WooThemes

Just a heads-up that Mark and I recently did a video interview with the guys of From The Couch. They asked us a few questions with regards to WooThemes, WordPress & blogging in general; and the conversation seemed to take on a Proudly-South African vibe in the end… Nevertheless, if you’ve ever wanted to see us in motion, check out the following two links (it’s a two part series):

• Part 1
• Part 2

Note: Magnus was excluded from the interview, because he couldn’t get his butt down to Cape Town in time…

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Well, maybe this isn’t as cool as Batman himself, but we think you’d love it nonetheles… Gotham News is the 2nd theme (after Typebased) we’re releasing from the recent Top 10 submissions in our WooContest.

So before we get into the details for the theme, we’d like to say thanks to Chris Rowe - who designed the theme - for a great theme concept. Chris’ 2nd Top 10 submission - Personal Blog Theme - is also almost ready for release and you can expect that one early next week.

The Theme

I think we were attracted to Gotham News mainly due to its simplistic beauty - and by that I don’t mean that it is not well-designed - in fact, it means that the design & style is great without being overbearing. This is one of the main things we’ve found recently - and it’s been confirmed in the responses we’ve gotten via our survey already: our users want our themes to be as customizable as possible.

For this very reason, Fresh News is our most popular theme ever - it’s got a great design and it’s built on a superior code base, which has allowed our users to customize it extensively (see the Fresh News mods on our showcase as an example).

So to cut to the chase - we saw all of these characteristics in Gotham News and that is why we’re so excited about this release. Essentially we’ve given you the blank canvas (that has been constructed on our top-notch theme framework) and it’s your job to make this design your own!

Magazine Style?

We’ve been focussing on a lot of themes that are not magazine-orientated of late, but again the preliminary responses on our survey has showed that most of our users are still very interested in buying these type of themes (it’s currently second after business themes). So Gotham News is basically us listening to your requests!

From a functionality point of view, we haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel, but instead we’ve taken some of the best elements from our other magazine themes and integrated them into a hybrid offering. The focus of Gotham News is on variety and catering to a vast amount of users’ needs & requirements.

Batman needs us

So we’ve got to run out, since Batman needs our help… But we’d love for you to check out Gotham News in a little more detail, view the demo of the theme or maybe it’s time for you to sign up to our themes club (which now sports 17 themes already!).

Oh, and leave your feedback. Please.

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We really believe in the wisdom of the crowd and we have thus decided to launch a little survey of our own… The WooThemes Survey is the first of its kind in many regards, considering that there has never before been a survey to track the preferences / opinions of WordPress users in terms of themes in general, the commercial themes market and everything that goes along with this.

So with a little bit of help from the awesome interface at PollDaddy we’ve setup a survey containing 30-odd questions aimed to help us guage your preferences / opinions in this regard. The survey serves a dual purpose in the sense that we are trying to get feedback on general WordPress themes issues, as well as opinions with regards to WooThemes itself. The survey is however open to anyone, as the few WooThemes-specific questions are only aimed at current WooThemes users.

We also intend on sharing some of the information we can mine from the survey with regards to the community’s views on WP themes and the future thereof (whilst we will obviously exclude the information relating only to our business).

We are hoping for as many responses as possible and have therefor decided to give away at least 3 Developer Subscriptions to 3 lucky participants. The survey will be open for the next 3 weeks and will thus close on Wednesday, 3 December 2008.

So hop, skip & jump over to the WooThemes Survey and get cracking on those questions… It’ll only take you 5 minutes…

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We’re very happy to announce the release of THiCK at last, after posting the teasers to the theme about a month ago already. But I’m sure you’ll forgive us, since we’ve been hard at work on quite a few other thinks during the last month (which included 4 new theme releases anyway). Plus, you’ll have to forgive us, once you see this beauty in action…

THiCK was designed by the self-confessed, punk rock designer - Matt Brett. This was the first time that we have worked with Matt and he is also probably the most-popular and most-established designer with which we have collaborated. And we can honestly say that Matt lives up to this glowing reputation as rockstar designer - the design of THiCK is awesome and the CSS superior to most websites you will find out there. So kudo’s to Matt for helping us create an incredible theme!

DESIGN

We asked Matt to create an uber-personal blog theme, which resembles the thinking and principles behind the redesign of his own site, which he did a while back. The result is a design that is intended to allow you to take back your own blog and publish all of the various elements that builds your personality (photos, lifestream, your favourites etc.).

The style itself is reminiscent of the style that Matt has become known for… The theme includes both a grunge & clean version, along with the option to use a traditional dark on light approach or a light on dark style. And then you will also have 5 different colour schemes (default - grey, blue, orange, green & pink) to choose from for each of these 4 style options, which makes it 20 possible colour / style combo’s in total. (more…)

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We really like to move fast here at WooThemes (even over weekends!)… So only two days after posting some teasers of the themes we’re working on, we have already started to deliver on our promises with our first theme release for November. And on top of that, it’s a free theme…

Typebased is the first theme we’ll be releasing as part of the winning entries in our WooContest. Typebased is an elegant, slick-looking personal blog design and with the 5 different colour schemes, we’ve tried to cater for a big possible user-base. The theme is built on our standard WooTheme-framework, that we use for all of our themes; so even though the “features” of the theme might not be that impressive - that was never the object of this release.

With our free themes, we are trying to keep things really simple, as the themes are targeted at the mainstream / mass market. This doesn’t mean that the quality of the theme is not on par with our other themes, since these free themes are there to give the general public the opportunity to experience WooThemes free of charge.

So we hope that everyone that downloads this theme, will enjoy it. We’re surely very happy with the theme and kudo’s to Armono Wibowo for the original design of the theme. Oh yeah - and obviously leave some feedback here as always…

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We know that this might come as a complete surprise to you, but we currently have about 10 themes that are in various states of development. Along with the 9 theme concepts that we have purchased from our WooContest winners, we have a few more collaborations that we’re working on. So, as we’re gearing up to release Matt Brett’s theme early next week, we thought it’d be cool to get your mouth watering over some of the other themes that are in the works…

Abstract by Veerle Pieters

Yup - you read it right! WooThemes is indeed collaborating with the super-designer, uber-illustrator and industry-leading designer, Veerle Pieters. We approached Veerle about a month ago to get cracking on a new design for us and she has created something truly unique and 100% within her signature style. This is a major coup for us in our attempts to get the best web designers involved with WooThemes in collaborative projects. Any here’s some enticing teasers:

(more…)

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