Here’s the categories we’ve been nominated in (click on the links to vote):

• Best Bootstrapped Startup
• Best International Startup
• Best Design

You can vote once per day until Tuesday, 13 December. Please click on the links above and vote for Woo!

Rockstar Business designed by Tim van Damme

I’ve been using the above design in teasing my book – Rockstar Business – in the run-up to its release and since it goes on sale next week, I’ll be retiring the design (which was originally done by Tim van Damme, who also worked with us on Antisocial) in favour of a new, sales landing page.

This begged a simple question to be asked: Could we release this theme on WooThemes?

The Possibility

The design has been perfect for publishing teasers of the book as part of the marketing campaign and as a self-publishing author, I’ve found this to be of immense value in creating hype leading up to the book’s release.

I’ve also received many compliments about the design of the site and Tim too had the following to say about the design:

It is one of the best designs I ever did and maybe the only one I can still look at months after launch and don’t regret a single pixel.

So at least you know that in terms of design considerations, this is a top-notch option… If this were however to be released as a theme here, we’d need to make a few minor modifications to make it generic enough to be used by many WooUsers. But…

It’s up to you…

The theme is obviously pretty niche & we’re unsure how many of you would actually use a theme like this. So you get to decide whether we’ll make this happen or not!

Vote below if you wanna see this design released as a theme here and we’ll make it happen automagically if you decide that, that’s the way to go!

[polldaddy poll=3765412]

A little while ago the guys over at RocketTheme – who initially served as a big source of inspiration for WooThemes (especially our club subscriptions) – announced that as of 1 January 2010, they will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6.

Whilst we all know that IE6 is the bane of any web designer / developer’s existence, here’s an interesting look at why this move would be viable:

According to w3schools.com, from the high in November 2003 of 71.2%, IE6 usage had dropped to 32% in January of 2008, and 18.5% in January 2009. By January 2010, this percentage should be around 6-8%. With the introduction of Windows 7 this fall, this percentage could be even lower. (via IE6 End of Life at RocketTheme)

And this is something we’ve been contemplating for a while now as well… Why? Because IE6 really is an ancient browser; especially in terms of how fast technology generally changes. If we were to drop support for IE6, it would mean:

• All future themes would not be tested in IE6; and
• Existing themes would however continue to support IE6 and we will provide support to users of those themes via our forum

We can most definitely not take this decision alone, as ultimately we need to keep you & your website visitors happy. So do you think we can drop support IE6 in future themes? Let’s have a bit of a discussion in the comments and also cast your vote…

[polldaddy poll=1950157]

So not to stroke my ego, but would you be keen for us to port this design to WooThemes and release it (most probably a free download) on here? I’m asking based on the feedback I got on the design and also the recent popularity of Mainstream, which is a theme / design in a similar mould.

Here’s what the design looked like (it will obviously need a few minor design adjustments before we could release it on WooThemes):

The previous version of my personal blog

The plan would thus be to integrate the WooFramework into the theme and along with a few design tweaks & some alternative colour schemes, we could be rocking out another free theme release.

So do you want this? Vote yes / now below and if you really love / hate the idea, leave a comment as well!

[polldaddy poll=1899254]

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…

In particular we’d like to thank Jake, Gould, Steve Robillard, Prashant and Brad Potter, who (in our opinion) contributed the best ideas and makes it into our little shortlist.

And now we just need you to vote for your favourite suggestion below…