The “Small” Stuff

One of the things that has become more & more evident as we’ve grown & learned more about our customers (and how they use our products), is the fact that the seemingly minor improvements are generally those most appreciated. We’ve found that you don’t necessarily want us to release 10 new themes a month, but that you’d be happy for us to balance new releases with fixes & improvements to older versions too.

To put that into a little context for you… We will continue to develop, evolve and add new functionality to our WooFramework. Having announced a new version of the WooFramework in mid-December, one of our biggest priorities in January is to deploy this to all of our themes. We’ve also already started working on some pretty extensive & unique new functionality so watch this space.

We’re also spending quite a bit of time in refining our general approach to developing WordPress themes and it’s important for us to not fall behind in terms of best practices. This means that a dose of hooks, filters & child themes may be introduced in future (the developers amongst you will know what we’re on about), whilst not straying too far away from our own philosophies (until now) in terms of these. Other “small” improvements also means that we’ll actually be including styling for forms, tables & alerts for our themes (this may seem trivial and considering that most of our users didn’t even miss these, we could be excused for excluding these, but in our opinion this is an improvement and a definite value-add).

The “Bigger” Stuff

In comparison to some of our other plans, the above-mentioned tweaks and new stuff seems rather generic & small.

I’d venture out & say that 2010 is a significant year for WooThemes and if we manage to use the momentum we’ve built until now AND we implement most of the ideas we have, it’ll be an amazing year. The bigger stuff will include some major overhauls and the expansion to further platforms (finally).

“What about WordPress?” you may ask… We’ve most definitely got some interesting plans for the WordPress side of our business (these will always be part of the “bigger” stuff we’re working on at any given moment) and WordPress will remain our core focus, irrespective of any other projects we will pursue this year.

For example – our tumblog themes are coming on nicely and you can expect a release sooner rather than later. On the surface, tumblog themes just don’t seem as big as doing Expression Engine or Drupal themes, but under that surface, we’ve got some amazing ideas to improve your experiences: not only do we want to replicate the front-end of websites that are powered by Tumblr or Posterous; we’re also planning on replicating some of the best functionality in their backends and bringing that straight to your WP dashboard (this functionality is well on its way to being finished; so you better believe it).

To an extent, these new things will change the face of WooThemes, whilst also building on the image, reputation & ethos we’ve created & nurtured until now. Fortunately though, because we are aware of this, we’ll be clever in terms of never straying to far from what you’ve come to know & expect from us!

The Balance

As mentioned right at the beginning of this post: we’re keen to find a balance in the multitude of new avenues that we will be exploring this year. You – as our customer – remain our top priority and if releasing themes on platform X doesn’t add value to your WooThemes experience, then we are seriously going to consider dropping our fascination & plans for platform X.

In some cases, we’re gonna be more than happy to be backseat drivers and allow you guys & girls to navigate the company to greater awesomeness. On other topics, we’ll take a firmer hand and lead you in the future with improvements, new stuff & better practices.

For us, it’s about the journey and that’s what excites us most.

The Showdown aims to feature the best modifications submitted to The WooThemes Showcase and put them in the ring against other “competitors” in a fun, interactive competition to be crowned the best WooThemes modification. Our Showcase already features some amazing modifications and the Showdown is further aimed at increasing the visibility & usability of the Showcase (more great modifications, means more inspiration for existing WooThemes users looking to customize one of our themes).

We’ll be presenting some awesome prizes this time around (we’ll even try to get some prizes sponsored outside of WooThemes stuff), so make sure to submit all of your WooThemes modifications to the Showcase ASAP, so that you can be considered for the new season.

After an amazing 2009, we’re extremely excited about the journey that lies ahead this year. We’ve been working behind the scenes, to get our ducks in a row and figure out what our goals & dreams are for 2010. So whilst all of these will be made public in the next couple of months, you can rest assured that we’ll be cooking up some ambitious ideas this year.

We’d also like to pass on our best wishes to every single customer & fan of WooThemes: may you too achieve all of your goals this year and have a great time whilst doing so! We hope – as always – that you’ll join us for the ride, as without you guys & girls, that road just isn’t as awesome.

May this year be even better than the last…

** For those a little bit tired after your celebrations until the early hours of the morning, we’ll extend the welcome to the second day of 2010 as well!

Our new batch of themes (i.e. these are designs that have been completed and are ready for development) includes collaborations with the likes of Sam Brown, Liam McKay, Ryan Downie, Mads Esjing, Kirstin Pauk & Chris Rowe; so there’s bound to be something you like in the new year.** The batch also includes themes across all of our ranges i.e. magazine, portfolio, business & personal blogs.

Here’s a very sneaky preview (we’ll follow up with more detailed previews closer to the respective theme’s release dates)…

** There’s also some new designs coming from both in-house, with some incredibly exciting new stuff from Magnus, Mark & Cobus. So come January, we’ll be firing on all cylinders in bringing you only the most awesome WordPress designs.