All the latest news and announcements, straight from the WooThemes HQ!
Making Money Online
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30. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
Making Money Online
I deliberately decided that the title of the post should be “Making Money Online”, purely because it’s still such a buzz-word for everyone looking to profit from an online venture. So the thing with our latest theme – Feature Pitch – is that it was designed to do just that: make you some money.
One of the things that probably frustrates me most – online & off – is that the salesperson doesn’t seem to get the recognition that he / she did in the years gone by. So whilst marketers (probably) have seriously devalued the skills and expertise of top salespeople, we still believe that selling yourself / your company / products / services is an art. With Feature Pitch we have thus tried to add a simple, yet effective tool to increase your conversions online.
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Suit Up!
10. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
What about a new look?
We thought it was appropriate to title the post the same as the “famous” saying from everyone’s favourite character Barney in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Why? Well, because it’s time to dress up your business website with a trendy new look.
Suit & Tie is our brand-new business theme and not that anyone is counting (hehe), but it is also our 35th theme to be released on WooThemes (this is also the last one to be released, before we officially switch over to WOO2). The theme was designed by well-known designer, Bryan Veloso, and we’re very pleased to be adding a little dash of his signature style (in 13 amazing colour schemes btw) to the WooThemes Collection.
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All aboard?
26. Mar, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
After a day of frantic coding to get the last little bits of The Station done, I’m proud to present you with my latest theme offering – The Station. As you know, I don’t design much on WooThemes, but this time around I’m really excited to see what you will do with my creation! 
At this stage, I must also give a lot of design credit to FRESH01 who polished the theme for me. He basically took my basic, unpolished version and turned it into something really eye-catching and hopefully special in all your opinions.
So what’s it about?
Without shame, I’d like to admit that The Station drew a lot of inspiration from the various Ellis Lab websites (such as Expression Engine). The main reason for this influence was their great (and trendy) manner in which they publish important information on the homepage, along with an extremely good information / navigation structure throughout their website.
So that is 100% where my focus was in designing this beauty. You can also be assured that this theme is intended to handle a helluva lot of information about your company, without a single bit of that falling off the way-side. A lot of thought and effort has gone into the different navigation spaces. We have also included quite a few options to allow you to actually customize all of these spaces.
The Goodies
Beyond the customizable navigation spaces, we’ve also included a spiffy new featured tabber, which allows you to emphasise the most important content (your most important messages). The rest of the homepage is also page-based, which gives you complete control over every character, paragraph, image & video that you want to include on the homepage.
I’ve also experiment with a new sidebar system, where you can choose between three different widgetized sidebars to be published along with the homepage, inner pages and blog-related pages. I hope that this will add value in terms of the choices that it presents to you: the user.
The Rest
Personally I’d love to evolve this theme and I can only do that with your feedback. So once you’ve played around with the theme, I’d be more than happy to listen to your suggestions. In the meantime, you can read up on the details of the theme, view the demo of The Station and consider signing up for our amazing club.
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We’ve produced something new
10. Mar, 2009 by Mark Forrester in New Themes
The stylish marketing tool for your company
Today I can finally announce the launch of our new business theme dedicated to stylishly marketing your products or services, Productum.
Why the name? Productum is latin for “something produced” and seeing we usually fill our theme demos with latin “lorem ipsum” dummy text I thought it was pretty appropriate.
The custom home page makes good use of the prime real estate with a javascript image switcher packing in 4 dedicated images, an about section with linkable buttons, a content area dedicated to one of your wordpress pages, a scrolling carousel dedicated to a specific category of posts, 4 widgetized footer modules and on the inner pages 2 widgetized sidebars with 6 custom woo widgets to use. All of this comes bundled with our wonderful usual theme options panel and 11 colourful styles to chose from.
Ariel and the Southern Media crew helped splice and dice the photoshop work into neat, beautiful code relying on the customizable 960 Grid System. Magnus then helped with his php wizardry skills and we implemented the wonderful woo theme framework.
As always we’d love to hear your feedback.
New theme with a weird name
04. Feb, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
Cushy by Liam McKay
I know, I know… The title isn’t overly original or indicative and probably doesn’t make any sense from a marketing perspective, but Magnus is away skiing in Austria and Mark is planning his wedding for this Saturday, which leaves me to do everything…
Cushy is the newest addition to our already popular range of business- / CMS-type themes, and we’re sure you’ll love the diversity that this latest design (by Liam McKay) brings to our ever-expanding collection of themes.
The design itself is very different to our other business themes (such as VibrantCMS & Over Easy), which sports a much cleaner look. Cushy takes a more vibrant and textured approach, without losing any of its sophistication. Also – with a variety of different page templates and layouts for different content sections, the theme seems to intrigue and surprise around every corner and click.
From a functionality perspective, Cushy has everything a business / corporate website would require, without being bloated. A custom homepage will allow you to stand out from the crowd, whilst a widgetized sidebar and footer adds to your options in terms of customizing the base theme. The product / services tabber on the homepage also displays some of your most important sales information effectively without taking up unnecessary screen real estate. Oh – and did you notice that sexy drop down menu’s for the main navigation!?
We hope that all of the Woo fanboys and -girls love our latest release; and maybe you’ll even consider signing up to our WooThemes Club, which now sports 24 themes! Before you leave, read the in-depth details of Cushy or check out the demo right away.
Oh… Wanted to let you know… I’m doing a little promo on Twitter a little later, where I’ll give away a few free copies of Cushy. So follow @adii on Twitter to get the scoop!
Veerle Pieter’s Abstract
17. Dec, 2008 by Mark Forrester in New Themes
Today not only see’s the launch of our Christmas 4 for 1 special, but also the launch of one of our exciting themes that we collaborated with the wonderful Veerle Pieters on – Abstract.
A good few months ago we commissioned Veerle to design us a theme with a typical Veerle flair to it. We requested the theme have a business feel to it, keeping it simple and fun though. That was our only guidelines giving Veerle almost complete creative freedom on this project.
The end product that Veerle supplied us with was a pixel perfect Illustrator mashup of shapes and curvy lines in a harmonious colour palette, laid out neatly in a spacious grid structure. It was professional enough to be used as a business theme, and also fun enough to be used as a personal theme making it quite multi-functional.
Over the last month, we’ve sliced and diced her beautiful photoshop/illustrator design into neat html/css and Adii and Magnus have applied some wordpress wizardry.
I was the lucky one to be selected to create some alternate styles for the theme, not a particularly easy task when working with an industry leading designer’s designs. No pressure. I do hope you enjoy the 4 alternate styles though and will find one that suites your personality.
Without further ado here is the demo for Abstract for you to marvel at, and below you will find links to purchase it. Remember if you buy this theme in the next week you will be entitled to download 3 other WooThemes. Bargain!
Busy Bees
08. Dec, 2008 by Mark Forrester in New Themes
What a year 2008 has been, WooThemes is only 5 months old, yet we’ve launched 17 themes, answered about 2 400 support queries (14 000 forum threads!), and replied to a heap of sales/administration emails. To put it lightly we’ve been busy bees .
Today is a very special day as we are launching the much anticipated 19th theme of 2008 appropriately named – Busy Bee . BusyBee was masterminded by Magnus “Flash Gordon” Jepson , after much research into the reasons for our most popular theme – Fresh News .
Busy Bee caters for a huge variety of users, it can be used as a news based or magazine based theme. Alternatively you can use it for your personal blog, or your business website. It is packed full of useful features, with Magnus revising a good chunk of the theme options.
9 dedicated advertising blocks, with an easy to integrate Adsense option, 13 pixel perfect colour styles and completely widgetized sidebars and footer space, with some lovely custom-built widgets.
Go taste the honey here , constructive feedback most welcome as per usual.
Update: We’ve added a video player widget because of popular request. Grap version 1.0.1 if you already downloaded the theme. Check out the docs for how to setup video posts.
Your eggs are ready, sir!
30. Oct, 2008 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
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.
DESIGN
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.
FUNCTIONALITY
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…
YOUR EGGS ARE READY!
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.
