The WooThemes Blog

Along with our announcement last week that we are re-focusing all of our resources on WordPress, we’d like to share some initial details on a new collaboration that we’re launching which will see more, niche, application-like themes coming to the WooThemes collection shortly.

A Colab?

Yep, we’re taking on this challenge with a collaboration, as our plates are already filled with a bunch of awesome things we’re working on, which means we simply don’t have enough time to take on every single idea that pops up within WooHQ. A collaboration with some awesome peeps therefore helps add capacity to the WooTeam, brings in some fresh voices and definitely gives the projects we’ll be collaborating more momentum, fire & passion.

The other reason for a collaboration is simply the niche nature of the themes that we’re aiming to release. If you have a look at our best-selling themes you’ll see that our users are predominately buying Business & Magazine-like themes. So whilst we’ve always made a push to release the odd niche theme, we’ve limited these in an attempt to satisfy the greater hunger of our users for Business, Magazine & Blog themes.

This approach however definitely leaves a couple of gaps, which would be great to fill (since we’d love to be *the* theme provider of choice for every single WP user by covering all of their niche bases imaginable). Again, a collaboration basically helps us do just that… Here’s the details…

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Things never slow down at the WooHQ, and to add some more fire to our bellies, we’d like to announce a new joint venture that is coming to WooThemes… We’ve been working behind the scenes to negotiate a collaboration that would see us working with the incredible guys over at WPBundle, which means that you can expect some amazing themes (all bundled) coming your way in the next month or two.

After we heard that WPBundle’s Kickstarter project failed to reach its goals, we contacted Liam (lead designer & co-founder at WPBundle, who we had worked with a couple of times already) about helping out with the project and making sure that it actually launches. The end-result of a few hefty discussions is that WPBundle will now officially be “powered by WooThemes” and we’ll be working side-by-side with their team to bring you even more awesomeness!

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Our Active Projects

As you know, the WooTeam is located all across the world; so managing all of our activities effectively, and making sure that we’re all on (approximately) the same page at all times, is quite a challenge. To help us lighten the management-load a bit, we – just like most other web-savvy geeks – use Basecamp to track our daily activities & tasks on one, easy-to-access platform.

So we wanted to give you a bit of an overview of how we use Basecamp for internal management, as well as interacting with all of our outside collaborators. At any given time, we’re interacting with 10 – 20 different people, on different areas of our business, with different WooTeam members in charge of managing the respective processes. It is thus quite challenging at times, but I’d like to think that we have a solid system in place, which has allowed us to keep most of the important things on the radar.

Here’s how we do it…

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I recently wrote a post over at WooCamp titled “5 Reasons to collaborate”, which suggests that collaborating with the absolute best-of-the-best designers has contributed massively to what we do here. Many of our themes (in fact, exactly 18 out of the current 36) were designed by others; so when we talk about collaborating, we’re pretty serious about it!

Now, collaboration aside, we wanted to publish a post, where we could give ourselves a few warm fuzzies, along with a little (innocent) ego-stroking. We contacted some of the designers that we’ve worked with in the past and asked them one simple question: What do they think about their collaboration with WooThemes?

Here’s what they said…

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As I designer, it is always a privilege collaborating with designers that you admire.  For me, one such a designer is Dan Rubin, whom I started following way back in my early days of exploring the interwebs along with my own design abilities. You just need to have a look at the list of books that Dan has authored (or co-authored) on CSS, web standards & design; to get an idea of how well-known Dan is…

A while back we got him to do a collaboration with us on a new theme and we’re no nearing the end of the design process (Dan has already started coding it). The concept is a personal profile space and includes sections to publish your portfolio, along with your other online activities. We’ll also be using Cufon (first time for us) for the custom fonts, which will add a nice typographic style to the theme.

So here’s a bit of a teaser… The theme (which is yet to get a name) will probably be available in the next 2 / 3 months… But we’re open for persuasion on developing this earlier…

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We know that this might come as a complete surprise to you, but we currently have about 10 themes that are in various states of development. Along with the 9 theme concepts that we have purchased from our WooContest winners, we have a few more collaborations that we’re working on. So, as we’re gearing up to release Matt Brett’s theme early next week, we thought it’d be cool to get your mouth watering over some of the other themes that are in the works…

Abstract by Veerle Pieters

Yup – you read it right! WooThemes is indeed collaborating with the super-designer, uber-illustrator and industry-leading designer, Veerle Pieters. We approached Veerle about a month ago to get cracking on a new design for us and she has created something truly unique and 100% within her signature style. This is a major coup for us in our attempts to get the best web designers involved with WooThemes in collaborative projects. Any here’s some enticing teasers:

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It is with extreme pride that we can announce the addition of the industry-leading designer, Elliot Jay Stocks, to the WooThemes core team. Elliot previously worked for the hugely popular web firm, Carsonified, before he decided to go freelancing back in March of this year.

Elliot now joins myself, Magnus Jepson & Mark Forrester as the four core members of the WooThemes Design & Development team. Essentially what this means, is that we get to decide what happens around here… From my experience of working with these 3 guys on the development of WooThemes, I can assure you that there’s a helluva lot of exciting things to come in the following months.

It is our belief that Elliot will add significant design experience to our activities, whilst also bringing his own unique style (which is different to ours) to the WooThemes table. Ultimately our members and customers will be the beneficiaries of this – so keep watching this space…