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

This is how the poster currently looks on the wall at WooHQ…

Finding the ninja is a little easier when viewed at this size...

Interested in buying this poster?

At this stage, we’re just keen to know how many of our users would be interested in buying this poster. The size of the poster will be A1 (get the dimensions here), printed on top-notch quality paper & individually numbered. The cost is likely to be approximately $20 – $30 excluding shipping.

If you’re interested, just add your vote below… The response here will determine whether we produce & sell the posters.

Win a copy!

Regardless of whether we start selling the poster, we’re giving 10 copies away for free. Simply add a quirky / funny / tongue-in-cheek comment on the original post and we’ll select the 10 comments that make us laugh most.

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:

The Giveaway

Before we tell you how you can enter this competition / giveaway, here’s what you can win:

• 2 x 3-month Developer Club Subscriptions
• 4 x Developer Package Themes**
• 10 x Standard Package Themes**
• 5 x Awesome WooThemes Ninja T-Shirts

**What makes this even cooler, is the fact that Brian has committed to contributing 50% of the costs of these themes ($650 USD) straight to our We Love Boobs campaign, so that’s another $650 USD that will be going to the awesome organization we’ve identified in aid of breast cancer awareness.

So this is how you win…

Twitter #woobs

To enter this draw, you only need to craft a clever & fun tweet… But we’ve got some “rules”…

1. The tweet needs to include the hashtag #woobs; and
2. You also need to use the words “twins” or “lollipops” in a fun & creative way.

Here’s an example tweet…

I checked in on the twins today and they look both happy & healthy! #woobs

We will then randomly select the 19 people who will be winning the 4 Developer Packages, 10 Standard Packages & 5 WooTee’s, whilst the 2 Developer Subscriptions will go to two tweets that we deem to be the most creative! (The most creative tweets would most likely include both the words “twins” and “lollipops”… Just sayin’…)

Get it? Remember that ultimately this campaign is about raising funds & awareness that will benefit the fight against breast cancer. So keep things clean & respect that people have lost loved ones to this horrible disease.

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.

Here’s how they look…

All 60 Hand-drawn Web Icons

Like these icons?

Download this icon set now!

If you’d prefer these icons without the sketchy dashes in them you can download this version (courtesy of Lorissa Shepstone).

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.

And therein probably lies the art & science of releasing a freebie; you need to actually release something that is representative of your business’ excellent services & products. If your freebies look like half-assed hack jobs, then that’s going to reflect badly on your business and it’s definitely not gonna convert the freebies users to paying customers. I also think that online peeps actually see through low-quality freebies which are simply released for traffic; people simply expect better.

So to sum up this “science” of the freebie, here’s a checklist you should consider before releasing your new freebie out into the wild…

• Why are you releasing the freebie? Are you doing it just for the traffic?
• What is the quality like? Is it in line with your products & services?
• Does releasing the freebie enhance your brand & its reputation?
• Does the freebie actually matter? Will your existing & potential new users actually find value in the freebie?

We’d love to hear what you think about this… Want to rant about low quality, hack job freebies? Feel free… And if you wanted to give us feedback on any of the WooThemes freebies and your opinions on their quality that would be appreciated too.

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…

Best-selling themes in the last 30 days (28 Jun – 28 Jul):

You needed to have these 5 themes in order (and we’ve included another 5 – which you didn’t need of course – to make up the Top 10):

1. Aperture
2. The Station
3. Gazette
4. Over Easy
5. Busy Bee
6. Fresh News
7. Feature Pitch
8. Suit and Tie
9. WooTube
10. Flash News

Surprised? I think the most intriguing thing to note from the above list, is the fact that some of our older themes (Gazette, Over Easy, Busy Bee etc.) are acting as some kind of flagship themes for us and are still selling really well. Whilst their dominance is being challenged by some of the newer themes (Aperture, The Station), I’d be surprised if these just stopped selling completely anytime soon.

The all-time list obviously makes for even more interesting reading…

All-time Best-selling themes (since 9 July 2008):

These are the 5 themes you needed to have in order (and we’ve included another 5 - which you didn’t need of course – to make up the Top 10):

1. Fresh News
2. Busy Bee
3. Over Easy
4. Gazette
5. VibrantCMS
6. The Station
7. Open Air
8. Flash News
9. Aperture
10. Fresh Folio

Not so surprised? Many of you actually guessed the Top 5 themes correctly, but couldn’t get it in the correct order… So sorry about that… This list however shows you what we’re talking about in terms of “flagship” themes that generally have a much longer-lasting appeal in terms of sales. This is of course evident since the Top 4 all-time bestsellers make an appearance in the list for the last month (whilst VibrantCMS was still in that list if you take sales from 28 May – 28 June).

And then – just before we announce the winners – it’s interesting to note that when looking at all-time sales and measuring the sales amounts vs the age of the theme, the Top 5 fastest-selling themes would be Busy Bee, The Station, Aperture, Over Easy & Fresh News… Interesting huh? I can honestly tell you, that one can get totally caught up in these stats, whilst trying to figure out what they mean… So here’s the winners then:

The Winners:

1. JohnONolan (submission)
2. Chris Gilbert (submission)
3. Ahmed (submission)
4. Mark T (submission)
5. Phil M (submission)
6. WP Themes (submission)

Congrats to the six of you. Drop us an e-mail and we’ll hook you up with a free Developer theme…

Also thanks to everyone else that placed a submission. We may try this again in coming months; so study the above figures well until then!

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…

The Rules

1. You need to guess our 5 all-time bestselling themes in order, along with the 5 bestselling themes for the last month (also in order). You can then add these in the comments below.
2. You do not need to guess both; we’ll be handing out two separate sets of prizes for these guesses.
3. You are only allowed one submission and multiple entries will be deleted.
4. The competition will only be open for 24 hours from the time that we publish this post.

Your Submission will thus look something like this (in the comments below):

All-time: 1. ThemeName A, 2. Themename B, 3. Themename C, 4. Themename D, 5. Themename E

Last Month: 1. ThemeName A, 2. Themename B, 3. Themename C, 4. Themename D, 5. Themename E

The Prizes

1. We’ll give out 3 Developer Package themes to the first 3 people who guesses either the All-Time Bestsellers or the Last Month’s Bestsellers correctly. So there’s 6 Developer Package themes in total to be given away.
2. The first person to guess both of these correctly (in one comment / submission) will receive a free Developer Club Subscription for 6 months (value of $300 USD).

Go for it…

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.

Here’s a preview of all 24 icons:

Now why would you use these icons? Well, beyond the fact that they’re very unique and extremely cool, Alex is already working on a more complete (approx 60 icons) icon set which will cover all of the “standard” web icons used within designs. So both sets will be in the same, distinctive style and you’ll have 80+ icons to use in your next design.

Download this icon set now!

If you’d prefer these icons without the sketchy dashes in them you can download this version (courtesy of Lorissa Shepstone).

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

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.

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!

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.

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).

1. Go to our themes page and select the theme you want by clicking the “Buy This Theme” button
2. Select your license (single or dev)
3. Then just enter your details and select the additional 3 themes you’d like!

Voila. Easy peasy.

If you are a previous customer and want to get more themes, you need to log in first and then go to our theme page to select which theme you want as your primary theme.

Act fast, this Christmas present with self destruct on Christmas Eve when prices will go back to normal.

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!

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.

Trying something new…

Along with the release of our first free theme, we’ve also decided that we’d like to try something new and open up our community to more prospective WooThemes users. So since this is a free release, we can’t include free technical support; but with our new 1 Year WooThemes Support Access package, you can now join in the fun and get the help you need.

Basically for a fee of $40 per annum, you’ll get access to all of our support resources and WooThemes community vibes for our free themes. We don’t think that’s a bad deal… Do you?

So what’s left to say? Preview the theme in action, download it and consider signing up for our 1 Year WooThemes Support Access package. Oh and please let us know how much you love us!

Hot off the press and in most UK newspaper/stationery stores is Issue 149 of Web Designer , the only serious tutorial-driven monthly publication dedicated to online creativity available in the UK .

Issue 149 focusses on the wonderful WordPress , giving you history and tips behind Web 2.0′s blogging behemoth.

We were approached by Web Designer last month and asked if we would contribute any of our WooThemes for this issue’s accompanying CD. After a brief chat Adii, Magnus and myself decided it would be silly to pass on the opportunity of marketing WooThemes to the huge following of this great magazine. After careful consideration we decided we would offer both Papercut and Proudfolio . That’s right two of our premium themes are avaliable for free with Issue 149 of Web Designer. Also in this issue is a step-by-step detailed tutorial on how to develop your own WordPress theme, albeit quite a basic one.

What are you waiting for? Make sure you pick up your copy today!