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…

Headlines for business done the right way!

We love this modification of Headlines on iContact’s blog, because it uses the default sexiness that is packaged with the theme as the base and purely builds on that to achieve their business goals. Beautiful!

Here are some of the reasons for us punting the Showcase so fiercely of late…

1. It’s about recognizing your hard work. So first and foremost, we believe that the Showcase is there to recognize the amazing work that all of you are doing based on our default themes. This is important to us, because your work is really amazing and if we can just send a little traffic your way, we’d be very happy.

2. It’s about a community. No community is complete without a little bit of a profile & ranking system. The Showcase is thus a little bit of an ego-stroke for those that get featured and we think it spreads some of those warm fuzzies in having your modified WooTheme featured in the Showcase. Recent initiatives like the Showdown (which is in it’s 3rd week already) just further adds a little bit of interactivity to the Showcase and for that very reason (I think), the Showdown has proved to be extremely popular.

3. It’s about showing you what’s possible. I don’t think that we could conceptualize any kind of marketing campaign that would beat the value of the Showcase. Fact is, the Showcase speaks for itself in terms of the ease-of-use and customizability of our themes.

4.  It’s about inspiration. Do yourself a favour next time before you consider buying a WooTheme, check the Showcase and become inspired about using one of our themes for your website. Didn’t think it was possible to create a website with XYZ using our themes? Check the Showcase and think again.

5. It’s not only about design. We try feature as many modified WooThemes as possible, but it’s obviously not possible to feature all of them. We however don’t *only* feature the modifications that look great, because not every WooThemes user is an uber-designer by trade. So instead we feature modifications that are achieving the goals / aims of the business / organization / project.

So hopefully this will explain to you why we’re so proud of the Showcase. If you don’t visit it often, we highly recommend you do so… We’re probably adding around 10 – 15 new modifications to the Showcase on the weekly basis, so you can expect a regular flux of amazing, new content.

Ever since we first started WooThemes, all of you have shown us that you love modifying our themes, ripping them apart and creating incredibly beautiful websites. You just need to spend a few minutes on our showcase to understand what we mean.

So what’s the showdown then? Basically we’ll select two of these incredible user-modified versions of our themes every week and then have them square off against each other for the title of Showdown Champion. We’ll select the contestants based on submissions on our showcase and we’ll always select two contestants who used the same theme as the basis.

How will you select the champion? In every week’s showdown, we’ll profile the designer / developer responsible for the modifications and then write a little review to explain why we think their modified version is great. BUT thereafter it will be up to you guys & girls to decide which of the contestants will be walking away as the champion. We’ll include a voting poll on each post and you’ll have 3 days to cast your vote.

What can you win? We’ll give each week’s winner a $50 voucher to spend with WooThemes (on either a subscription or an individual theme package), as well as a brand-new WooThemes t-shirt, which we’ll start selling soon.

So sure, this is all about winning yourself some Woo-(street)-cred, whilst having some fun at the same time. We look forward to feature our first two contestants next week and hope that you’re just as excited about this as we are.

Battle stations ready!

GoMediaZine is a group of guys and girls passionate about art and graphic design. Their website is a great resource for any aspiring designer with a massive following. Recently they re-designed their website. We ask Jeff a few questions about why he opted to base their new design on a WooTheme.

Jeff, first up, we’ve got to say that GoMediaZine is our favourite modification of a WooTheme ever and you’ve become somewhat of a flagship of inspiration for us. Can you give us a bit of insight into the design?

Thanks, it means a lot.  I chose Fresh News because it had a lot of the functionality already built in and I just needed to tweak the look.  I didn’t want to just change colors. It was a big deal for me to infuse a little bit of Go Media’s rich illustrative brand but still keep it clean and well organized.  I felt a mild textured look was appropriate but I didn’t want to do a “grunge” design if you know what I mean.  I used elements from the memorable Concentric Circles Series that Go Media’s Oliver Barrett did 2 years ago that have become somewhat of a Go Media staple.  I figured it was an iconic image that people associated with us, so it fit perfectly.  And the hand-drawn-looking “hair” or whatever you want to call it is another design element that I have been using a lot in my work that people kind of recognize as a Go Media thing.  We have a “hair” vector pack that is very similar.  The choice of a deep purple was a new one for Go Media.  In the past, our Go Media sites have been focused on the yellow (which was initially part of our brand), which I honestly think is a hindrance.  I want to explore other colors, and naturally purple is yellow’s complimentary color, so it worked nice.   The texture came from the back of an old record sleeve.  Nice and dirty.

Considering that you guys are into design & development yourself, why did you decide to purchase a commercial theme, instead of developing one from scratch?

We went back and forth.  I’m not exactly an expert with WordPress and we also are so busy that developing our own custom sites takes forever.  The more we do web development jobs, we realize it’s not worth it to do it ALL yourselves.  It cut the time down immensely and I can focus on making a memorable website design, which is what I like to do.  I do know enough about WordPress to tweak and hack my way through to get what I want, and if not, I’ve got a few people I can ask.  So it seemed like the best option.  I had bookmarked about 10 different commercial themes, some more expensive, some cheaper.  But I went with Fresh News because it felt fit our needs the most.  It wasn’t “perfect” right out of the box, but it was damn close!

Relating to your previous answer: what do you see as the main advantages & disadvantages of buying a commercial theme?

The obvious disadvantage is that everyone else can make a similar site.  It’s a template, so other people are going to buy it as well.  If you can customize it to where it barely looks like the original, I think that’s a very good thing.  When you’re a company like us, it’s important to stand out from the crowd.  I was worried about that when I bought Fresh News.  But in the end, it can potentially be better for us because we can do Fresh News custom jobs for other people once they see what we’ve done with ours.  The main advantages are definitely the speed and ease of getting a working “pro” WordPress site without a whole lot of effort.

The ability to customize our themes extensively, is one of our main selling points. How did you find the process of modifying the theme?

It was fairly easy for me although I have a slightly advanced knowledge of HTML and CSS.  There were points where I was stuck and ready to give up, but I think that happens with just about every web job.  It was mostly all just a background image the overlayed PNG’s that make the theme really stand out.  It’s not too far off the original if you take away that.  I have since added some “sidebar widgets” to the footer because the original sidebar was getting too long.  That was something that wasn’t readily available in the original theme.

Lastly, what were your strategic aims with the new site and do you feel that the Fresh News theme has helped you achieve those?

We wanted to make it easier for readers to find our content and interact with our site.  Our pillar articles are our tutorials and guides/advice on running a design studio.  The old site was your typical blog site and it was hard for new visitors to even find those articles.  We wanted to take it up a level basically.  We also wanted to sell a little advertising, something our old site didn’t support.

This has thus resulted in the creation of a new section on our blog called “5 Minutes With Woo”, which will feature a quick-fire, 5 minute, 5 question “interview” with some of our users that we have showcased on the showcase (sounds a bit silly). The idea is just to give you some insight into the feelings of our users and their experiences with our themes.

So to kick this off, we have asked Steffan Antonas a few questions… Hope you find it interesting and find this new section of value, since we’ll be adding about 2 of these posts a week from now on. Enjoy!

1) Steffan, you have used Live Wire on your personal blog. Why did you choose Live Wire and how have you found the theme thus far?

Livewire is a magazine-style theme so it might not seem like a good choice for a personal blog, but I loved the 3 column structure and the post style elements on the blog-style layout. With lifestreaming becoming the norm, I wanted to be able to pack a lot of different kinds of content on my home page, but to also make the layout easy to scan to maximize readability. I didn’t want my blog to be just about my posts – I wanted to bring many different elements like Twitter, my photos and various lifestreaming elements to the foreground, and make my posts a part of the mix.

Livewire’s blog layout and post excerpt/thumb styling is perfect for packing a lot of content on your home page, while giving the site a professional, clean look – very few “personal” blog themes have this dense magazine-type styling, so I just tweaked the theme and added a widgetized sidebar to get as much mileage as I could out of the center column to make it work for what I wanted.

So far, the theme’s been great and the new design has been very well received. The site’s been featured on WP-Premiums.com’s main page, as well as the Best-Of-August roundup, on Mark Forrester’s blog and a few other smaller design blogs. All-in-all, since the redesign, my daily traffic has more than tripled and my subscibers have doubled.

2) Considering the wealth of great free themes available, why did you decide to purchase a commercial theme instead?

The choice to go premium, in my opinion, is a no brainer, because you get on-going support from the designer (and from support forums). I can’t speak for other Premium theme designers, but the Woo Themes team has really taken a lot of time and energy to make their themes compatible with popular plugins and services like Flickr and Feedburner. It’s a real value add, especially for people like me who integrate a variety of webservices into my blog. Blogging isn’t just a self-contained activity anymore.

People who use unsupported themes learn the hard way that code isn’t static – it’s always changing – WordPress is constantly upgrading, web services are always changing and plugins aren’t always compatible with newer versions of WP. Just because everything’s working on your end today, doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way. Just the other day, Flickr changed something on their end and something went wrong with the Livewire theme that had been working fine for months and I started having some minor formatting issues in all browsers – I went to the support forum and people were already talking about it. By the time I even realized there was something wrong, Magnus already had a fix and an updated style sheet available for download. My site was back, looking great in 10 minutes and I didn’t have to worry about it. That’s what premium gets you – peace of mind.

Also, there’s a lot to be said for being able to upgrade to newer and newer versions of WordPress as the platform continues to expand rapidly with no real worry that your site is suddently going to go down. When you go premium, the designers do a lot of that coding and testing before you even have to worry about it.

Finally, having a back-end theme options panel was a huge draw for me – it saves me a ton of time and make WordPress work like a system. The less I have to get into the code, the better. That extra mile taken by Woo Themes to integrate a lot of the functionality into thier admin panels is a huge value-add for me as a blogger – easy feedburner integration, flickr, video, ads, number of posts per page, layout, styling…it’s all there. Love it!

3) Do you have any web development / design skills? How would you rate those skills?

I’ve been coding HTML and CSS for years and I’m a photoshop semi-pro, but I left the design world about 5 years ago for a different career. Since then, I’m largely self taught so there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge with PHP, but I get by and just do it for fun now. By today’s standards, on an amateur to rockstar designer scale, I’m smack in the middle when it comes to coding and closer to the professional end when it comes to adobe’s design suite.

4) How did you find the theme from a customisation point of view?

It wasn’t that tough, but I had to hack at it a little (don’t we all?). The structure is logical and obvious to someone who’s used to web development and coding, but I wouldn’t recommend a novice attempt to make major structural changes. It would get messy fast.

The CSS however is gorgeous – it’s logical, commented well, and easy to follow and edit – just how coding should be.

5) Anything you’d like to add for existing & prospective WooThemes users?

I want to see other lifestreaming elements be brought into the WooThemes portfolio. Progressive personal blogs are doing a lot more integration with third party services. Blogging is becoming less about posting long thoughtful articles, and more about mixing long posts with microblogging and lifestreaming. I think you’d see a lot of personal bloggers invest in themes that offer built in life streaming elements (stylized twitter streams etc).

I’d also like to see integration with popular commenting services like Disqus and Intense Debate. I still havent gotten this to work on my site, but both commenting services are SO much better than WP functionality ever could be.

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.

As our registered users are aware there is a showcase forum in our support forums where you can submit your customization of a WooTheme for others to view. A showcase gallery, viewable by all our site visitors, is in the pipeline for the WooThemes website, but we hope this will suffice for now.