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!

Swatch was designed, and submitted to us, by Oliver Long, and will definitely be our most detailed and feature packed free theme we’ve ever released.

Don’t worry our loyal community of paying customers, you are not being forgotten, you’ll be smiling from ear to ear with our next few releases.

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!

One-Stop Flexibility

With Simplicity we tried to create a theme that could become your one-stop / all-in-one option for new business websites. This means that the theme had to have extreme flexibility in both design & functionality without compromising on either of those.

Starting with the homepage, you’ll see the following modules available: a Featured Slider, Mini Features, Portfolio & Testimonial. On our demo, we’re using the full width template, but this is easily interchanged for a content + sidebar layout (example here). You will also note that we’ve taken this flexibility into the featured slider as well, where you have multiple layout options, which allows you to use that space as you wish.

We also believe that by including basic portfolio functionality, Simplicity enables you to showcase your products. Whilst this functionality only includes the basics for now, we can totally see it possible – in future – to integrate WooCommerce to add an online retail aspect to the theme.

So much goodness under the hood...

Under Simplicity’s hood you will find our established WooFramework at the core, making sure that everything runs just perfectly. Customize your footer (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 columns isn’t a problem for Simplicity and we’ll even remove it if you want), tweak the typography or switch around the layouts/sidebar of the inner pages.

Sounds too easy, right? But the WooFramework really is that awesome and if you consider it is being used in all 89 of our themes, it needs to be incredibly flexible already.

As far as opinions go, Simplicity is our answer to the question “How should a new business website look?”. If one of us were to start a new consulting firm or photography studio, we would most probably use Simplicity. And if that sounds like we’re just saying that for the sake of it, we have some “evidence” to prove this: we actually use our own stuff often!

Nothing sells a theme (or a new business for that matter) like clicking around in the awesome surrounds of a great-looking demo. You can also get more details on Simplicity here.

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.

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)…

Back to Biznizz

In 2011, you can expect a handful more releases like Biznizz purely because our business themes are our most popular, and as a result we’ll make sure to give you as many, amazingly designed options as possible. The feature sets for business themes are pretty standard, and instead we’ll focus on spicing up the design and then including the odd new, perhaps niche feature.

Biznizz' Beautiful Homepage

So let’s have a look at Biznizz‘ design, the beauty of which is most focused on the custom homepage. The homepage showcases probably the biggest featured slider we’ve ever developed (or included in a theme), but we figured that with the right graphics, your visitors / customers will be completely unable to ignore your marketing messages (in a very Jedi mind trick kinda way). Further down you’ll see the same kind of mini features – icon / symbol along with some copy – that have been very popular and is also very prominent on our homepage. In addition to this, there’s enough space to have a biggish section for your blog posts, as well as a widgetized sidebar to do just as you please (and with our Sidebar Manager you’ll have even more control).

For the inner pages, you’ll find that everything pretty much adheres to what we consider to be best practice and you’ll even find that most of those layouts are modeled in a very similar way to how our own website looks. Which brings us to another point…

Just Like WooThemes

We get so many e-mails asking whether the design we are using on our own website is perhaps available as a theme. The answer has always been “no” for two reasons:

1. There’s too much custom design & development work that has gone into the theme and it would thus never work for as a generic theme for thousands of users; and
2. We prefer to be unique in the exact same way that we recommend to all our users that they modify our themes to suit their own brand / identity.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t release a theme that is at least close to our own design. In the past, we had a handful of options that you could consider if you wanted a design that closely resembles our own: Inspire, Optimize & Coffee Break. When we were however working on Biznizz, we realized that we might have subconsciously stumbled onto something here…

Side-by-side comparison of the Biznizz & WooThemes.com blog pages.

Biznizz – as mentioned above – is incredibly similar in layout & flow to our own site and we think that if you wanted to replicate what we were doing on here, Biznizz would be a great option for you. We’re not suggesting copying us (or anyone else), but a winning recipe stays a winning recipe…

So consider starting of this new year with a brand new look for your business website. Check out Biznizz’ other features and have a look around the demo. Beyond that, enjoy our first release for 2011!

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…

The Promo

For the rest of this month (24 – 31 August 2010), you can get a free paperback copy of Rockstar Business (yep, free shipping to anywhere in the world included) if you purchase any of our business themes.

Our thinking is that if you wanna be all Rockstar-like in business, you’ve got to start your business off with a great-looking, and functional website. Our business themes are perfect in that regard (there’s also a reason why it’s the most popular category on Woo). So not only will you find great value in using our themes, but you’ll get a great business read (courtesy of Woo) to boot.

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”).

The Sealight home page modules explained

The Sealight custom post types that become available after installation

There are some beautiful alternate color styles that Kirstin has cooked up for the Sealight users. Best thing to do is have a squizz over the theme on our demo server, view the theme listing page, and then make the decision – how can Sealight not be a good fit for your business website?

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

jQuery driven Featured Area

The custom homepage is similar to our other business themes, as it has a mini-features area and a custom widgetized area on right and in the footer. You can easily add more content above or below the mini-features area from the options panel.

Mini-features area

I’d also like to mention that we included the new Google Font replacement javascript in this theme for the first time, using the Droid Sans and Droid Serif fonts. It really makes the theme look unique compared to those standard web-safe fonts. If you don’t like it you can simply turn it off in the theme options.

Other features include a jQuery driven portfolio page template, easily change background image and color and lots of custom Woo widgets to put in your sidebars or footer.

The default Apz home page design

On first glance it looks like it is designed for Apple iPhone apps exclusively, but given it’s a hugely flexible nature one can easily disable the iPhone imagery and it can become completely flexible for your requirements.

What also excites us about this theme is that it is the first theme that our multi-talented forum ninja – Kirstin Pauk – has designed for us. What you might not know about Kirstin is that his skills are not limited to only great customer service in the woo forums with over 7500 forum threads posted. He is also a very talented pianist, apparently with a history in opera singing too, a Star Trek evangelist, AND a ninja with an obvious good eye for design. Watch this space because Kirstin is already working on another theme at the moment.

The orange Apz alternate style with a multimedia overlay clicked on.

The home page can also showcase custom widgets like a “Customer Feedback” and “Twitter Stream” widgets, as well as a uniquely styled blog module. There is also a dedicated blog section to the Apz theme.

The Apz blog page template.

Feedback is most welcomed, feel free to browse the demo for a more detailed look at the theme. Then you might feel the urge to buy it here

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.

Beyond the featured space, we’ve also included a very nifty widgetized space, which acts as a secondary, featured space of sorts. This is what it looks like:

Widgetized & Scrolling Enabled

You’ll note that each of those boxes includes a little down-arrow, which scrolls the content in the box. The idea we had here was to include as much information as possible without taking up too much space, as the homepage is still your most prime web real estate.

The flexibility is topped off by a 5-column widgetized footer; so it is really possible to construct your homepage exactly as you wish.

Boast!

This new design will definitely give your business something to boast about. The design is ultra-modern in terms of style, whilst the structure is superbly flexible (as I’ve described above), which will allow you to bend the theme to serve your exact & specific needs.

The theme includes all of our standard goodies (custom widgets, page templates, the WooNav etc.) and by now you should know that this means that we have your business’ back covered. This is thus definitely a theme you need to consider… Check out Boast’s theme’s features or have a look & play with the demo.

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.

If you have a look at the homepage, you’ll see that the design is reminiscent of a layout trend that have been made popular by Mac OSX applications in particular. The header includes a nicely emphasized  feature block to introduce your product / service, whilst the rest of the homepage contains smaller bits of information that will continue to enhance the supposed awesomeness of whatever you are selling.

The inner pages are uncomplicated in both design & function, and they were crafted with ease-of-use in mind. Once you have sold the reader on your product / service (on the homepage already), the rest of the website should read easily and the reader should jump into a purchasing process with a smile on his / her face.

We believe that Feature Pitch accomplishes all of that.

So if you have been using an out-of-date design, that just hasn’t been converting your leads into sales; we seriously recommend you give Feature Pitch a try. We don’t really believe in those “30 days money back guaranteed” deals, but we almost believe in Feature Pitch that much, to actually consider offering you something like that…

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.

The theme (demo here) is perfectly suited if you’re looking for a clean, yet trendy, new look for your business website. The homepage features a very nice jQuery slider to emphasize your most important marketing messages, whilst the inner pages sports a very stylish and out-of-the-box layout. As always, we’ve packed the theme with all our business-related goodies and for those that would know, it incorporates many of The Station‘s features & functions.

So we really think that it’s time to throw out that old tux and get yourself all suited up with our new offering. As always, our club members, don’t even have to make a purchasing decision here, because they already have the theme. You should consider that at some time.

(Image by ~ashleighlutz)

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!

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!

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.

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.