The WooThemes Blog

Everyone loves physical merchandise from the brands they support, right? Well, we’re keen to experiment a bit in this regard and are considering selling our new WooVille (Where’s Woo?) poster. Have a look at our test-run printed version of the poster:

Wouldn't this look great in your office / workplace?

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Things are starting to heat up over here and the hotness can partly be attributed to our We Love Boobs campaign. In fact, things are getting so hot right now, that even our so-called “competitors” want to join in on the fun.

This may come as a surprise to many of you, but when it comes to competition within the WP community, all of the competitors (in the corporate sense of the word) are very friendly with each other. And as evidence of that awesomeness, Brian Gardner (founder of StudioPress) contacted us with a great idea in support of our We Love Boobs campaign. So here’s the down-low:

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Last month when we released the 24 Social Media Icon Set by Alex Latimer, we promised that we’d soon follow it up with a full web icon set in a similar style… So as we’re approaching the end of the month, we thought it’d be good idea to brighten up your day with another freebie (just because we all hate paying bills).

The full hand-drawn icon set (again in Alex’ signature) style comprises of 60 individual, unique icons which will cover most of your web design bases. The icons are supplied in a 64 x 64 pixel size and as transparent PNG’s; so you have enough flexibility to integrate them in your unique designs.

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Over at WooThemes we’ve released our fair share of free WordPress themes in the last couple of months and we’ve even dabbled in the odd free web icon set as well. And the reasons behind these freebies are simple: 1) we like to give back to the community; and 2) it is a great marketing tool.

The one thing that we’ve always been pretty adamant about though (with regards to the freebies we release), is that the quality of those freebies needs to be right up there. so the free themes that we have released are all top-notch themes and they include all of the functionality that our paid themes would.

Why? We want to impress you guys enough to consider signing up / purchasing the real deal, instead of just using the freebies.

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24 hours has passed since we posted yesterday’s “Guess our Bestsellers” competition and it’s about time that we get to announce the winners of some of those Developer themes…

First up, nobody could come up with the right guess for our best-selling themes in the last month, so nobody thus got both correct and the free 6 month subscription on offer has thus gone to waste… There are however 6 people who guessed our all-time bestselling themes correctly and we have decided to give each of these people a Developer copy to any of our themes. But before we announce the winners, we need to tell you what the winning combo’s would’ve been…

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We do love our competitions here at WooThemes and we’re definitely of the opinion that things would just get a little dull over here at times, if we didn’t spice things up with whacky, new contests & promo’s. The funny thing about these competitions is, that we never really spend a lot of time conceptualizing it; instead we just act impulsively based upon a creative spark. So excuse us if our ideas aren’t overly complicated, but we believe the freebies definitely makes up for the lack of “substance”…

So this time around, we were curious to see whether you could actually guess which of our themes were indeed the bestsellers in terms of their popularity & sales. This is especially intriguing, since with every recent release we’ve had negative comments about the theme, even though we obviously have the past sales data to back up our decisions. Here’s how this is gonna work…

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After our previous (free) icon release was so wildly successful and popular with you all, we figured that it might not be a bad idea to do it all over again…

This time around, we collaborated with South African artist – Alex Latimer – to create a very unique hand-drawn icon set which is reminiscent of Alex’ signature drawing style. The set comprising of 24 different icons, should cover most of the social networks that you frequent regularly and the default icon size has been set at 64 x 64 pixels.

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So when the WooThemes team met up at FOWD at the end of April, we brought along a very special gift: a limited-edition WooThemes T-Shirt (only a 100 got printed). Now, whilst we know that we’d look extremely sexy modeling these shirts, we thought that we’d get everyone that was lucky enough to get a shirt, to model them for us…

This is what you need to do…

For this next week (Monday, 18 May – Sunday, 24 May), we’ll give you a free copy of any of our amazing themes, when you take a picture of yourself wearing the WooThemes shirt, post it to Twitpic (or similar service) and tweet the link (include @woothemes in the tweet, so that we can pick it up).

What’s more, is that we’ll give the most creative image + tweet combo, a free 3 month subscription, instead of just a single theme. So we dare you to be a little creative and maybe even a little a silly…

We look forward to seeing the sexy, new WooThemes models!

Web Designer Magazine - Issue 155

That’s right Issue 155 of Web Designer Magazine features us yet again, but this time we have a more prominent feature with a full page dedicated to a Q & A with Adii and a look at the WooThemes headquarters in Cape Town, South Africa.

Issue 155 focuses on WordPress’s impressive and biggest upgrade to date - version 2.7. The magazine features explanations of this version’s highlights, the dashboard editor explained and designer tips and opinions.

We’ve teamed up with Web Designer Magazine and launched three of our popular WooTheme wordpress templates for free on their promotional CD.

That’s about £200′s worth of WooThemes goodness!

Which themes are available on the CD you may ask?

One from each of us. Adii’s Geometric business/portfolio theme, Magnus’s Freshfolio portfolio theme and my magazine theme – Foreword Thinking.

Head on over to your local UK newspaper shop to get your copy or buy this issue online.

Take a tour of WooThemes HQ

It’s competition time around here again… For a while now, I’ve had both wpressd.com & wpmag.com registered with the idea of using them for some kind of WordPress-related (duh!) project. The sad truth is however that I’ve never had enough time to invest in developing these domains into something that justifies the quality of the domain names.

So I’ve decided to give both of these domains away, in the hope that someone else will develop them and do them justice. Obviously the idea is that the projects will both contribute back to the WP community; so we all stand to gain from this!

Here’s what you can win:

1. One of the two domains: wpressd.com or wpmag.com;
2. Any theme (of your choice) from our collection to get your new domain cracking; and
3. We’ll even do a little follow-up blog post once you have launched the new site.

And it is so easy to win:

Simply comment below and tell us what you would do with one of these domains, should you own either of them. The best idea will then get the domain and the other freebies that go along with that.

We look forward to your ideas!

An irresistibly good free theme

We know February has been a bit slower compared to the previous 2 / 3 months, but it must be as a result of the extreme heat here in South Africa (where I’m based) and the icy coldness over there in Norway (which Magnus calls home). So instead of focussing on some of our upcoming club themes, we’ve been in a giving mood…

Along with the free icon set we released last week, we’d like to announce the release of our brand-new free theme: Irresistible, which now becomes our 5th free theme release. The theme was designed by Izuddin Helmi and was a Top 10 winner in the WooContest of last year.

Irresistible (demo here) is a personal blog theme, with a little bit of a multimedia focus. The idea was to great a visually-rich design that accomodate your written content, lifestream and all of your multimedia content as well. Nothing flashy; just a cool personal blog theme, with the standard WooThemes backend goodness thrown in there as well.

So enjoy this free release and if you’re impressed with the quality of the theme, consider buying one of our premium themes.

We’ve decided to end 2008 on a high and make BlogTheme available for public release. So with this free release, we are now already boasting four, very nice free themes – which will definitely receive a big boost in 2009 as well.

The decision to make this theme available for free now, after initially releasing it as a paid theme, might look strange to you, but we can assure you that there’s nothing dodgy about this decision at all… We simply feel that even though BlogTheme is a great-looking theme; the new pricing structure we trialed with the theme did not really have the effect we were aiming for. So instead of increasing the price of the theme (to be level with our other themes), we’d rather just release it for free!

We will also be taking care of all our users who have purchased a copy of BlogTheme until now. E-mails were sent out to them this morning, which offers them the opportunity to either exchange their copy of BlogTheme for any one of our other great themes or request a full refund for the purchase. If you haven’t received this email please contact us.

So everyone stays a winner around here… We hope that you enjoy your New Years’ celebrations tomorrow!

Today is supposed to be the last day of our Christmas 4-for-1 special , meaning all your Christmas shopping is supposed to be finished.

However, if like me you still haven’t got everything you said you would and you’re now already celebrating this merry time of year we’ve decided to throw you a life line and extend our 4-for-1 special till the end of 2008 , that gives you one more week to take advantage of this fantastic offer!

We thought about changing the offer slightly, and coming up with a clever new catch phrase, but why mess with a winning formula, especially if all you can come up with is this one we found on fail blog .

Happy shopping Woo Users and have a fantastic Christmas!

P.S. See all the special details on the original 4-for-1 offer post here .

P.P.S. This offer will definitely be ending when the clock strikes 12am (GMT) on New Years Eve 2008 . No more extensions.

Ho Ho Ho! Santa has arrived a week early here at WooThemes headquarters, bearing lots of gifts and instructing us to dish them out to you in the form of a 4 for 1 special for all our WooTheme visitors!

We’ve run a 3 for 1 special in the past as our Halloween special, but nothing as daring as this. 4 wonderful WooThemes for the price of 1 !

Santa has assured us this is a sensible business move and will help make a lot of people’s Christmas even more merry!

This offer applies to both Single & Developer Licenses, which means you get the following:

• Buy a Single License for $70 USD and get any 3 other themes (on Single Licenses) of your choice; or
• Buy a Developer License for $150 USD and get any 3 other themes (on Developer Licenses) of your choice.

For the single license special, each of the 4 themes comes with an individual license, so you can use the themes on 4 different websites.

HOW IT WORKS

As with everything in life, there’s some “rules” with regards to the special… Here they are:

1. The special is only valid from 17 December (midnight GMT ) until the end of 24 December 2008 (midnight GMT) the clock strikes 12am on New Years Eve 2008 (we extended the special ) as specified above. No previous purchases will be eligible for this. If you miss the deadline, you will not be able to make use of this special.

To take advantage of this fantastic Christmas present simply select to purchase your favourite theme, for example, our latest theme offering, Abstract (which we collaborated with Veerle Pieters on will be launched with the start of this 4 for 1 promotion – details to follow).

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Eek… This is kinda embarrassing, but we missed our own birthday, which occured on Sunday, 2 November. We had been planning to do a post about it, but things just never really panned out, considering we were busy finalizing stuff for the WooContest. But better late than never, we say…

So then I think it’s time that we hear a nice big “Happy Bday Woo!” from all of you folks! Now sure – WooThemes itself is only 4-odd months old, but this whole journey started out on 2 November 2007, when I released The Original Premium News Theme (I was also on my own at that stage). Back then, I definitely was not as serious about the business as I am now and it was only when Magnus & Mark joined that things really started to take shape.

In hindsight, our business has far exceeded my wildest expectations and I think all 3 of us are more motivated than ever to continue building WooThemes!

Now, with all of that out of the way, we’d like to give all of you a present (even though it is our birthday). So since The Original Premium News Theme started it all, we’ve decided to release the theme to the public for free. We’ve learned a helluva lot since releasing The Original theme, but that theme is one of the cornerstones on which WooThemes has been built. So we’re sure that everyone will enjoy this free release…

The theme will be released under the same terms as our Snapshot theme i.e. you will need to purchase a support package from us to get access to the support forums & tutorials. Otherwise you will need to enjoy the theme without our help!

So download the theme and enjoy this one as a celebration of the journey we have undertaken in the last year!

Just to prove that we’re not too busy with design contests and upcoming themes, to still care about the community: we’d like to announce the release of our very first free theme – Snapshot.

Snapshot is based on our very own WooThemes Showcase and we’ve simply removed all of the “Woo-specific” code from the template, whilst porting the original showcase theme to the established basis & framework we build all our other themes with. The theme is aimed at users who’d either like to display a very visual portfolio, a photoblog of sorts or a design gallery (much like BestWebGallery).

Even though this is a very niche-focused theme, we expect that many of you will enjoy a bit of the Woo-quality that we’ve become renowned for during the last couple of months.

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