WooThemes

If you’ve been following us, you’d know that many of our themes (as well as this website) are based on the extremely popular 960.gs CSS framework. Now even though many designers / developers prefer not to use CSS frameworks in their projects, we think that we’re maximizing the value of the framework, whilst maximizing the ability of our users to edit the themes.

See - we believe that because it is so easy to understand how 960.gs works that it makes customizing our themes slightly easier. Considering that our themes are created to serve as the basis for your next (unique) project; customizablity thus plays a big role in that regard.

Beyond the customizability of a theme using 960.gs; we also think that the framework is extremely flexible, which allows us to create a wide variety of different themes, whilst it also doesn’t limit users of our themes in what they can & can’t do with them.

Do you have any experience with 960.gs? What do you think about us using it? Think it adds value?

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We admit that we’ve been a bit quiet in the last week or so (more so than we would normally be), but that doesn’t mean we’re not working… The only real reason for the radio silence, is that I’ve been getting things ready for when I move into my new house at the end of the month, whilst Magnus is in Orlando (USA) for holiday, and Mark has just returned back to the UK after a 6 week trip to South Africa (for holiday and wedding planning). So the honest truth is that we’ve been helluva busy; just elsewhere though…

But even considering this, we’ve managed to release our 3rd theme this month - BlogTheme - yesterday, whilst work on quite a few other themes is coming on very nicely. The next theme release (due in the first week of December) will be Veerle Pieters’ amazing theme called Abstract. After which we hope to release Magnus’ Busy Bee theme, along with one other theme before we take a bit of a Christmas / New Year break.

So as you can see, even though we don’t blog and we don’t tweet - it definitely doesn’t mean that we’re not working. Make sense?

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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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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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As we continue to grow and release more and more themes so does our support queries in the forums. We have a dedicated team of great Woo Ninjas, but we are looking for one particular ninja who can dedicate a bit more time to our forums. We are wanting someone who will check the forums every few hours during office hours, and check in once on the weekend too. They will be responsible for answering woo users queries and the general day to day administration of the forums.

The exact hours you work are pretty flexible, you can work from home and earn good money, not to forget you receive a developer’s license to all our themes. All we require from you are some great html/css skills and sound wordpress knowledge, as well as a love for WooThemes. We request a minimum of 500 forum posts a month (exact terms available upon request).

Sound attractive? We are only accepting one Master Woo Ninja for now so if you think you have what we need get hold of us asap on info@woothemes.com.

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Wow!

That pretty much sums up what I intend on saying in this post: “Wow! Simply wow!”. We can’t even begin to explain how appreciative we are of all the support, tweets & kind words we have received in the last week, to really run down October in amazing style and end on an unbelievable high!

Both our first-ever design contest and our scary, crazy Halloween Special finished up yesterday, which undoubtedly contributed to this manic last week. Some of you even used our comment form to determine whether or not the Halloween Special was still on…

So, we’d just like to say a big thank you to everyone that has become a WooThemes member this month, submitted a concept for the design contest, advertised us through our affiliate program or just told a friend / contact about WooThemes.

Even though we are fast approaching the end of 2008 (and in a time of the year, where energy levels tend to go down), this last week has given us the momemtum and motivation to continue the way we’ve done in the last month. So expect more themes, more specials and more new ventures!

Hope you’ll join us on this ride, where we’ll go full on and ride out the year in some style!

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Many of you have already been following me, Adii and Mark on Twitter, where we post our random thoughts and also tweet about WooThemes.

But now you can follow the official WooThemes twitter account to stay updated on small and big things happening, and we might even throw out some twitter-only news on upcoming special deals before they happen. Well worth it in other words

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I think many of the potential members of our WooThemes Club kinda baulk at the price of a subscription vs buying an individual theme, which we can totally understand, since the gap is kinda big. If you just consider the price differences between buying an individual theme or a subscription (I’ll use the cheaper, 3 month option as an example), you’ll come to this comparison:

• Single License ($70) vs 3 Month Single User Subscription ($150): Difference of $80 USD
• Developer License ($150) vs 3 Month Developer Subscription ($225): Difference of $75 USD

And then it goes without saying that the 6 Month Subscriptions just further increase these gaps. But I’d like for you to consider the following figures, based on the club members that subscribed in the first 2 weeks after we launched the club in July this year (since those subscriptions came up for renewal now; with the majority being renewed for another 3 months):

• We launched the new WooThemes Club with 8 themes (all with multiple styles and colour options);
• Since then, we have released another 5 new themes;
• Consider that another new theme - Over Easy - will be released on Thursday, which makes it 6 new releases in about 3 months;
• So that means that the 3 Month Subscribers would’ve gotten 13 / 14 themes for their subscription; and
• This then translates to about $11 / theme on a 3 Month Single User Subscription and about $16 / theme on a 3 Month Developer Subscription.

Now in my mind (even if I could be totally neutral, unbiased and objective for a minute here) that is incredible value right there; especially considering that stuff that is going on in global economic markets.

What do you think? Does this “increase” the value of our club subscriptions in these turbulent times? Let us know your thoughts…

No discussion yet

It’s only 5 days until Halloween and the end date for our WooContest, so still some time to get your designs in to us. Our Flickr Group now holds 150 members and 105 contest entries which is pretty impressive! If you haven’t already seen our previous favorites you should take a look.

We have been busy gathering guest judges, and we have a few great web designers who were able to help cast their votes. We will be posting more details later in the week as the contest ends. Here is four more designs that we think are top notch.

Purwokerto by Deny Sri Supriyono

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Wowee… We must admit that our wildest expectations are being exceeded with regards to the success we’ve already seen for the WooContest. When we decided to launch this competition at the beginning of the month, we did not know what the quality of the submissions would be like, but with some amazing submissions already (and almost 2 weeks left for more entries), we’re very, very happy!

So as we did last week, here’s Week 2’s roundup of our favourite WooContest submissions. Again, these are in no particular order and we’re simply highlighting the submissions that stand out at the moment…

Prouder Studio by thecraigvine

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