WooThemes

We’ve had an amazing response to our WooContest and already have 39 items in our Flickr group. We will be listing a few designs each monday until the contest ends that we think stand out amongst the crowd. We also want to point out we are looking for all types of designs and not only magazine layouts, so we really hope that we see some more unique designs.

In no particular order here are some of our favourites:

(more…)

16 Comments

About a month ago now, I tweeted about having signed up a few popular and well-known international web designers to work with us on some collaborative themes for WooThemes. So having kept this secret for the past month, I think it’s time to share and show what we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes…

So the first collaboration we’ve lined up is with grunge, design king - Matt Brett. For me personally, this was a major coup, since Matt was one of the first designers that I started to follow when I started to teach myself design / development at the end of 2006. Beyond that though, I’m sure that you’d agree that Matt comes with a big reputation, a signature design style and an awesome portfolio (so exactly the kind of things we’re looking for in a collaborative partner).

The Theme Concept

During the last 2 weeks, Matt has been working on a brand new theme concept for personal bloggers. We decided after a spade of content-heavy themes, we needed to focus on releasing some themes targeted at individual bloggers.

This will also be the first theme that will include lifestreaming functionality - so we’re aiming to release another extremely feature-rich and multi-purpose theme. Along with the lifestreaming, the theme will also contain functionality to include / display your favourite books, games, DVD’s & music within the design - so the focus will be 100% on you, as the blogger (if you have a look at Matt’s own design, you’ll get an idea of what we’re talking about).

So what does the theme look like?

A blog post hyping about a new theme wouldn’t mean anything without some images, so here’s a few to give you an idea of what the finished product will look like… Note that the theme will essentially have 4 distinct styles i.e. Light on Dark Clean, Dark on Light Clean, Light on Dark Grunge and finally Dark on Light Grunge. And obviously all 4 of these styles will come in a few different colour scheme options (isn’t that what you expect from us by now?).

So here are those images: (more…)

26 Comments

As you all know, we at WooThemes love collaborating with industry-leading, creative designers and launching stylish and unique Wordpress themes every month. We also love seeing how our fantastic community of users customize and implement our themes.

We therefore thought it would be a good idea to launch a competition where you our readers/users can get involved, and gain some exposure, designing a theme concept for us. Not to forget, you stand the chance to win some big money!

How to enter

To enter the competition, contestants must submit a  theme concept you think would go down a treat on WooThemes.

• The design must be created in Photoshop, Fireworks or Illustrator format.
• The website container must have a width of between 940 and 980 pixels, catering for the average 1024 X 768 user.
• The entries must be submitted to the WooThemes Flickr pool in jpeg or png format and tagged “Woocontest”.
• Entries must be submitted before midnight on 31st October 2008. That’s Halloween night! Woooooooooooooo.

Your submission on Flickr must include:

• Your name and any URL you would like linked to in case you win.
• Any stock or source images you have used including URLs. Be sure to only use stock images that have Extended Usage licenses that allow for distributing the theme design once coded, otherwise avoid use of stock images.

The winner will be chosen according to the amount of positive comments it receives, as well as feedback gathered from guest judges (guest judges will be announced soon).

The winner will receive $2000 and a 6 month develop license, whilst the runner up will receive $1000 and a 3 month develop license. Both will obviously grab a heap of exposure.

We will then add some wordpress magic to the concept and launch it is an official WooTheme, crediting our winning designer.

Terms and Conditions

• The theme concept submitted must be entirely your own work. As mentioned above if stock imagery is used it must have an exttended usage license.
• By entering this competition you consent to your theme concept possibly being used by WooThemes and avaliable for purchase on our site. First and second prize will, as already stated, be awarded a cash prize for their work.
• If any other theme concepts are used by WooThemes the designer will be informed and a once-off fee will be awarded to the designer for the concept. The fee will be agreed upon by both parties. Sales generated off the theme will be kept by the company.
• The winning theme concept and the runner up may be required to mock up an inner page before payment is made, determined by an inspection of the design source file. A clearly noted grid structure is highly recommended.

134 Comments

This week we interview  Craig Haggart of Go Innovate.

Goinnovate is a passionate, enthusiastic web design studio located in Leeds who believe in forward compatibility, web standards, and building web sites that are browser compliant.. We ask Craig a few questions about why they opted to base their recent re-design on a WooTheme.

Craig, you are using our Proudfolio theme, right? Just asking, because you have really done a great job of completely changing our basic theme…

Thank you very much I’m glad you guys like the design, and Yes it is true the website uses the Proudfolio theme, it’s hard to believe when you look at. We stripped the whole thing down and built it from scratch; kind of like dressing a manikin, the structure was there we just dressed it with our own style.

(more…)

1 Comment

Even though the title sounds almost Biblical, we won’t be that blasphemous… But our latest theme - Open Air - is sure to Woo you to a major extent.

This theme has been a while in the making, but that’s only because we like to produce quality themes around here; instead of having to push out mediocre designs every second week.

So if you want to get an idea of what Open Air has to offer you: read the rest of the post…

Design

Liam McKay - a household name around here at WooThemes - is again responsible for this clean-cut design and this shows exactly why we love to collaborate with others on our themes!

The whole design - home page and inner pages - all adhere to a very strict grid-based structure, whilst still giving you the artistic and stylish beauty that you have come to know from our themes. Subtle gradients, borders and separating lines tie all of the elements together; whilst uniting the styling into one identity.

Magazine vs Personal

As with some of our other themes, we’ve allowed you to choose whether you’d like to use Open Air with a magazine or a more personal front page. And you’ll note that the differences in the header is quite significant when interchanging between these two options; for the magazine option, you’ll be able to feature an important post, whilst the personal option displays an about the author section, as well as links to his / her Twitter account and e-mail.

Functionality

After releasing 10 themes before Open Air, it becomes really difficult to wax lyrical about all of the features, but when we’re already including all of the standard WooThemes greatness, there’s not much to say… Oh, except for the fact that we’ve added a Video Player…

We’ve decided to experiment a bit (both in terms of the coding challenges, but also in terms of what our users would like us to add to our themes) and the result is a new built-in Video Player. The nice thing about the video player is that it picks up the videos from the posts that you’ve published and you thus do not need to publish video-only posts to have them display there. Nifty, right?

Come on… We know you want to give this air a bit of a whiff…

You should really view the the demo of Open Air here, because the theme is much better than this blog post (which is just a clever marketing attempt on our part).

If you think we’re stark raving mad to think this theme is pretty cool, feel free to tell us that in the comments. But we can’t guarantee that we’re gonna take you seriously… Hope you guys and girls enjoy the new theme and look forward to your feedback!

13 Comments

Hot off the press and in most UK newspaper/stationery stores is Issue 149 of Web Designer , the only serious tutorial-driven monthly publication dedicated to online creativity available in the UK .

Issue 149 focusses on the wonderful Wordpress , giving you history and tips behind Web 2.0’s blogging behemoth.

We were approached by Web Designer last month and asked if we would contribute any of our WooThemes for this issue’s accompanying CD. After a brief chat Adii, Magnus and myself decided it would be silly to pass on the opportunity of marketing WooThemes to the huge following of this great magazine. After careful consideration we decided we would offer both Papercut and Proudfolio . That’s right two of our premium themes are avaliable for free with Issue 149 of Web Designer. Also in this issue is a step-by-step detailed tutorial on how to develop your own Wordpress theme, albeit quite a basic one.

What are you waiting for? Make sure you pick up your copy today!

17 Comments

This week we interview Jeff Finley of GoMediaZine.

GoMediaZine is a group of guys and girls passionate about art and graphic design. Their website is a great resource for any aspiring designer with a massive following. Recently they re-designed their website. We ask Jeff a few questions about why he opted to base their new design on a WooTheme.

Jeff, first up, we’ve got to say that GoMediaZine is our favourite modification of a WooTheme ever and you’ve become somewhat of a flagship of inspiration for us. Can you give us a bit of insight into the design?

Thanks, it means a lot.  I chose Fresh News because it had a lot of the functionality already built in and I just needed to tweak the look.  I didn’t want to just change colors. It was a big deal for me to infuse a little bit of Go Media’s rich illustrative brand but still keep it clean and well organized.  I felt a mild textured look was appropriate but I didn’t want to do a “grunge” design if you know what I mean.  I used elements from the memorable Concentric Circles Series that Go Media’s Oliver Barrett did 2 years ago that have become somewhat of a Go Media staple.  I figured it was an iconic image that people associated with us, so it fit perfectly.  And the hand-drawn-looking “hair” or whatever you want to call it is another design element that I have been using a lot in my work that people kind of recognize as a Go Media thing.  We have a “hair” vector pack that is very similar.  The choice of a deep purple was a new one for Go Media.  In the past, our Go Media sites have been focused on the yellow (which was initially part of our brand), which I honestly think is a hindrance.  I want to explore other colors, and naturally purple is yellow’s complimentary color, so it worked nice.   The texture came from the back of an old record sleeve.  Nice and dirty.

(more…)

9 Comments

We were tempted to call it a Woo-dified theme, but a modified WooTheme probably makes more sense… But anyway…

We’ve just made another value-adding feature available to all WooThemes user, in the form of approved WooTheme modifiers. Since the launch of WooThemes, we’ve built up a dedicated group of Forum Ninja’s that assist in running & maintaining the forums. From this group of Ninja’s, we are now approving the best one’s as official WooThemes modifiers.

This means that they can take care of all the modification work for you and then you simply pay them for their work. These guys & girls know our themes inside / out by now - so if you work with them, you’re sure to get a heavily modified version of our themes, that should look amazing enough to get into our elite showcase.

This service is only for modifying our themes. When you send your enquiry, remember to specify which theme you would like to modify and be very specific about what modifications you would like. You’ll have to purchase the theme before we will start modifying the theme for you.

So if you’re keen, you can shoot over to our Contact page for details on how to get in touch with them.

8 Comments

As part of our overall offering here on WooThemes, we have decided to (in conjuntion with our recently launched showcase) publish some feedback from our users, which should inspire existing WooThemes users to maximize the use of their themes or entice prospective users to join in the fun.

This has thus resulted in the creation of a new section on our blog called “5 Minutes With Woo”, which will feature a quick-fire, 5 minute, 5 question “interview” with some of our users that we have showcased on the showcase (sounds a bit silly). The idea is just to give you some insight into the feelings of our users and their experiences with our themes.

So to kick this off, we have asked Steffan Antonas a few questions… Hope you find it interesting and find this new section of value, since we’ll be adding about 2 of these posts a week from now on. Enjoy! (more…)

6 Comments

Since we don’t like keeping you in the dark about the things we are cooking up here at WooThemes HQ, we just thought that we’d share some sneak previews of the newest theme we’re working on…

During the last few weeks we’ve been working with some collaborative designers on new theme concepts and one of these - entitled Open Air (another collaboration with Liam McKay) - is nearing completion and will be available during the latter stages of this month. The theme will have a dual-purpose, as it will include both a magazine-style & traditional blog layout, whilst also featuring a brand new (enhanced) video player, which we’ll be experimenting with.

Here’s a teaser collage of screenshots (there’s no larger preview available):

We’re quite excited about the theme and even though we won’t be reinventing the wheel, you can expect another typically, quality release from us. Kudo’s also to Liam for again coming up with a brilliant concept, after the very popular release of Papercut last month.

We look forward to sharing this one with our WooTheme users! And if it isn’t obvious to you yet: we’re pretty serious about regularly releasing new themes. The themes scheduled for the next few months will blow your mind! So sign up to The WooThemes Club already!

21 Comments