The WooThemes Blog

We are only days away from the release of our 100th theme. Can you believe it? 100 themes.

To get everyone excited for our big milestone we thought we’d tease the theme in a different way. Ryan ‘The Cannon’ Ray has been experimenting with Final Cut Pro X and Motion and this is the result. Not bad if we say so ourselves!

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In the last couple of years, there’s one thing that we believe we’ve accomplished and that is showcasing our products and services online in a usable format. Much of what we have learned can be found (in various shapes & sizes admittedly) in our Business Themes collection, where we’ve applied best practice and all the little tricks that have made our business so successful.

Our latest theme – Simplicity – takes this experience & knowledge to a new level (again).

The Homepage: Simple, clean and absolutely beautiful

Simplicity is the first design from our proposed 6-part collaboration with honorary WooTeam member Chris Rowe. When we briefed Chris on this design, we asked him to spend a lot of time researching new trends in business websites. Then before Chris jumped into Photoshop, we fused his research with our own experience and we think the result is absolutely spectacular!

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A sweeping post title we know

WooThemes powers a lot of business websites, and we hope to educate more businesses on the benefits of our themes this year through more dedicated landing pages, video content and sales materials.

OnSwipe (partly) powered by WooThemes

Today we can proudly announce that OnSwipe (formerly PadPressed), who just raised $1m in funding, are using Auld, one of our newest tumblog themes, on their company blog.

We are quite proud of how we are helping contribute to the success and growth of an innovative startup through their brand material.

As we mentioned on Monday, we wanted to kick this year off with an immediate new theme release to get the development momentum and WooJuices flowing again. The theme to kick things off is a brand-new business theme aptly named Biznizz.

We already hear some of you groaning, half-expecting us to announce a massive new release (like a WP theme that is a 100% clone of Facebook or something to do with e-commerce), but that was unfortunately never gonna happen straight after the holidays. Heck, we’re still getting the sand / snow out of our hair (some of us spent the holiday in sunny South Africa, whilst others were in less sunny Europe)…

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After careful and continued research we’ve realized our users love a WooThemes promotion every now and again… In fact, we’re pretty sure that you’d love a WooThemes promo every single day, right?

Unfortunately that’s not the case, BUT…

In the last year, Adii has been working on his new book – Rockstar Business – which is due out in 2 weeks’ time. Adii explains the book as “…a look at how I’ve turned myself into a self-branded Rockstar…”, which may have some merit, but this also means that Adii has been on the receiving end of quite a few “Rockstar” jokes from the WooTeam… The WooTeam is probably not the best, nor most objective book critic though… *chuckles*

On a serious note, we’ve seen a few snippets (you too can do so here) and knowing Adii we’re sure the book will be a really fun read. So we thought it would be a good idea to get you in on the action…

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Sealight - Perfect for businesses showcasing their products and services

We’ve just released a great addition to our business theme portfolio called Sealight that we teased a couple weeks ago – with some new features seeing the light of day.

Sealight was originally conceptualized and designed by the talented Mr. Chris Rowe, who we have worked before with on numerous occasions – the personal blog theme aptly named “BlogTheme, and the magazine themes “Spectrum” and “Gotham News“. So it was only a matter of time before he designed us a business theme.

Sealight boasts introduces some unique features to our business theme portfolio.

For the featured slider that we have used in a few of our themes before – instead of using posts/pages tagged with a specific tag, it know uses a custom post type called “slides”. Simply add new slides and they’ll appear in the featured slider. Similarly the home page has a module dedicated to information boxes that can house features/services your business/product offers and a cross-fader testimonials module quoting happy customers/clients – both of which have a custom post type dedicated to them (“Info Boxes” and “Testimonials”).

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We know you love business themes here at Woo, as you can see from our theme leaderboard. So closely following Apz is another business theme designed in-house by myself.

Inspire continues where Optimize left off, adding a dynamic custom homepage that uses custom built jQuery in the featured area.

jQuery driven Featured Area

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Apz is a niche business theme for developers/designers wanting to showcase their application/product on a unique home page that highlights all of it’s features/benefits, social media surrounding it, and multimedia created to advertise it.

The default Apz home page design

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We’re going back to the niches with our next release of Apz, which we believe will be the perfect theme to showcase & promote your iPhone / Blackberry / mobile app… Heck, we even think it’d be amazing for web apps or as a standard business theme due to the flexible controls we’ve built into the theme (to make it more generic if you so choose).

This is what you can look forward to…

Getting Back to Business

As we’ve been promising, some “good ‘ol traditional” themes are on their way and today’s release is just the start of this sequence which should last for about 5 / 6 releases (before we go a bit niche again).

Our new business theme, is the beautifully designed Boast (done by Liam McKay) which sports a very nice, Apple-like gloss.

The Homepage

Boast’s awesome homepage really makes this theme shine (yes, you get it: the design is glossy) and we’d like to believe that the possibilities & opportunities that this offers you is very valuable indeed.

First up, we have a very different featured slider to the one we normally integrate. We’ve reserved a lot of space for the very first messages that you communicate via your website and as a result, the space is extremely prominent & flexible.

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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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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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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.

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.

Find out more about the theme or demo it here.

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!

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!