GeneralPosted by Magnus Jepson on 30 Oct 08
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 
AnnouncementsPosted by Adii Rockstar on 30 Oct 08
Who ever said that we don’t at least try our best to please all of our fans? If it’s not 4 new themes in one month, it’s design competitions and now there’s this so-called Halloween Special thing as well… So what’s all the fuss about?
From the moment that this post has been published, this Halloween Special will be available and it will run until midnight on Friday, 31 October 2008 (at which time, the scary Halloween ghosts would have haunted you enough already). This is what you can get:
The 3 for 1
We’re basically offering you the opportunity to get 3 of our brilliant themes for the price of 1. This offer applies to both Single & Developer Licenses, which means you get the following:
3 Months Free
We also have a special offer for those of you interested in becoming a member of our amazing WooThemes Club… You can buy any 3 or 6 month subscription and we’ll throw 3 months in completely free of charge, which means you’ll get a 6 or 9 month subscription for a very, very low price.
As with everything in life, there’s some “rules” with regards to the special… Here they are:
And that’s it! Happy Halloween everyone and we hope you celebrate it in some WooThemes-style! Enjoy the special!
AnnouncementsPosted by Adii Rockstar on 30 Oct 08
Maybe one day in the future, we’ll start doing worldwide breakfasts where all of our fans can sit down, meet us and just chat with us over a good cup of coffee and a steady breakfast. But for now, we’d just like to know: how do you like your eggs?
Over Easy is our brand new theme and the second design that is completely targeted at our business users. The theme might have a funky name, but the rest of the theme is pure class and aimed at being a serious, valuable online presence.
The design was the brainchild of WooThemes co-founder - Magnus Jepson - and you’ll see that it contains many of the style considerations that has made Fresh News our most popular theme to date. We have purposefully gone for a slightly minimalistic design style with loads of open spaces, as the idea is that the theme should be customized extensively to suit your company’s brand image.
On the homepage, you’ll note that we’ve gone for a very popular structure amongst business websites at the moment; with the featured slider and 3 column secondary content. On the inner pages, you’ll see a more traditional approach with a left-sided content area and a right-hand sidebar.
From a functionality perspective, one of the main features is definitely the featured scroller (similar to our VibrantCMS theme), which definitely adds a lot of value, class & sophistication to your business website. The slider is basically the first interaction a business will have with their readers and they can thus promote their most important information in style.
Beyond that, we’re trialling a new system where we’ve widgetized most of the spaces that will need custom content. For example - the 3 column secondary content section on the homepage (below the slider) are basically 3 widgetized spaces and you can thus add any widgets to those spaces. We have thus also written a few custom widgets (with their own options) to help you on your way…
This is our fourth theme of the month and we might’ve just left the best for last (imho). Over Easy is feature rich and it does quite a few things quite well. But ultimately it’s great at one thing: being the perfect solution for your online, business presence.
So I think that with that said, it’s time to view the demo, purchase the theme or even better sign up to the WooThemes Club and call of our great themes for one low-price.
Oh yeah… Do let us know what you think and we’ll pass your feedback onto our kitchen staff. Tips are always appreciated! With compliments from the WooChefs.
GeneralPosted by Adii Rockstar on 28 Oct 08
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:
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):
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…
GeneralPosted by Magnus Jepson on 27 Oct 08
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
AnnouncementsPosted by Adii Rockstar on 23 Oct 08
Something new in the room? Nah, we’re just adding a few things to improve the ambient glow around here… So can we hear a nice big “Hello!” for the latest addition to the WooThemes family - Ambience by the incredible Liam McKay.
Ambience is our first theme that is solely targeted at personal bloggers, whilst it also incorporates a strong lifestreaming element (which is another first for us). So instead of having a “super” theme with a wide variety of features, we’ve decided to go completely niche with this one and really just target personal bloggers (as we had neglected this niche until now).
(You will also see this trend evident in other new theme teaser - from Matt Brett - we posted a while back.)
As we mentioned above, Liam McKay is again responsible for the design and even though this is his third theme already with us, I’m sure you’d agree that he has brought a new design style to the table with every new theme.
From a layout perspective, the design is as strong as ever and the grid gives it a very nice, usable interface. This along with the well-though-out typography, means that Ambience is a seriously professional theme.
But the stand-out feature of this design, has got to be the extravagent background graphics. Ambience derives most of its style from the splashes of colour in the background and those graphics thus sets the tone for the rest of the design. The transparent content boxes on top of the background, also adds an uniqueness / slickness to the theme as a whole; both of which will make you stand out from the crowd of generic, free themes.
Instead of giving you a run-down of the functionality of the theme, we’ve decided to rather focus on the unique lifestreaming function we’ve included (considering that Ambience is again built on top of the same, super-feature, super-functional themes backend as all our other themes).
We have basically integrated the Lifestream plugin by David Cramer into the theme (you still need to use the separate plugin) and created a custom widget specifically for Ambience. This means that you get the great functionality bundled with the plugin itself, whilst it integrates effortlessly into Ambience’s design style. If you have a look at Ambience’s live demo, you’ll note that the lifestream widget in the sidebar is pretty nifty… Right?
Come on, we can sense that you’re whole face is already glowing and you’re rubbing your hands together in glee… So why don’t you just run on over and read more about the features of Ambience, view the demo or even buy this little beauty. Hope you enjoy!
GeneralPosted by Adii Rockstar on 20 Oct 08
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
AnnouncementsPosted by Adii Rockstar on 16 Oct 08
For quite a while now, we’ve been considering expanding and diversifying our themes to other CMS platforms, with Expression Engine always being at the top of that wish list. During this time, we never seriously considered the popular ecommerce platform - Magento - until this great opportunity came along to work with Roy Andre over Ecommerce Extensions.
So as part of this experiment, we’ve worked with Roy Andre Tollefsen to port our Open Air template to a new template for Magento. Since we don’t know anything about Magento’s inner workings (our game is still WordPress), Ecommerce Extensions have taken care of all the development of the theme (preview here), and they’ll also be taking care of all the support, client admin etc. And if you notice that the price of the theme is considerably higher than our current themes, it’s because it’s more complex developing for Magento.
Suffice to say, that this is really new grounds for us and we’re simply experimenting with the possibilities that exist for us to port our work to popular CMS platforms (Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine etc.). We do however hope that this experiment with Magento & Ecommerce Extensions pays dividends, as I’m sure a total ecommerce solution could be a valuable addition to some of our users. What do you think?
Theme ConceptsPosted by Magnus Jepson on 14 Oct 08
There have been lots of theme concepts floating around the WooCamp lately, including collaborations with well know designers and lots of good WooContest entries, so I thought I would add to the mix. We’ve been lacking a good business theme after the launch of VibrantCMS, and that is why I wanted to design a sleek and sexy business theme directed at small/one man web/coding companies, but also versatile enough to be used as a personal blog/portfolio.
The front page template includes a prominent header where your message will come accross to the visitor, and your work / products will be displayed in the slider underneath. There will also be numerous color styles just like in VibrantCMS so it will be easy to find something to fit your brand. Check the screeshot for a few already made.
BlogPosted by Adii Rockstar on 13 Oct 08
Just to prove that we’re not too busy with design contests and upcoming themes, to still care about the community: we’d like to announce the release of our very first free theme - Snapshot.
Snapshot is based on our very own WooThemes Showcase and we’ve simply removed all of the “Woo-specific” code from the template, whilst porting the original showcase theme to the established basis & framework we build all our other themes with. The theme is aimed at users who’d either like to display a very visual portfolio, a photoblog of sorts or a design gallery (much like BestWebGallery).
Even though this is a very niche-focused theme, we expect that many of you will enjoy a bit of the Woo-quality that we’ve become renowned for during the last couple of months. (more…)
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WooThemes is a project started by three respected designers - Adii, Magnus Jepson and Mark Forrester - whom all share one thing: their passion for WordPress. Find out more about the WooThemes team here.
All of the themes available on WooThemes are 100% unique and we can assure you that you won’t find similar CMS solutions elsewhere for any other platform.
We pride ourselves not only in the quality of our themes releases, but also that of our support & customer service. Our ultimate aim is to build a community of passionate WooThemes users, where future themes will be influenced by our userbase.
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