSS and customised PHP functions. A perfect fit with “Advanced Parent Themes”, yes? So why are some users apprehensive about it? Fear of the unknown.

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“Personal” experiences / opinions should generally be reserved for my own blog, but I figured for this WooLessons post it’d make sense to share a recent personal experience to further illustrate the importance on one’s team (something which has actually been covered quite extensively in WooLessons since we started publishing these).

So last week I decided to take some time off and spent a couple of days at a nature reserve in the Western Cape with my wife. No mobile reception, minimum internet and a bunch of non-work activities (i.e. sleeping, relaxing by the pool, etc.) to keep my mind out of work. Blissful & some much needed downtime just to recharge the batteries.

But that’s not the point of this post… During our time there, I checked in on WooHQ activity, because I’m the curious kind, and also because I never manage to completely shut down when away on holiday.

I saw that Cobus had posted some mockups for a new top-secret project (see these two mockups if you’re curious) and was asking for some feedback. Since I was very close to this specific project, I immediately felt the urge to jump into the conversation to “make sure” that my vision and ideas were being implemented. Yet I stopped just there…

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Along with our announcement last week that we are re-focusing all of our resources on WordPress, we’d like to share some initial details on a new collaboration that we’re launching which will see more, niche, application-like themes coming to the WooThemes collection shortly.

A Colab?

Yep, we’re taking on this challenge with a collaboration, as our plates are already filled with a bunch of awesome things we’re working on, which means we simply don’t have enough time to take on every single idea that pops up within WooHQ. A collaboration with some awesome peeps therefore helps add capacity to the WooTeam, brings in some fresh voices and definitely gives the projects we’ll be collaborating more momentum, fire & passion.

The other reason for a collaboration is simply the niche nature of the themes that we’re aiming to release. If you have a look at our best-selling themes you’ll see that our users are predominately buying Business & Magazine-like themes. So whilst we’ve always made a push to release the odd niche theme, we’ve limited these in an attempt to satisfy the greater hunger of our users for Business, Magazine & Blog themes.

This approach however definitely leaves a couple of gaps, which would be great to fill (since we’d love to be *the* theme provider of choice for every single WP user by covering all of their niche bases imaginable). Again, a collaboration basically helps us do just that… Here’s the details…

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Are we making the right investments to help grow the company? How do we determine which projects we need to commit to?

This question popped up recently, whilst we were scoping out some new functionality – the working title is The WooThemes Concierge for now – that we hope to add to WooThemes.com in the next couple of week. The functionality is basically aimed at making the lives of our users – especially prospective users – easier when they are faced with the “challenge” of deciding which theme to purchase (which has become more difficult, considering we have 90 themes as I write this).

If I was an outsider and I asked myself the same questions (as above) applied to this project, I’d probably like to know:

• How the WooTeam decided on committing resources to this project instead of alternatives;
• What the alternatives (direct or indirect) were; and
• How this decision was evaluated in terms contributing to a return on investment.

So here’s an overview of how we made this decision…

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As co-founders of a healthy growing company, there are many things that we could be proud of, but recently there’s been one thing that is really standing out in terms of the significance of the warm fuzzies that it produces.

Jeep is using Busy Bee for their official blog

In recent months, we’ve been seeing more & more big brands using our themes (like Jeep above or Ford pictured below). Obviously we’re ecstatic to have 45k+ users using our themes, but somehow knowing that our products are also becoming the choice of the elite & A-list is gratifying on a whole new level. I mean – wouldn’t that stroke your ego too?

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Hanging around WooThemes.com the last couple of days, you might’ve noticed that there’s a few bits & pieces that simply disappeared over night. If you haven’t noticed it yet, it probably justifies our decision, but we still owe you an explanation, and assure you we’ll still be taking care of you if this announcement effects you…

We launched our ExpressionEngine themes in January last year, in an attempt to diversify and expand our business. The EE launch was also eventually followed by the introduction of Tumblr, Drupal & Magento themes, which re-inforced our strategy and allowed us to really gauge the demand and viability in these markets / communities.

After more than a year of working hard on this strategy, we came to the difficult decision to transition these platforms out of WooThemes as we re-focus our attention on the one CMS which our core team loves: WordPress.

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