Jeep is using Busy Bee for their official blog

In recent months, we’ve been seeing more & more big brands using our themes (like Jeep above or Ford pictured below). Obviously we’re ecstatic to have 45k+ users using our themes, but somehow knowing that our products are also becoming the choice of the elite & A-list is gratifying on a whole new level. I mean – wouldn’t that stroke your ego too?

What’s the big deal?

If we had to dig deep and thoroughly evaluate our feeling in this regard, we’d say that having big brands & companies using our themes, is significant for the following reasons:

• Retail brands such as Nike endorse big name athletes and celebrities, because that personal endorsement has massive publicity and public relations value. Jeep – as an example – is now doing the same thing for us.
• A company as big as Jeep, should have a rather attractive web budget, yet their web designers decided to use one of our very affordable themes. We can only believe that their decision is based on value for money. Extreme quality perhaps only has to cost you $70…

We are proud advocates for our own product – heck we use our own stuff, so seeing other big brands & companies using our themes solidifies our biased opinion

Ford using Canvas (!!) for their Campus Rail Jam Tour

Know of more brands running on Woo?

At the moment, we’re relying heavily on submissions to the Showcase to find out who is using our themes and how. Every now & again we randomly stumble across a site doing a Google search and are pleasantly surprised to see our theme in use and it’s creative implementation. But we want to see more…

Do you know of any prominent brands or companies using our themes? Maybe you’ve stumbled on an amazing WooThemes modification recently, don’t assume we’ve seen it, let us know.

The Salvation Army of Canada is using the Gazette theme.

John Smit - our South African rugby captain is using a modifed version of our Irresistible theme.

This tweet by a WooThemes fangirl, Lara Dickson, sums up our mission in this regard quite elegantly:

Dear @woothemes, I love you. I can tear you apart, build you up again, and you never complain. Love, Deepdish

We never complain, in fact we encourage it. Our Showcase is a major source of customization inspiration for WooTheme owners, we are hugely proud of enabling our users to do whatever they want with our themes.

You should try it sometime…

If you have a look at AUS120, Cubicle Ninja’s & Kirstin Pauk’s websites, you’ll note that these guys obviously knows what they’re doing. What makes these even better, is the fact that all of them are based on an original WooTheme; so judging by this, I’m sure you’d agree that they have enough experience to tweak our themes at will…

These guys are also included in the list of 14 (currently) available Affiliated Woo Workers which you could contact for help in getting really extensive modifications done to your WooTheme. Between those 14 freelancers / agencies, we’ve gotten a heck of a lot of submissions on the Showcase and there’s enough evidence around that they’re worth the money they get paid.

So for first time WooThemes user, we’d seriously suggest considering working with one of these Woo Workers. We are quite strict when it comes to including new people / agencies on the list, as we want to ensure that they provide top-notch quality to our users.

But if you’re comfortable hacking away at our default awesomeness, please do so over and over again!

New Features in V1.1.0 of The Station

Here’s a brief run-down of the new features in The Station, which you can also see live on our demo:

Integrated Woo Framework Backend & New Theme Options

So The Station is the first “older” theme to restrospectively get the brand-spanking new theme options backend we’ve been rolling out in our last few themes. Here’s a little video to show you how this looks and explain the new options we have implemented:

Alternate Featured Slider

Everybody loves the featured tabber on the homepage of The Station (right?), but we thought it’d open a whole world of possibilities for you, if we gave you the opportunity to seamlessly switch between a featured slider and the default tabber. Here’s how that turned out…

The News Station Magazine

This one is slightly more mindblowing… Ever since we uploaded The News Station mockups to our Flickr profile, we’ve been contemplating how to implement them. In the end, we decided to integrated this with the existing The Station theme framework and just allow you to switch between the default business homepage & styles to that of the magazine look.

Just look how hot that turned out:

More…

Those 3 are the biggest additions to V1.1.0 of The Station, but there’s a few smaller additions & improvements that we’ve included as well:

• Integrated Content & Sidebar Video Player (view screenshot);
• 2 New Woo-specific widgets i.e. 125×125 Ads & Sidebar Video Player;
• Improved jQuery for the tabber & sliders;
• All content on the homepage now uses the default .entry styling for typographical elements;
• Updated blog pages to include the post image using our brand-new post image uploading functionality; and
• Improved the drop-down menu’s to support more levels.

That’s fun, but how do I upgrade?

Unfortunately there’s no quick & easy way to do this at this stage, but part of the integration of the new WooThemes framework will mean that upgrades to newer versions of themes will be much easier in future. We’ve tried to limit the changes to backend / core files as much as possible; so you should be able to keep most of your front-end changes in tact throughout the upgrade.

We suggest that existing users of the theme, consult the included changelog and update only the affected files.

We’ve just made another value-adding feature available to all WooThemes user, in the form of approved WooTheme modifiers. Since the launch of WooThemes, we’ve built up a dedicated group of Forum Ninja’s that assist in running & maintaining the forums. From this group of Ninja’s, we are now approving the best one’s as official WooThemes modifiers.

This means that they can take care of all the modification work for you and then you simply pay them for their work. These guys & girls know our themes inside / out by now – so if you work with them, you’re sure to get a heavily modified version of our themes, that should look amazing enough to get into our elite showcase.

This service is only for modifying our themes. When you send your enquiry, remember to specify which theme you would like to modify and be very specific about what modifications you would like. You’ll have to purchase the theme before we will start modifying the theme for you.

So if you’re keen, you can shoot over to our Contact page for details on how to get in touch with them.

We’ve managed to put together our design showcase in record time and we are pleased to point you to it at showcase.woothemes.com .

Have a browse around some of our favourite website designs, leave some constructive comments for the webmasters and give the designs your personal star ratings.