For those that didn’t follow the conversation, we’ll quickly provide a bit of a recap:

• Opinions on the latest theme release range from it being great, to it being not so great (this is specifically being leveled at the design of the theme and not as much the functionality which most consider to be awesome);
• The criticism seems to be that we aren’t being innovative enough with our themes – particularly our business themes – and that other theme providers are doing this much better than us;
• Our strategy is to release themes that meet the requirements of as many of our users as possible, and as a result we try to avoid going overly niche when designing new themes;
• Furthermore, we always need to find the balance of the features that should be included in a theme out-of-the-box versus what should be left for custom development should single users require very specific / unique functionality.

That’s been the discussion up until now (you may want to read through it yourself to catch all the little bits). So what now?

This is where we need you to speak up; but not just in terms of adding your voice or having an opinion, but providing us with some clear, concise & constructive feedback about how you feel we can do the following: 1) improve our themes; 2) add innovation to our themes collection; and 3) increase your value when using WooThemes.

You can do this by giving us some exact examples of websites (in terms of design & feature sets) that you would like us to consider as part of our inspiration, or directing us to other WordPress themes which perhaps already scratches your itch (an itch that we aren’t scratching at the moment).

So please shoot with any thoughts, ideas, suggestions or feedback that you may have. We look forward to engaging with you.

You know that we build our themes up to be broken (by you) and that we want you to modify the heck out of our themes as much as you can (hence why we’re so proud of the Showcase). So we’re fascinated to get to know & see how you are using our themes and if you have a couple of minutes we’d love to hear from you!

This is the deal:

We’re looking for two “types” of WooThemes users:

1. Designers / developers who are using our themes for clients (in either a freelance or agency capacity); and
2. Business owners who are using our themes to publish their businesses online.

If you fall into one of these categories (and even if you don’t), we’d love to hear your story and find out how exactly WooThemes has influenced / changed / improved your business. We plan on using this for a new section on our website and let’s just say that there’s a great chance that you will be getting a lot of free traffic & publicity if you do decide to get in touch with us.

So with a little bit of help from the awesome interface at PollDaddy we’ve setup a survey containing 30-odd questions aimed to help us guage your preferences / opinions in this regard. The survey serves a dual purpose in the sense that we are trying to get feedback on general WordPress themes issues, as well as opinions with regards to WooThemes itself. The survey is however open to anyone, as the few WooThemes-specific questions are only aimed at current WooThemes users.

We also intend on sharing some of the information we can mine from the survey with regards to the community’s views on WP themes and the future thereof (whilst we will obviously exclude the information relating only to our business).

We are hoping for as many responses as possible and have therefor decided to give away at least 3 Developer Subscriptions to 3 lucky participants. The survey will be open for the next 3 weeks and will thus close on Wednesday, 3 December 2008.

So hop, skip & jump over to the WooThemes Survey and get cracking on those questions… It’ll only take you 5 minutes…