We’ve just released a great addition to our business theme portfolio called Sealight that we teased a couple weeks ago – with some new features seeing the light of day.
Sealight was originally conceptualized and designed by the talented Mr. Chris Rowe, who we have worked before with on numerous occasions – the personal blog theme aptly named “BlogTheme, and the magazine themes “Spectrum” and “Gotham News“. So it was only a matter of time before he designed us a business theme.
Sealight boasts introduces some unique features to our business theme portfolio.
For the featured slider that we have used in a few of our themes before – instead of using posts/pages tagged with a specific tag, it know uses a custom post type called “slides”. Simply add new slides and they’ll appear in the featured slider. Similarly the home page has a module dedicated to information boxes that can house features/services your business/product offers and a cross-fader testimonials module quoting happy customers/clients – both of which have a custom post type dedicated to them (“Info Boxes” and “Testimonials”).
There are some beautiful alternate color styles that Kirstin has cooked up for the Sealight users. Best thing to do is have a squizz over the theme on our demo server, view the theme listing page, and then make the decision – how can Sealight not be a good fit for your business website?
The Wonderful Sliding Options are proved, Obviously this is a professional business Website for showing great products!
Please consider adding custom post types to Canvas. That would make my year. 😀
They would only be needed for the Canvas Biz slider right?
Yep, but that would be very useful
Why not also for the magazine slider? 😉
Regards
Kristoffer 🙂
Magazine slider posts Are normal posts though… What benefit would there be in having custom post type for that slider?
I agree. The magazine slider should not be a custom post type. You generally want those to show up with all the other posts and be tagged and categorized in the same way. That functionality is already worked out well in Canvas.
Its kinda okay looking, but not that great.
Your other business are better..
And even the default color scheme isn’t that pretty as you say… (I’m sorry Kirsten, no offense, its just what I think)
And that paper background behind the ‘info boxes’ really doesn’t look good..
But it does integrate nicely with WP 3.0. It would be good if the design improves a bit….
But I do like the work done on Inspire and Apz. Its really good.
Also last thing I wanted to say is that… the Featured slider would have some more transitions other than the regular sliding one… then many of your business and magazine themes would become a must buy.
I have seen some really nice themes on ThemeForest that have these beautiful sliders… some also with 3D styles.
It would really be good to see some of those on your existing themes.
I hope Chris Rowe, you don’t take my comment as negative.. I am just telling what I think.
Good Luck 🙂
Thanks for your “constructive” feedback 😉 Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I for one think this looks smashing.
I’d agree with most of that. Really isn’t a very elegant looking theme.
I see you guys using some lateral thinking for new themes, but core categories like business and magazines are all beginning to look very alike in terms of structure. Any room to broaden out the thinking on these?
Sure, what do you have in mind?
There are just lots of different, fresh biz site structures out the. DropBox for example has a very minimalist design (which I think is WP).
All the business themes are geared to selling a product/web service. How about taking a look at what the modern service (eg accounting/law firm) site might be like. Would be less visually engaging but would need much more attention paid to the content structure and layout.
The current themes are reminding me of the way themes followed web trends too blindly in the Web2 and ended sites ended up with rounded corners on everything, massive fonts and a lime green palette.
Hope this is seen as constructive, many of your themes are really great and I use Headlines.
How many users would use a design similar to Dropbox though? Probably not many, which is also probably why we tend not to release such themes.
We’re attacking some new niche businesses soon, but if you have a look at our Showcase you’ll see that our business themes are being used by many types of businesses (online & off). I also believe that something like The Station would be perfect for an accounting / law firm. But hey, that’s just my 2 cents… 🙂
Actually I agree with Judo, maximum of all your business themes have the same structure, like:
The header
Features Column (slider)
Content
– Some info boxes with icons
-Sidebar
Footer
Why not experiment with a theme and make it completely unique. Like have:
Header
Some large Text space (just to put an impression on the viewer)
Featured column (some really cool transitions)
Then an Info space with no sidebar… but rather than having icons, have images on top of the info content… Something like SquareSpace’s website has…
(This info space can be full width)
Then some space for some content or maybe for latest blog post, also this space can have a sidebar… for stuff like Twitter and testimonials.
Finally a simple minimalist footer… makes a really good end to a beautiful theme.
You guys can try some stuff like that… making something different than the some old traditional Woo business themes. I know you guys can figure out something even cooler and better.
I know these kinda layouts sometimes get tricky… but I also know that you guys are big developers and you will find some way out.. I am just a small designer and I can only give you suggestions… 🙂
And I am pretty sure that many of your customers may really love something really different from Woo..
Good luck 🙂
We are all for experimenting, but we also know from experience what works good for business. You can expect more themes that try to be a bit different than the standard formula in the future though 🙂
Well that would be really nice 🙂
I totally agree with all the feedback here, this really does feel like the sort of theme that gets churned out daily on themeforest and other WP factories…
I really don’t think the whole feature slide fad amounts to much more than just that, a fad. I mean, be realistic, how many sites do you know and use on a frequent basis that use the slider gizmo in whatever shape or form? Very few, and yet it has almost become a standard element in the premium market.
So the point is, we know what the standard themes types are. We know how they work. We know how much they sell for and roughly how many of them we might sell. If that is the case, designing “outside the box” is hardly rocket science.
My advice would be to do some research into cutting edge, popular sites, that don’t fit any of the standard theme layout criteria and come up with a list of plausible variations.
You could even come up with a series of wireframes and float them by your community here with a little polldaddy action – better yet, include it as an item in your email list and get your audience involved in the creation process…
Developers and designers in the premium market are so frightened of losing market share, so afraid of taking risks, that they’re in danger of losing sight of a key factor at stake in all of this: the love of design.
Final thought: Woothemes has been a lead player in WP Premium theme dev, that’s not in question, you’ve had a really good run, but my gut feeling is that now’s the time to pause and take stock and plan for a new lease of life that will guarantee you some mileage while competitors continue pumping out the status quo…
That’s my $0.2
One of the main reasons why we’ve been successful is because we have stood firm with regards to our strategies. Magnus has mentioned this above, but I’ll reiterate: after interacting within this community for 3+ years now, we know what works in terms of WordPress themes and as long as users continue to purchase these kind of themes, we’ll continue to release them. 🙂
To illustrate this point… James says sliders are a fad, but Christopher wants us to release even more themes with some unique & flashy sliders. So what do we do? We go with the option that sells more themes.
Supposed “innovation” just for the sake of innovation means nothing to no one. The value of innovation should be measured by how much value it adds to a group of users with the same needs / wants.
I agree with you in that we could try to be more innovative here at times, but do consider that 90% of our work should be in keeping 90% of the users happy. This means that we can only pursue the more niche categories in the left-over 10% (as an example).
Hi Adii,
we’ve seen some really positive responses to sliders and some that are not so hot.
You’re right to stick with what’s right for business and what people come back for.
I think those looking for amazing design miss the point. We take your infrastructure and add our designs to it. What we’re looking for are flexible, smart systems.
There are a heap of stunning designs out there in Themeland, but not a lot of them work very well – lots made by designers that don’t understand content management, client requests or let’s face it, business.
I’d be really keen to see iPad slider support built in to WooThemes sliders and magazines. A really good magazine theme that’s functional in both standard browser and iOS – particularly on iPads – would be a killer theme and get us LOTS of business.
Just planting an idea that I know is already there if you guys are talking to @PadPressed in any way, shape of form.
Cheers and keep up the amazing work.
Thanks for the words of support.
Will definitely check in with what the @PadPressed guys are doing. 🙂
Great stuff – it looks like jQuery Mobile will be the tool of choice and if you can add swipe actions to sliders and pinch controls to images pages then you’ll be doing most of the heavy lifting.
iPad ready WooThemes – particularly directly into Canvas – would be awesome.
Thanks for the reply.
What you call innovation for the sake of innovation is much of what underpins the history of humankind. Not all innovation is utilitarian or quantitative in its application, much retains a purely theoretical character – sometimes even bordering on the absurd. I think you’re confusing innovation with economic strategy, supply and demand. More often than not, innovation exists pre supply and demand, in non-commodifiable form.
And when you say 90% of your work should be in keeping 90% of the users happy, you make the ‘should’ sound like a moral imperative, when actually it’s entirely your choice to produce market-driven design. In light of the critical feedback here and on previous theme releases – and let’s recognise that it has been courteous and constructive feedback driven by real end-user concern – what remains unclear (perhaps even to you) is the extent to which your audience is actually happy and the extent to which you’re willing to actually listen. I wouldn’t be so pretentious as to apply that to my own comments, but I do feel that you could all do a lot more to show gratitude to your readers for their invaluable contributions (again mine not included). Then again, perhaps my own expectations are too high.
All this may sound like a rant or something, but don’t get me wrong, I’m a big woothemes fan, and I support your work. I think I’d just like to encourage you to break new ground with WP themes.
@James
The way to understand how the Woo forum and feedback system works is just to repeat after me: “Woo knows best”.
I don’t bother to contribute ideas here anymore.
This is one of the first theme’s I have seen in some time with no search feature at all. I was hoping to find the new ‘estate’ search functionality built within the theme, but alas, it’s not there. (would have been a great learning experience to see how to adapt estate search into new custom post-types and taxonomies.)
With the new estate search functionality being so much more powerful than the standard wp search, is there a reason you are not including it within all your new releases?
It’s like you released a killer new set of functionality only to abandon it on the very next theme release. Rather confusing.
Not confusing at all imho. Estate’s search functionality is perfectly suited to Estate and I can’t see the value that such an advanced search would add on a site using Sealight’s suggest data structure.
What “advanced” search criteria do you think the average user would need?
One case scenario:
Use the slider ‘slides’ as a post type dedicated to specialty products, say ‘wordpress themes’. I would use the slider to feature the latest available themes, yet there would be hundreds of other themes behind the scenes in the slider post-type.
–which brings up an important point:
Why is there no built-in archive page for the slider ‘slides’ post-type? (actually all 3 post types are a complete mess code wise)
It’s only a matter of a few rewrite rules and a couple of template files to provide the archive and single view.
-scenario:
Using the ‘info boxes’ post-type as ‘manuals’ pertinent to each of the themes for sale.
Obviously a user would want the ability to search through the info post-type for manuals that belong to a theme that they are interested in.
This is only one basic off the top of my head scenario. I can come up with a few hundred more if it makes a difference.
–I think the point I am making is this theme is deciding what is important to me as the admin, and not myself. As woo has already developed such great technology, why are you handcuffing me like this with no search ability?
Now I have zero use for this theme so it really doesn’t matter to me what you do with it. I simply go through the new releases looking for new ‘goodies’ that push the boundaries of wp.
Like the dedicated post-type slider, is kind of a neat new concept.
It’s not about handcuffing anyone, but there is a major flaw in your logic: every scenario you described above will be specific to *one* user’s needs. There is absolutely no way that we can create a general theme for general use to use any kind of taxonomy structure with advanced search.
For Estate it obviously works out well, since the search is specific to properties and thus specific to the aim of the theme. But Sealight can literally become anything and there’s no way (beyond the way of coding a complete new CMS solution & platform) to make the functionality that you are after generic enough.
The bottom line is: there is *always* a place for custom development and our themes should be used as a starting point or a building block, instead of a complete custom solution (as that it will never be).
I hope I’m making sense here…!? 🙂 If we could, we certainly would add as much functionality as possible into every theme, but we don’t because we need to protect the needs & requirements of the majority of users. For the minority that needs to extend beyond that, custom development is the way to go (for now or until we find a way to make some functionality more generic).
On first review, Sealight has a simple front end with some new back end features built around WooThemes “Ease of use” ideals. Instead of coding a custom page to “look and feel” like the demo’s features list a backend WYSIWYG tool.
“Make it look however you want and we will make the code easy to modify with our built-in tools” seems to be the axiom for the newest, most popular designs. This is WooTheme’s biggest asset in my opinion.
I edit a PSD file, create content, modify the custom CSS, and hand off to the client. After a little training, they are off and running! They are doing daily updates, nav bar changes, making edits to marquee pages, and slew of other tasks no other WordPress or CMS system will allow without knowledge of code. It truly empowers my clients to make their website a platform to market their business daily.
Thanks for the new theme! Keep innovating!
Contrary to others, I actually like the look of Sealight. Certainly can’t please everyone all the time, but I would imagine your showcase speaks for itself – easy-to-customize themes.
To me, the color scheme is almost secondary though to the overall features of the theme, and this is where you guys continually shine. I really like how you guys leveraged custom post types here, and that really helps me help my clients, especially the featured sliders and testimonials.
A detail which many might overlook, but I thought was an excellent touch, was the image of the homepage with the overlay of labeling of different areas. I think that’s something to consider doing more often in the future because it really helps put in my mind what the possibilities are for this theme (what’s hard-coded vs more free-form).
Keep up the good work!
We have a slider on our site’s home page ( http://www.icanlocalize.com/ ). When I first got it, I was excited. Now, I don’t think it’s such a good idea.
With auto-animation, it’s plain annoying. Nobody can pay attention to anything on the screen because of the animating slider.
Without auto-animation, people only see the first page of the slider and think that this is the only thing we’re doing.
Take great businesses like:
http://www.ibm.com
http://www.adobe.com
http://www.verizon.com
They have many different services, but they don’t feel compelled to putting them on a slider and running by me. Their sites let me choose what I want to see.
Sliders look great, but I think that they’re bad for usability.
I agree and that was exactly the point I was trying to make earlier.
Amir,
Not for nothing, but Verizon.com does have a auto-animating slider on their homepage.
Maybe sliders aren’t the most usable thing ever, but they do have their use & value. They’re also all over the web; so for now we’ll be sticking with them. 🙂
It’s a good thing that designers stick to their own. ‘design by committee’ where everyone throws in their 2 cents and the designer complies with everything produces dull designs that are good for nothing.
Having said this, I think that some more work should go into the usability of sliders. I’m not a usability expert, but there are many out there. I’ll invite folks we’re working on to join the discussion and throw in their ideas.
A small point, but IMO not enough sliders have pause on hover. This should be default, as the alternative is annoying to say the least.
Congrats on another top notch theme!
I agree with John. I like the explanation overlays for the same reason. In addition, I always look for the lorem ipsum in the demos to actually be real text that explains the options of that particular section. In other words “This section is controlled by a widget. You can change button colors in the admin panel…”. That would really help me choose a theme and visualize it’s possibilities.
As far as the other feedback on this theme, I don’t know how everything got so critical and negative, but I think Woo continues to cater to the 90% AND the 10% very nicely. Rock on guys.
Thanks for the kind words. 🙂
And we’ll definitely be looking to upgrade our demo’s accordingly in a way that they are more explanatory.
Well done Woo Team well done!
But don’t you think it’s time to add more transitions to the slider? This question is not just for this theme. It’s a general one. I think all your themes that include slider have only one type of transition. Adding a few more transitions to the slider would add value to your themes and besides would make the themes more appealing.
So, what do you say?
Maybe, but this is considered to be the standard, which means it is the most general solution, which most people prefer using. 🙂
But perhaps we’ll have a play around for some future themes.
Hi,
first of all, I am not impressed with the looks of sealight but i really like the use of custom posts in this theme ! I would love to see this implemented in some of the existing themes, e.g. inspire, coda or optimize.
Hi,
They would work in Inspire and Optimize for the slider (which uses pages) and for the front page mini-features area and testimonial section. But I can’t see anywhere in Coda they would work, as Coda uses posts for all of it’s slider posts and other front page posts. Where do you see custom post types being used in Coda?
I know that Codda is a magazine template, but i like the design very much and i can think of it as a cms with slider and a feature area based on custom posts instead of recent posts.
But it’s not designed to be a CMS, so changing that would kind of be only for your personal needs 😉 We can’t just add custom post types and change how the theme operates, as that would not work for all the other users.
I know that 😉 I will take a look into sealight and try to modify coda for myself, because i have a nice project and coda will fit perfectly.
Nevertheless would it be nice to see more templates with custom post types 🙂
Agreed, custom post types are great where they serve a purpose, so we’ll be sure to include that for upcoming themes.
Lets be honest latest theme is rather drab and SAFE.
The additional scheme really look like an after thought and not truly realized. I have watching things carefully for the past couple of months and I think now is the time to download all of themes on my subscription and cancel it.
Because you said “WordPress themes and as long as users continue to purchase these kind of themes, we’ll continue to release them.”
So you are just going to regurgitate the same formula over and over again with very little freshness to the business theme set?
The reason we haven’t included more than 5 alternative styles is the theme includes a set of styling options that make it easy to style it how you want: http://cl.ly/629972dc7162b2647662
It’s hard to please every customer, so we try to cater for all tastes, so we can’t guarantee you will like every theme unfortunately 😉 We see a lot of users requesting out of the ordinary business themes, so we will surely look into more non-safe-formula themes in the future, and hopefully please those with non-standard taste buds 🙂
Magnus its not about ” those with non-standard taste buds ” Its a case of different day same theme. Also its not about ” out of the ordinary business themes”
Its about some fresh thinking not the same exact formula. Header – Slider – content – footer.
You guys should look elsewhere for inspiration and give us something NEW. Surely by the feedback your getting in the blog entry its obvious people want more.
I am going to download the themes and cancel the Sub as I have everything I need already?
I hear you James, and although we do try think out of the box, that won’t stop us from creating standard formula themes (like Sealight, Inspire, Optimize) as these are much requested. Hope to have you back as a subscriber one day! 🙂
BTW with the red colour style, the background image does noch really fit the backgroung colour.
Thanks for spotting that 🙂
Addi,
You have mentioned you have stood firm, over you business direction. I respect that. Part of the reason why you have been SO successful, is because you business direction was ahead of its times, and it matched your themes. which were at the time simply amazing.
BUT not times have changes, and loads of people are churning out great themes, and it is a difficult job trying to please everyone, BUT having similar themes is really not good enough (sorry)
As a long standing Woo themes developer subscriber I urge you to do a LOT better and push the boundaries as i know you guys are capable off. This theme is a write off and i will never use it.. sorry
So… That begs me to ask the question: Which theme (and why) would you buy instead of Sealight?
Addi tepoint was this theme is PERFECT but not PERFECT FOR THESE DAYS… it like all other themes that were cutting edge back in the day but these days with so much offering from other places.. woo needs to keep up.. so many people cant be wrong can they?
If you recall you apple like methodology that you claim your business upholds, well apple are great for one thing.. foreseeing demand.. and anticipating a niche.. and making things extremely functional yet ground breaking..woo themes these days is not ground breaking ENOUGH…
my $0.02 worth.
I understood that point, which is why I asked you to elaborate on what you believe a “cutting edge theme” is. So I’d love some examples, even if they’re from competitors. But I’m truly & sincerely interested in how you define that term as this would help us better understand your needs for future themes.
cutting edge idea, pasted from the forum:
That’s a concrete & constructive suggestion and one that I’m happy to say is already on our radar. 🙂 In fact, you may just see us announce a collaboration with John Hicks in the very near future…
A few other, ‘cutting edge’ examples:
example of taxonomy term selection via ajax, also includes multiple views on a single page, (click the layout button)
http://www.fancast.com/full_episodes
generic wordpress vs. of the same concept
http://www.kriesi.at/theme-overview
A few great concepts:
http://elastictheme.org/
And of course we cannot ignore:
http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/carrington-build/
Basically theme’s are not just theme’s anymore. It’s functionality and extensibility. Pretty pictures n layouts get really boring very fast.
Heck, why not go all out and build a drag ‘n drop squarespace style theme framework?
Most of your users seem to be screaming out loud for functionality vs. cookie cutter template releases.
another amazing example: (estate remix)
Now this site kicks butt!
http://www.cocosuites.com/en/suites/Spain/Barcelona
check out the detail page complete with ajax:
http://www.cocosuites.com/en/suites/Spain/Ibiza/Ibiza-Gran-Hotel-Grand-Suite
Now that is how to use custom taxonomy ‘ajaxed’ search.
This concept would apply to just about any theme model that has a large amount of data behind a custom post-type. (shops, estate, music, vids, you name it)
I really hope this one inspires woo a bit
Thank you shwn that is pretty much what I meant as well!!
Rather fugly and confused theme. 10 thumbs down.
Very constructive feedback, thanks. 🙂
Adii… I know your kinda pissed, but everyone’s got a point here… 🙁
We are not pissed at all, we enjoy constructive feedback. But we don’t enjoy subjective feedback without constructive criticism.
What Magnus said.
An opinion simply for the fact of having an opinion doesn’t add any value. We’re more than happy to consider any kind of comment (irrespective of how subjective that is), but it needs to be constructive, otherwise it’s of no value to us.
Dear Woo Company,
You guys are saying that till people will buy these type of themes you will continue to build them. Am I right?
I just wanted to say that around 2 years ago… you guys used to stand out of the crowd since at that time there weren’t many themes that used to have business and CMS functionalities. Most of them used WordPress just as a simple blog.
And you guys brought cool themes that had a lot of CMS and business style features… and that were very unique during those days..
But since then you’ve done nothing much… you still continue to make the same old templates.. (I am talking about your Business theme range)
There is nothing unique about your business themes these days.. hard to say but you haven’t developed much when it come to Business CMS style designs…
I have seen many other themes that have really unique and better designs on ThemeForest and other WordPress theme makers…
But sure you got better admin panels and stuff which makes you guys better… but if your designs are gonna be old school and unimpressive then all of your hard work on making it more functional just goes waste.
And if talking about sliders then sliders are okay… but it would be nice to add some more transitions. And also these days all of your themes have a slider… again making it the same, just like your older themes…
These days there are also many slider plugins…
like this one: http://codecanyon.net/item/ddsliderwp-11-transitions-slide-manager-panel/109211
I think Sliders are a thing of the past…
Please Woo I hope you take my comment as positive and do something about it.. because I don’t know whether by doing this you are gonna get new customers… but definitely you will lose a lot of existing customers..
Good Luck 🙂
I gotta say I have to agree with the overall sentiment on this.
Just saying, “hey folks still ’em so we just keep building ’em” isn’t a very forward looking approach in my opinion.
There is definitely a disconnect in the quality of the themes. The new formats, such as real estate and mobile apps are top notch – beautifully designed and very well thought out.
All we are saying is that we’d love to see that kind of innovation and thinking in the magazine or business themes.
Okay, I’ll entertain that sentiment… How do we innovate in this regard (in your opinion)? Got any examples of websites that you would like us to emulate?
Well since you’re asking, I do have a couple things I’ve been praying you’ll release.
1.) The email sign-up site where the entire upper slider area is actually a giant email sign up form (could also be done by adding an alternative for the slider section on your business sites)
example: http://10coupons.com/
2.) The Directory. Man do I have a need for a directory theme. Restaurants, hotels, bands, instructors, you name it. Some need Map integration, all need custom post types. Basically a generic/multi-purpose Estate or just some way to search by multiple criteria.
3.) Speaking of coupons, they are really moving into being a huge thing these days. It would be really niche but how about a module/theme that makes downloadable coupons with expiration dates?
4.) Classifieds! Here’s my current site. http://www.musicvilla.com/usedgear
This theme works fairly well but is glitchy and FAR from Woo. You guys would absolutely KILL this theme.
Thoughts?
Just downloaded and installed the new theme for one of the websites I am working on. I saw in your demo a pricing template, but can’t find anything in the theme or in the instructions to this template.
What am I missing?
Great work.
Interesting discussion here today, for sure. Not presuming to know anyone’s perspective other than my own, I’ll throw a thought into the mix…
Woo’s themes are the easiest I’ve used when it comes to customizing themes for an end user. Now, there are other theme foundries out there that have what I’d call “more polished” themes out-of-the-box, design-wise… and that’s great, too. It all depends on who you’re designing for.
I prefer starting with Woo’s themes, which tend to be, generically speaking, more simply designed. They’re much easier to chop/cut/slice/modify in all kinds of ways, versus the themes that are designed for very specific purposes – on those, I can’t change a thing without the whole thing falling apart. I’ve customized themes that have more design flourishes, and they end up being a pain to deal with (not to mention the hassle of the coding structures they use – no where near as clean as Woo’s, imo).
If I wanted a theme to just install and go, I might look elsewhere at times. But if any personalization is going to be done (which is is, in 99% of cases) I’d much rather built on top of Woo’s foundations than any others out there.
I simply share this for people who may be wanting a “plug-and-play” theme that’s designed to the nth degree; you may be happier elsewhere. (After all, if you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to no one.) But for what Woo does, I think they’re the best. I see their path of innovation, and I appreciate it greatly – it makes what I do so much easier.
Just my $.02.
Agreed… When I use the Station, I’m squinting to look at the structure to see how I can edit it to fit my clients’ needs. Same goes here with this new one. Structurally I see some real possibilities for building nice solid business sites. I’m not overly fond of the color themes, and the lined-background in the content area has got to go (really!), but with just a bit of tweaking I think this theme will look and PERFORM great.
I believe it was said above, but what you get with Woo is dependable performance and ease-of-use on the back-end. I like to have some brains with my beauty…
And sliders, or “billboard animations” are here to stay–get used to it. 🙂
Thanks for the support guys; this means a lot coming from two guys who have customized a heck of a lot of WooThemes for clients & personal projects. 😛
“If I wanted a theme to just install and go, I might look elsewhere at times. But if any personalization is going to be done (which is is, in 99% of cases) I’d much rather built on top of Woo’s foundations than any others out there.”
I can certainly see how a designer/programmer with the skills would like a bare-bones site to start with. Sure, if Woo wants to only target that market, fine.
I don’t know what the Woo user demographics are – but for myself, I became a huge fan because I’m an artist and graphic designer who doesn’t have enough of the coding knowledge to do a lot of customization beyond changing a background color. I want a stylish theme that looks great with a few MINOR tweaks. Even if I had those skills, my time is spent better creating content then coming up with a new design. I would think I’m not alone in my needs.
Please know that I have been a huge Woo fan. You have some great themes – but I have to agree with some of the criticism. I prefer your older themes. The new ones mostly look slick and, masculine. When I was recently thinking of getting a new theme for a new blog I just started, I was looking through the newer releases, and couldn’t find one I liked. I actually found myself thinking maybe it was time to look at what other companies are offering. I ended up using Fresh News again, which I’ve always loved, but it needs a little feature love (footer, more ad space) so I will probably have to get some customization.
I can completely understand how you need to build themes that appeal to the broad rather than the individual, but I do hope you also release some that are more design oriented as well.
Personally, I think you need a woman on staff with a more feminine eye. (not girly like royale, but classic yet fresh with a touch of feminine curve.)
I think this is a good conversation – and I think it’s correct that you’re getting this feedback because people are such fans. Who would bother following you on facebook and the blog posts if they weren’t. 🙂
This themes is gorgeous from a design standpoint. Great attention to detail without over designing. Nice work =)
Glad you like it Brandon! 🙂
The notebook paper lines background has nothing to do with the overall design. You should change it or add a solid color, just my two pennies 🙂
Nice looking theme…
We like that whole feel of the design. You can easily change it to solid color if you don’t like it 🙂
I’m a long time Woo follower and customer, I go back to 07′.
Let me first echo a previous commenter by saying how impressed I am by the overall quality of feedback here. Congratulatory or critical, it is evidence that people actually care, and it speaks volumes about the relationship you’ve built with your customers. I say this, because as you know, most Internet comment sections are flame war/troll grounds.
That being said, I do sympathise with a lot of the criticism being made here, even though some of it might be said with more zeal than reason at times. I think the urge to see Woo push the boundaries of WP theme innovation comes from people’s real passion for what Woo has accomplished and what the brand stands for. It should be seen as support and encouragement rather than knee-jerk negativity; a testament to your success rather than an indictment of your professional shortcomings.
I think there’s another source of discontent at work here, one that stems from the rapid rise of “theme factories” (as someone put it) and the growing realisation that the way things are heading, WP runs the risk of being foreshadowed, even outweighed by large theme makers that put profit before community and numbers before innovation – in short anxiety over the survival of WP under its current constitution and ethos. This was clearly the main overtone that surfaced during the recent Pearson Vs. Mullenweg debacle.
Given this context, it’s hardly surprising that Adii’s “90%” note was met with such scorn. The suggestion (admission?) that the Woo audience is seen as a percentage, a number on a flip chart, rather than a disparate body of valued individuals with individual needs was, to some, a rude eventuality. While it may be true at a strategic business level, it’s not something a customer (or potential customer) wants to be reminded of. Add a touch of general complacency and begrudging tone to some of the Woo responses and you have a recipe for outrage.
This is 2010, never has business been more about transparency with and caring for your customer base. Feigning the attempt just won’t stand; partly because legacy travels at the speed of light on the Web, but more importantly because the people voicing opinions here actually do care, they are your livelihood, and at the very least, they deserve your FULL attention.
Oh and by the way, rarely has a blog title been so unwittingly prophetic…
Inspiring comment. Thanks so much sharing & inspiring! 🙂
And your comment is directly related to this: Open Forum.
Really nice theme,great work.
I am suprised how much of a negative reaction this theme has elicited on this thread.
So the theme is similar in structure to others out there? Yeah, that is OK. Many business actually need the familiar conventions for their sites rather than confuse users with overly innovative features. It is the content that ultimately differentiates for most.
I am customising this theme for several clients and have actually switched from a different theme maker. A big reason for that is because the back end Woo options are unambiguously simple for the client to retain the control they want that allows them to reduce reliance on a coder for content management.
Improvements? How about offering image values for the previous/next slider controls (important for multilingual sites also) Also image options to replace the form buttons in the theme options.
No theme will ever satisfy 100% of users, I think Woo have made a good call on this. I like it and I bet lots do that do not comment here.