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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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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Eek… This is kinda embarrassing, but we missed our own birthday, which occured on Sunday, 2 November. We had been planning to do a post about it, but things just never really panned out, considering we were busy finalizing stuff for the WooContest. But better late than never, we say…

So then I think it’s time that we hear a nice big “Happy Bday Woo!” from all of you folks! Now sure - WooThemes itself is only 4-odd months old, but this whole journey started out on 2 November 2007, when I released The Original Premium News Theme (I was also on my own at that stage). Back then, I definitely was not as serious about the business as I am now and it was only when Magnus & Mark joined that things really started to take shape.

In hindsight, our business has far exceeded my wildest expectations and I think all 3 of us are more motivated than ever to continue building WooThemes!

Now, with all of that out of the way, we’d like to give all of you a present (even though it is our birthday). So since The Original Premium News Theme started it all, we’ve decided to release the theme to the public for free. We’ve learned a helluva lot since releasing The Original theme, but that theme is one of the cornerstones on which WooThemes has been built. So we’re sure that everyone will enjoy this free release…

The theme will be released under the same terms as our Snapshot theme i.e. you will need to purchase a support package from us to get access to the support forums & tutorials. Otherwise you will need to enjoy the theme without our help!

So download the theme and enjoy this one as a celebration of the journey we have undertaken in the last year!

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Well, it’s probably time to get to the highlight of the recently finished (and first ever) WooContest, as I’m sure all of you are waiting to see who’s walking away with the prizes… The contest delivered 188 amazing concepts and we’re extremely happy with the quality of the submissions.

Obviously with a competition of this nature, there’ll be some people who walk away as winners and others who’ll get another opportunity to win next time (there’s no such thing as losers in our book). We have decided to award a 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize, whilst we have also contacted another 7 designers to buy their submissions. This will then make out our Top 10.

Before we get to the winners, we’d also like to thank Elliot Jay Stocks, Liam McKay, Brian Gardner & Jason Schuller for acting as guest judges and providing us with some valuable input. We considered their votes, along with ours to finalize the following list:

1. The Groovy Series by izuddin.helmi - $2000 Winner!

Choosing the ultimate winner for a contest like this, is never easy - but with three great variations in the series, we absolutely had to pick this one! We love the style, customizability and the different layouts, which ultimately clinched the first prize in our minds.

2. myweblog by Spencer.Gurnk - $1000 Winner!

We think this concept is a typical WooThemes design and that’s probably the reason why we like it so much. They say that one shouldn’t “try fix something when it’s not broken“, so this slick theme will fit into the hugely popular WooThemes theme recipe book easily and we believe that it’ll proof just as popular with our users.

3. Store WooTheme by jonikox - $500 Winner!

With our recent push to get into the commerce / business themes market, we think this one will go down really well. The grunge design is definitely popular and we’ll be sure to add a few more styles to the design before it’s ready for release.

4. Irresistible by izuddin.helmi

There’s something truly mystical about this design and we love it. We’re sure that with a bunch of different colour schemes, this theme can turn into one of the most popular themes on WooThemes.

5. Prouder Studio by thecraigvine

Another design that can count itself unlucky that it didn’t make it into the Top 3. Irrespective though, we’d love to develop this theme and add it to our growing list of portfolio themes.

Completing the Top 10…

Then, in no particular order, here are 5 more outstanding submissions, which just didn’t make our Top 5. We have already contacted these designers about purchasing their concepts, since we’d love to develop these and add them to the WooThemes stable.

• Newsport by Armono Wibowo
• Bloggingstream by fir.da.us
• TypeBased by Armono Wibowo
• Gotham News by onvo
• Personal Blog Theme by onvo

So a big congrats to all the designers that have made it into our Top 10 and especially to the three winning designers for their amazing concepts! What do you think? Do you like the designs we picked? Or do you think we missed one of your favourites?

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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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