All the latest news and announcements, straight from the WooThemes HQ!
WooFramework gets Shortcodes
37
12. Aug, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Development
We’ve seen many comments about WP shortcodes on Twitter, and on a few blogs lately, so we figured whilst everyone was talking about it, we’ll just get going on implementing it.
The latest update to the WooFramework (which now takes it to version 2.9) features the addition of shortcodes for a variety of buttons, info boxes, related posts, as well as some social bookmark buttons. The idea behind the shortcodes is that it makes it easier for you as publisher / website admin to re-use certain popular elements within your blog post, without having to worry about re-doing large sections of code (that’d just be mundane).
An overview of the elements you can create using our new short codes
Continue Reading »
WooVille #1: Real Innovation
11. Aug, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooVille
Many of you have asked us about the inner workings of the WooTeam & WooHQ and whilst we have blogged about this every now and again, we’ve maintained most of our secrets.
WooCons #1: 170 Free Web Icons
10. Aug, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Freebies
Everybody loves a free web icon set and we love releasing these once in a while. After seeing our WooFunction icon set has notched up almost 60 000 downloads thus far, we felt another web icon set was long overdue. So we set out to find an awesome designer to work with us…
Similarly to finding Tyler’s work for our upcoming tumblog theme – Crisp – we stumbled onto Janik Baumgartner‘s work on Dribbble and immediately got in touch with him to work with us on a new icon set. And to say that we’re pleased with the results, would be a complete understatement of the awesomeness in this icon set.
Continue Reading »
Crispy Content
10. Aug, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Theme Concepts
After seeing this Dribbble (and seeing how well it was received by the Dribbble community) by the talented, young designer, Tyler Galpin, we knew we wanted to release this on WooThemes. So we contacted Tyler, purchased the design and it has been in development recently…
What to expect? Well, Crisp will be a hybrid between a personal blog and a tumblog (available on WordPress only; not Tumblr) and you can expect minimalism, perfect typography and an amazing canvas for your new content. Here’s a teaser…
Maximizing Value & Revenue
04. Aug, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp
Since our beginning we’ve opted for a very simple strategy: maximize both value & revenue for every single WooThemes customer.
This means that we are constantly looking at ways in which we can improve your experience over & above the purchases you have already made with us. So it’s kinda saying that you make the decision to buy X from us, but we’ll give you X + 10.
And this approach obviously has a knock-on effect: we create more loyal users who spend money with us more regularly. This is both profitable and it allows us to repeat the process of re-investing in value additions which we don’t necessarily get paid for (directly).
Try this in your business.
Estate V1.1 Roadmap
03. Aug, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Development
Since releasing Estate 2 weeks ago, we’ve been inundated with feedback, suggestions and feature requests, which in our book means: you are using Estate & loving it. 
Our strategy with Estate’s release was to get it into your hands sooner – rather than later – so that we didn’t need to do guesswork in terms of what features & functionality you would need. You see we can happily admit that we’re not real estate agents; so we’re keen to take our cue from you guys & girls (who are far more experienced in real estate) in what we’ll be including in Estate next.
We’ve therefore been taking all the feedback we’ve been given and have prioritized the additions / tweaks that will make it into V1.1 Estate (which should be available soon). This is what’s coming up…
Continue Reading »
New on Drupal: Optimize & Gazette Edition
02. Aug, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
This month our ever-growing Drupal themes collection grows both by something old (read: classic) and something new, with the addition of Optimize & Gazette.
Since release, Optimize has been extremely popular, which also means that it is already been made available on EE before. So porting Optimize to Drupal was a very obvious decision for us, as it provides some awesome business value for your Drupal installation.
You also now have quite a choice of our best-selling business themes (on WP) available for Drupal and you most definitely can’t go wrong with one of these: Optimize, Inspire, Delegate or Coffee Break.
Continue Reading »
Tell Us: How do you use WooThemes?
02. Aug, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Interactive
We’re working on a few new things (non-themes related) in the WooHQ and as is the case every now and again: we require your feedback & help!
You know that we build our themes up to be broken (by you) and that we want you to modify the heck out of our themes as much as you can (hence why we’re so proud of the Showcase). So we’re fascinated to get to know & see how you are using our themes and if you have a couple of minutes we’d love to hear from you!
Continue Reading »
Business Beacon
30. Jul, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Theme Concepts
Following up with a quick 1-2 after yesterday’s release of Unite, we have another awesome theme that’ll be with you soon.
Our business themes are by far the most popular range of themes on WooThemes (did I just use “themes” 4 times in the same sentence?), which means that a month without a new business theme almost feels kinda weird…
Sealight (by Chris Rowe, who also designed Spectrum) is our shiny new theme which is geared at being the beacon within your business. So expect to want to change your business website when Sealight is released soon. And then here’s the teaser so long…
Delivering happiness… errr… themes
30. Jul, 2010 by Mark Forrester in Interactive
Adii, Magnus and myself are all reading “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Hsieh of Zappos at the moment, and we are all avid fans of Tony’s personal/hands on approach to business.
At WooHQ we all keep a close eye on the emails we receive, whether they be good or bad, happy or irritated users. In that way we can continue to add value, find purpose and direction, and in turn deliver happiness to our users.
We love receiving glowing testimonial emails from WooTheme users dotted around the world, it makes our pixel-pushing, computer-bound work more personal knowing we are delivering our products to actual human beings, not just zip files that we deploy to the interwebs.
We received this one from Mark Simmons on his experience with the Aperture theme and we thought it would be great to share these occasional “happiness” emails we receive with you our site visitors.
Continue Reading »
United!
29. Jul, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
Microblogging is still catching flame like a house on fire. After our foray into this type of themes – and the popularity of Retreat amongst others – we’re now venturing into that field again with our latest theme, Unite.
Unite was collaboratively designed by the pixel perfectionist Rogie King and it offers you a sweet, minimalist canvas on which you can create and showcase your content. The minimalist design is unobtrusive, which also means that your content can do all of the shining (here’s a reminder to implement a great “content is king” strategy). So we’re saying that this makes Unite great, but from your viewpoint this may all seem a tad dull… Maybe this would’ve been true had we not spent a lot of time adding some new bling to other aspects of the theme…
Continue Reading »
Our “Apple-like” Strategy
27. Jul, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp
If you are anything like us, you like two things: 1) Apple; and 2) learning from other great companies & entrepreneurs. So when we came across this post about Apple’s recent success (and their strategies in this regard), we figured it’d be a great idea to latch onto that and explain some of our strategic decisions in the last year.
Taken from Jason’s post, here’s how we have applied some of those strategies in a very similar way…
1) “You don’t need to be first.”
You should know by now that we have a “release when ready” mindset with regards to putting out new stuff, which means that sometimes things simply take longer to see the light of day. We also love innovating and pushing unique awesomeness your way, but we have never tried to be the first to market with everything.
This is probably most evident in our recent real estate theme – Estate – which most definitely isn’t the first to market. We’ve been more than happy to bide our time and develop something that will blow your mind, instead of trying to rush a product simply to be first. Quality takes time; sometimes you’ll be first, other times you won’t.
Continue Reading »
Tweaking the user experience page by page
26. Jul, 2010 by Mark Forrester in Blog
When we are not designing themes here at Woo Headquarters we are tweaking and improving the process of delivering those themes to you. At least that’s what we were doing last week.
We thought it would be a good idea to document the changes we implemented last week with the honest reasoning behind the user experience tweaks. First let’s have a look at the theme listing page, as it was last week:
The theme listing page, prior to the UI tweaks
After much deliberation we decided we weren’t entirely happy with the user interaction process required when buying our themes, and the confusion of having four call-to-action buttons taking you to the checkout page.
Continue Reading »
Break to Build
22. Jul, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Interactive
We’ve always been massive advocates of enabling WooUsers to customize the heck out of our themes. Customizability is one of the key selling points of our themes – thanks to the solid codebase that is our WooFramework.
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.
Uniting Conversation
21. Jul, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
Here’s another teaser of an upcoming theme that we are extremely excited to release very soon… Unite was designed by the uber-talented Rogie King and it’s been unfortunate that this one has been sitting in our backlog for so long, BUT it’s only because we’ve had to develop something superbly unique to make the theme truly special.
When Rogie initially designed the theme, he had a vision for a commenting system that would change the way that readers commented on a blog post. To say that this was a challenge integrating would be an understatement, but Jeff has done amazing work to make this a reality.
For now though, you need to be content with a graphical teaser instead…
Continue Reading »
Estate: Your WordPress Real Estate Solution
20. Jul, 2010 by Mark Forrester in New Themes
More than just a theme!
Estate (formerly known as Realtor; R.I.P.) – the WordPress real estate theme solution is finally here!
The WooTeam (especially Jeff & Cobus) have spent months in perfecting Version 1 of Estate and we’re so excited to now hand this over to all the awesome WooFans to try it, experiment with it and obviously: build your next WP-powered real estate website using Estate.
One of the main reasons that Estate took a little longer, and required more love (in comparison to our other themes), is the fact that we’ve included quite a bit of niche functionality that we had to develop specifically for Estate. So it wasn’t just a case of mixing & matching code from our existing themes; nope, we had to develop Estate from scratch. The other reason for this development process relates to all the new custom post type & taxonomy goodies in WP 3.0 that we’ve utilized, because we wanted to release a real estate theme unlike any other WP theme that you may have encountered up until now.
Continue Reading »
