I was specifically thinking of our “Custom Logo” function, which is included in every single theme and allows the user to quickly & easily replace the theme’s default logo with their own. No frills, no fuss. This isn’t a very glamorous feature and as far as usage goes, you’d probably find that almost all WooCommunity users have used it. The development that went into the feature is also minimal, since it’s not the most complicated function that ever needed coding. This obviously also means that support enquiries for this feature is pretty much non-existent.

Could this be the perfect feature? Maybe.

We’re not saying that we don’t believe in the more expansive, elaborate & complicated features which we include in themes like Listings, SupportPress & the likes. But in the search for which theme features are most used across the whole WooCommunity, simple may be best. Less perhaps sometimes is more.

What is your favourite WooThemes feature? What simple features do you think we should include in more themes?

We already hear some of you groaning, half-expecting us to announce a massive new release (like a WP theme that is a 100% clone of Facebook or something to do with e-commerce), but that was unfortunately never gonna happen straight after the holidays. Heck, we’re still getting the sand / snow out of our hair (some of us spent the holiday in sunny South Africa, whilst others were in less sunny Europe)…

Back to Biznizz

In 2011, you can expect a handful more releases like Biznizz purely because our business themes are our most popular, and as a result we’ll make sure to give you as many, amazingly designed options as possible. The feature sets for business themes are pretty standard, and instead we’ll focus on spicing up the design and then including the odd new, perhaps niche feature.

Biznizz' Beautiful Homepage

So let’s have a look at Biznizz‘ design, the beauty of which is most focused on the custom homepage. The homepage showcases probably the biggest featured slider we’ve ever developed (or included in a theme), but we figured that with the right graphics, your visitors / customers will be completely unable to ignore your marketing messages (in a very Jedi mind trick kinda way). Further down you’ll see the same kind of mini features – icon / symbol along with some copy – that have been very popular and is also very prominent on our homepage. In addition to this, there’s enough space to have a biggish section for your blog posts, as well as a widgetized sidebar to do just as you please (and with our Sidebar Manager you’ll have even more control).

For the inner pages, you’ll find that everything pretty much adheres to what we consider to be best practice and you’ll even find that most of those layouts are modeled in a very similar way to how our own website looks. Which brings us to another point…

Just Like WooThemes

We get so many e-mails asking whether the design we are using on our own website is perhaps available as a theme. The answer has always been “no” for two reasons:

1. There’s too much custom design & development work that has gone into the theme and it would thus never work for as a generic theme for thousands of users; and
2. We prefer to be unique in the exact same way that we recommend to all our users that they modify our themes to suit their own brand / identity.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t release a theme that is at least close to our own design. In the past, we had a handful of options that you could consider if you wanted a design that closely resembles our own: Inspire, Optimize & Coffee Break. When we were however working on Biznizz, we realized that we might have subconsciously stumbled onto something here…

Side-by-side comparison of the Biznizz & WooThemes.com blog pages.

Biznizz – as mentioned above – is incredibly similar in layout & flow to our own site and we think that if you wanted to replicate what we were doing on here, Biznizz would be a great option for you. We’re not suggesting copying us (or anyone else), but a winning recipe stays a winning recipe…

So consider starting of this new year with a brand new look for your business website. Check out Biznizz’ other features and have a look around the demo. Beyond that, enjoy our first release for 2011!

As a bonus for sharing this trip down memory lane with us, we’ll include a few teasers of the stuff you can expect from us in 2011. So here goes…

Themes

We wouldn’t be WooThemes, if we didn’t consider our various theme releases and related developments as being the foremost of our story this past year. This is an overview of the most awesome stuff we did:

• In February we released Canvas, which has become both our flagship theme and also the best-selling theme in 2010. We invested a lot of time in Canvas this year and we will continue to do so in 2011, with BuddyPress support and child-theming being two things that we will be addressing.
• One of the most significant areas of development for us in the past year, was most definitely our tumblogging / microblogging themes. We first launched these themes in March, and since grew our collection to 7 tumblogging themes. This was followed by the launch of the WooTumblog plugin & Express.app in October, which has signalled our intent for some continued improvements / enhancements in this space early in 2011. And to cap off a great year of innovation for us in this space, we’re extremely happy to see a bunch of other theme developers building themes on top of the work we’ve done.
• In addition to our tumblog themes, 2010 was also the year in which we really went niche for a couple of our themes. A few highlights include the most advanced real estate WordPress theme, Estate, the DIY restaurant theme, Diner, and finally our build-your-own directory theme, Listings. All of these niche themes have been wildly successful and you can expect a couple more moves from us in this space next year.
• In August we announced our collaboration with WPBundle, and after months of incredibly hard work we finally launched WPBundle in December. We’re proud of WPBundle because it’s a whole new concept within the WP community and as a result we’re just happy to fuel more innovation within the WP theming space.
• 2010 was however also the year that WooThemes finally grew beyond just WordPress with quite a few releases on other platforms. In January it was ExpressionEngine, March saw us jumping on the Tumblr bandwagon,  April we finally got around to the widely used Drupal and finally in late 2010, we managed to roll out a couple of ecommerce themes on Shopify & Magento.
• All-in-all, we released 27 new WP themes, 7 Tumblr themes, 11 EE themes, 10 Drupal Themes, 3 Shopify themes & 3 Magento themes in 2010. Not a bad haul we’d say…

Development

At the very beginning of the year, we promised to tackle both the small & bigger problems / features during the year, and we’d be surprised if anyone thought that we didn’t achieve just that. We’ve spent a lot of time doing the “ungrateful” & unnoticed work and our development processes have been affected by including more & more awesome features in our themes. Regardless though, 2010 has been a massive year for us on a pure geeky / development front:

• Contributing to the WordPress core has to rate quite highly on most WP developers’ list of “like to achieve, before I die”-things and we managed to do just that. We initially developed the WooNav which was eventually committed to the WP 3.0 core as WP Menu’s. This was such a big personal achievement for us and we’re still the only premium WP theme developer to have made such a significant contribution to the WP core.
• The WooFramework was a big focus for us in 2010 and we kicked this off by releasing V2 of the WooFramework to all of our themes in January. This was followed by the incredible SEO functionality additions in June and the even more incredible Sidebar Manager in September. Those are just a couple of things that WooThemes users received absolutely for free this past year and you can expect much the same in the new year.
• We also did quite a bit of work that surrounds our coding and in April we launched the WooCodex, to help you guys & girls bend, break and utilize the WooFramework. This was followed up by a big improvement to the Theme Documentation in May and the first batch of new tutorial videos towards the end of the year. Again, you can expect us to continue upping our game in this space in the new year and we’re incredibly keen to increase the value of our support resources drastically in 2011.

General

On the lesser noticed “general” front (hey, 90% of what we do is design & development related), we had quite a few highlights as well:

• Our mobile officing experiment was extremely successful and even got Woo on the Slopes featured on Mashable. Not bad for a company retreat, eh?
• We made quite a few waves on the mainstream tech front and this was highlighted most when we were featured on 37Signals’ blog in their Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud series. This is most definitely something that we cherish and it also signals our intent of being the most awesome company we can be.
• We also did our best in giving back to other awesome projects that deserves a bit of a financial boost. Both The Rockstar Foundation & the Kill the Spill campaigns received our backing in 2010. Two very worthy causes and we’d love to replicate such contributions in the future.
• Along with all these serious things, we also managed to cram in a few fun things… We redesigned our mascot, the WooNinja, and launched the WooVille cartoon series. You will most definitely see more of the WooNinja in 2011 and we’ll continue to give you an exclusive, behind-the-scenes & tongue-in-cheek look at our company via the WooVille cartoons. All work & no play makes Jack a dull boy.

So as you’ll see, 2010 was a pretty massive year for us and we definitely did a whole bunch of awesome things. And we’re sure you’d agree with us that the value of being of a WooThemes customer has just continued to increase.

That said, we definitely didn’t manage to achieve all of our goals in 2010 and we ended this year with quite a difficult month after the severe DoS attacks on our server. One of our biggest regrets for 2010 is the fact that we didn’t get to launch WooCommerce, which is currently #1 on our list of priorities for 2011 (more on this in the first week of January). We’ve also been working on a complete new membership backend with a few exciting additions, yet this too has taken longer than expected.

These are however the things that we’ll take on the chin, we’ll learn from them and we’ll be a bigger, better and more awesome WooThemes in 2011.

Kids: Don’t do drugs & say no to Defaulto.

After we heard that WPBundle’s Kickstarter project failed to reach its goals, we contacted Liam (lead designer & co-founder at WPBundle, who we had worked with a couple of times already) about helping out with the project and making sure that it actually launches. The end-result of a few hefty discussions is that WPBundle will now officially be “powered by WooThemes” and we’ll be working side-by-side with their team to bring you even more awesomeness!

The Nitty Gritty

We’d like to get into some nitty gritty with regards to our collaboration & joint venture, as we’re sure that you’re gonna have many questions…

Firstly, we can mention that WPBundle will remain a separate entity & project all-together, and even though it’ll be powered by WooThemes, we haven’t acquired them or any of that jazz. We are simply working with them to combine some of our resources to release themes that are truly great.

The extent to which we’ll be combining resources includes: WPBundle themes will be developed on top of the WooFramework, we’ll be integrating our membership backend with theirs (so that both sets of users can benefit from the other’s products) and we’ll be doing some cross-promotional campaigns. Logically you can see WPBundle as an independent, sub-division of WooThemes if you like (contradictory, but it works).

So themes on WPBundle will only be available on WPBundle, and our themes won’t be made available on WPBundle either. Our subscriptions too will be untouched in this regard, and WPBundle’s releases won’t ever become available via our club. You can kinda compare WPBundle’s releases to that of MacHeist every year.

The First Bundle

Liam & his team have been working on the themes for a while now and they’ll soon be able to do some internal beta testing. We’re hoping that the first bundle will see the light of day in September, but you know how these things go sometimes…

What’s important is that we’re very excited to release the first bundle with the WPBundle crew and the 10 core themes that will be included in that first bundle are sure to blow you away (teasers here).

What’s Next?

For now (unfortunately for you), you will need to wait patiently for us to get the first themes ready… As soon as we get closer to release, we’ll be publishing more details on pricing, availability and all the other bits & bobs that you are bound to want to know.

In the meantime you should obviously follow us here to get the latest news, but we highly recommend that you tune into WPBundle directly, as they’ll be publishing teasers & smaller updates there more frequently.

Finally: we hope you’re as excited as we are!?

For those that didn’t follow the conversation, we’ll quickly provide a bit of a recap:

• Opinions on the latest theme release range from it being great, to it being not so great (this is specifically being leveled at the design of the theme and not as much the functionality which most consider to be awesome);
• The criticism seems to be that we aren’t being innovative enough with our themes – particularly our business themes – and that other theme providers are doing this much better than us;
• Our strategy is to release themes that meet the requirements of as many of our users as possible, and as a result we try to avoid going overly niche when designing new themes;
• Furthermore, we always need to find the balance of the features that should be included in a theme out-of-the-box versus what should be left for custom development should single users require very specific / unique functionality.

That’s been the discussion up until now (you may want to read through it yourself to catch all the little bits). So what now?

This is where we need you to speak up; but not just in terms of adding your voice or having an opinion, but providing us with some clear, concise & constructive feedback about how you feel we can do the following: 1) improve our themes; 2) add innovation to our themes collection; and 3) increase your value when using WooThemes.

You can do this by giving us some exact examples of websites (in terms of design & feature sets) that you would like us to consider as part of our inspiration, or directing us to other WordPress themes which perhaps already scratches your itch (an itch that we aren’t scratching at the moment).

So please shoot with any thoughts, ideas, suggestions or feedback that you may have. We look forward to engaging with you.

We know we should’ve done this a long, long time ago, but when things are moving so quickly (and you’re releasing 3 / 4 awesome new themes every month), the smaller things tend to fall from the radar. But better late than never, right?

The Playground is a WPMU setup, which allows you to test-drive our themes and experiment with the backend features (which has been impossible on our demo’s). So if you’ve been contemplating buying one of our themes, you should seriously consider playing with it first and making sure that it’s the right fit for you.

So… We’d like to launch a new initiative, whereby our themes will be translated into as many languages as possible. There’s obviously a lot of value in this for us and we’d like to reward everyone that actually contributes some translations to the project. How cool would it be to have every WooTheme available in 20-odd languages?

You can help! If you read / write / speak English, as well as another language you can help us out and translate any of the themes we have available. We haven’t limited this to WooThemes-only users, as all of the .po files have been made available here. We think the reward for contributing should persuade enough of you to help us out here…

We would’ve loved to do this ourselves, but unfortunately we’re not as multilingual as we’d need to be to handle this internally. So we’re hoping we can count on all the Woo fanboys & girls to work with us to improve our themes even further!

First up, we’ve tried to create a new space for you to keep track of all the different teasers / previews that we’ve posted on the blog. This “Themes in Progress” page is also accessible from the navigation menu’s in our footer and you should check there regularly if you want to drool…

Secondly, we’re getting through us much work as possible in the next 2 months, so that we can have a bit of a rest in December & early January. So whilst we’ll be blogging, releasing new themes and providing support during that time, we won’t be working overly hard on new stuff. Everybody needs a break ya’know…

And lastly, we wanted to tease you a little more before we leave… We have been working with 3 awesome designers – Veerle Pieters (2nd time), Sam Brown & Sarah Parmenter – on 3 new & unique designs which we will probably preview in the next week or two. We also unexpectedly purchased a design submitted to us by a very talented, young designer Ajmal Eylia last week. So there’s another 4 new themes which we need to show pretty soon.

Your only choice is thus to stay up-to-date.

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…

Whilst it’s our job to make decisions about what kind of themes to release next (and judging by the growth of WooThemes, we’re pretty good at that), we thought it’d be good to put this out there to all our fanboys and -girls and get your opinion / feeling on this… So just as a matter of recapping things, here’s all the “types” of themes we’re releasing at the moment:

• Personal Blogs. These are generally designs that are inspired by traditional blog layouts. The best examples are Abstract and Irresistible.
• Magazine / Content Heavy. So basically these kind of designs are geared towards blogs / websites that publish large amounts of content on a regular basis. Our best-selling themes in this category are Fresh News, Busy Bee & Gazette.
• CMS / Business. Quite a high number of our recent themes have been geared towards businesses and helping them achieve their strategic goals. The best business themes are The Station, Over Easy & VibrantCMS.
• Portfolio. These themes are generally aimed at designers / photographers / artists who blog, so the theme itself is a combo of a portfolio with a written blog. The best examples from our portfolio range is Fresh Folio & Proudfolio.
• Multimedia. So this is a little bit of a more diverse label, as it includes video blogging & photoblogging themes. This is also probably the type of themes that we should expand in the future. Our best multimedia themes at the moment are Aperture & WooTube.

What’s next then?

From the teasers that we have showed you, there’s a portfolio theme, a photoblogging theme, a personal / lifestream theme (similar to Tim van Damme’s own website) and a theme for bands / musicians (multimedia). We’re also releasing a new personal blog theme (for free) and a portfolio theme (by Dan Rubin) before the end of July.

In addition to those, we have 2 magazine themes, a business theme and 2 “girly” blog designs in the works (with our various collaborative partners, along with some in-house design goodness). But the question remains: What should be next?

We would really want to hear from you about what kind of themes we should be designing. We’ve got a bunch of awesome collaborations lined up with amazing new designers, but we’re not sure what to ask them to design. So use the comments and tell us (with examples preferably) what kind of designs you’d like to see us release next. Go on. We know you want to…