The WooThemes Blog

It’s been a couple of (very busy & hard-working) weeks since we first launched our ExpressionEngine themes and we’re now glad to finally shift WeeThemes into it’s next gear. Considering that we are vastly experienced with WordPress, we’re taking a little bit longer to get accustomed to ExpressionEngine, but both our marketing & education is growing fast.

First change we’ve made is giving ExpressionEngine it’s own home here on WooThemes. You can now get your EE fix there – we hope it now becomes clear why you can (in future) consider EE as an alternative for personal & client projects.

Then more great news is that two of our best-selling business themes – Delegate & The Station – are both now available for ExpressionEngine. This takes our total amount of ExpressionEngine themes to 5, with more coming soon.

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Sheesh, it feels good to kickoff the newly, introduced Showdown Series (get the info here) today. We hope that all of you have been just as excitedly awaiting the start of a new, intereactive campaign, which promises to be a whole lot of fun.

So for the very first Showdown ever we are featuring two incredible modifications of The Station, which has been our best-selling theme for the last 3 months. The two designs squaring off today is the elegant DBDA Studio versus the funky YourMentalWealth blog. Let’s get into some critique and reviewing then…

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The Station has been one of our most popular themes since we released it about 7 weeks ago and as you should be now expect from WooThemes; we like to add value for existing users. So a few weeks ago, I contacted all of the current users of The Station, to suggest some improvements and new features and got a whole lot of great ideas…

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:

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After a day of frantic coding to get the last little bits of The Station done, I’m proud to present you with my latest theme offering – The Station. As you know, I don’t design much on WooThemes, but this time around I’m really excited to see what you will do with my creation!

At this stage, I must also give a lot of design credit to FRESH01 who polished the theme for me. He basically took my basic, unpolished version and turned it into something really eye-catching and hopefully special in all your opinions.

So what’s it about?

Without shame, I’d like to admit that The Station drew a lot of inspiration from the various Ellis Lab websites (such as Expression Engine). The main reason for this influence was their great (and trendy) manner in which they publish important information on the homepage, along with an extremely good information / navigation structure throughout their website.

So that is 100% where my focus was in designing this beauty. You can also be assured that this theme is intended to handle a helluva lot of information about your company, without a single bit of that falling off the way-side. A lot of thought and effort has gone into the different navigation spaces. We have also included quite a few options to allow you to actually customize all of these spaces.

The Goodies

Beyond the customizable navigation spaces, we’ve also included a spiffy new featured tabber, which allows you to emphasise the most important content (your most important messages). The rest of the homepage is also page-based, which gives you complete control over every character, paragraph, image & video that you want to include on the homepage.

I’ve also experiment with a new sidebar system, where you can choose between three different widgetized sidebars to be published along with the homepage, inner pages and blog-related pages. I hope that this will add value in terms of the choices that it presents to you: the user.

The Rest

Personally I’d love to evolve this theme and I can only do that with your feedback. So once you’ve played around with the theme, I’d be more than happy to listen to your suggestions. In the meantime, you can read up on the details of the theme, view the demo of The Station and consider signing up for our amazing club.

If you follow our Flickr pool, you would’ve noticed that we’ve been adding quite a few new theme concepts in the last couple of days. Now along with my own The Station concepts (the theme will be available next week) and Dan Rubin’s theme concept we posted this past week, we’d like to share three more upcoming theme concepts with you…

Feature Pitch

I have been enjoying putting on my design hat of late and ever since FRESH01 & Foxinni joined the WooThemes team, I now have some amazing skills to assist me. So for Feature Pitch (which will still get a more unique logo), I came up with the concept and then had FRESH’s help to polish the design and truly turn it into a top-notch WooTheme.

The theme’s purpose is simple: to sell your products / services. This is a promotional site, influenced largely by the way Mac Applications (see Things.app and Versions.app) are being promoted and sold. Also – to serve this purpose, we have actually gone for a much narrower design and the width is only about 800px.

I feel that this theme is something unique in terms of our current business theme offerings (only Productum comes close in purpose & focus), which means we’re only trying to offer you an even bigger variety when it comes to using the right theme, to promote your business in the best possible way. Here’s some teaser images:

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I just wanted to give you all an update on the development progress of my new theme – The Station – since we’ve been quiet on the matter since I posted the previews a few months ago. We’ve been doing quite a bit of upgrading work to our existing themes, whilst we’ve been trying to push through the backlog of themes concepts; which has meant that we haven’t had time until now to attend to The Station.

But with time, comes wisdom (or something like that); so FRESH01 and I have given the theme mockups a once-over to give it a much more polished and vibrant look. The theme has also officially gone into development this week and even though we won’t put an exact date on its release, we can now safely say that it won’t be too long before its release.

So here’s the updated mockups for preview… Let us know what you think!

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