We didn’t expect anyone to keep track of this, but it’s great to announce that today is officially WooThemes’ first birthday. It is exactly a year ago that we launched WooThemes from the now-defunct Premium News Themes.

A few highlights from the past year includes:

• We released 30 new themes (that’s 2.5 new themes every single month);
• We collaborated with the absolute best-of-the-best designers;
• We have added 3 new permanent members to the WooTeam; and
• About 3 weeks ago we finally launched version 2 of WooThemes (WOO2)!

Pretty WOW, right?

And this wouldn’t be a party if you couldn’t join us in the fun… So instead of our usual x-for-1 promotion deals (which has been targeted at new users), we’ve decided to say thanks and give a little something back to our very loyal WooThemes users. This is what we’ve come up:

• Buy any Standard Package theme for only $15; OR
• Buy any Developer Package theme for only $25.

We know you want that… But here’s the rules:

1. You have to own another Standard Package, Developer Package or Club Subscription from WooThemes to be eligible for this promotion. This promotion is thus not available for new purchases on the 9th, even though you can buy any themes (for a new account) at the normal rate and then qualify to buy another theme on this promo.
2. Each user is limited to purchasing only one of these promo’s (either a Standard or Developer Package).
3. The permanent 2-for-1 (on Standard Packages) and permanent 3-for-1 (on Developer Packags) aren’t applicable.
4. The promotion is only available for a period of 24 hours and will officially close at midnight on 9 July (GMT – 10). No exception will be made in extending this offer.

How do you get this?

1. Log into your user account.
2. Then, on the Add Products tab, select either the “Birthday Time – Standard Package” product or “Birthday Time – Developer Package” product and click on Buy link (the green plus icon).
3. Complete the payment / checkout.
4. And once you have your 2Checkout transaction ID, please send us an e-mail (info[at]woothemes.com) with that transaction ID, your username and the theme you’d like to have added to your account.
5. Lastly – enjoy the new theme!

Hope you enjoy this birthday with us… Whilst you get your teeth into some extra WooThemes at amazingly low prices, we’ll crack open a round of few beers and ponder the things we can expect to happen in the next year…

Now, collaboration aside, we wanted to publish a post, where we could give ourselves a few warm fuzzies, along with a little (innocent) ego-stroking. We contacted some of the designers that we’ve worked with in the past and asked them one simple question: What do they think about their collaboration with WooThemes?

Here’s what they said…

Working with WooThemes is a pleasure every time. The guys run a well-oiled machine but they’re super friendly and always open to new ideas. In fact, the creative freedom the team give their designers is why I enjoy collaborating with them so much, and their respect for designers’ decisions is rarely matched by other clients.

Elliot Jay Stocks – Designer for Proudfolio & Backstage (upcoming)

Some of the nice things (of working with WooThemes) were the creative freedom and trust that was shown to me. Fast responses and feedback also made the process move along very quickly.

Tony Geer – Designer of SophisticatedFolio (upcoming)

WooThemes are awesome to work with. A lot of freedom, correct and stipulate with payments, and good feedback when needed.

Tim van Damme – Designer of Antisocial (upcoming)

The people of WooThemes absolutely let me do my own thing. They actually insisted on it, which makes this collaboration unique for me.

I often work with clients who have boundaries and constraints in place before they ask me to do the design work for their project. Working with WooThemes was totally different—I was free to totally express myself and be as creative as I wanted, while still focusing on solid graphic design. Their attitude and trust definitely made it a fun and cool experience. I was even able to name the theme. Because the experience was so great, I feel honored to have my name attached to this project.

Veerle Pieters – Designer of Abstract

Working with WooThemes achieved, if not getting really close to achieving, the perfect relationship between client and designer. They know what their market would like and provide the proper boundaries so that the end product is in-line with expectations without hampering creativity. It’s no wonder I constantly prod them for another opportunity, I had a blast working with them.

Bryan Veloso – Designer of Suit & Tie

WooThemes do a fantastic job of letting your creativity come out. I think they embraced my ideas and really gave me a lot of freedom in the design work. As creative people themsleves they understand the pressures on the designer, and realize how important it is to give proper ideas, feedback and communication. Probably the most pleasant working experience I’ve ever had.

Liam McKay – Designer of Papercut, Ambience & Cushy

Working with the WooThemes fellas wasn’t like working for a client at all. They provide some basic features they wanted to see in the theme, and a general direction, then basically said, “Go!” The design process was quite nice, since all three of them are designers themselves. If I was ever stuck on a detail or needed someone to bounce ideas off, they were quick to open up and return with helpful suggestions and feedback.

Matt Brett – Designer of THiCK

So based on that, I think it’ safe to say that we’re a pretty cool bunch to work with… What do you think?

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…

DBDA Studio – Link (David Bailey of DBD+A)

DBDA Studio

So I like these two modifications for two very different reasons. DBDA has gone for a much more minimalist approach with regards to modifying the default styling in The Station and the main modifications are the bright, diverse colour scheme and the featured animation on a modified homepage.

The colour scheme definitely gives one a very cheery feeling when browsing the site, whilst the featured message area – with its animation – makes a great first impression and also adds to the vibrancy of the site as a whole.

Why would we then feature this site if it hasn’t been overly modified? Because this shows that most of our templates are already well-designed and with just a little bit of unique tweakage, you can achieve a fantastic result. Need I say “less is more”?

YourMentalWealth – Link (Developer: Taylor Trask at Strategic Blend)

YourMentalWealth

In stark contradiction to the DBDA site, YourMentalWealth has received a massive overhaul of the default The Station styles. In fact, the new styles are so well executed throughout the whole site, that we needed to look at it very closely to know that it was indeed making use of The Station. Another thing that’s obvious from the modifications, is that a lot of thought has gone into designing something (and implementing that in such a way) that reinforces the overall look / feel of the site.

The (almost sea)-green colour they’ve used is not my favourite, but I feel surprisingly at home whilst browsing the site; so I think Taylor & his team deserve kudo’s for that. I’m also very impressed with the Shopp plugin, which they have integrated on the Shop page.

The Verdict

Overall, these are really impressive modifications and it’s going to be interesting to see which one you think is better. Remember that the winning contestant will get a $50 WooThemes voucher and a brand-spanking new WooThemes T-Shirt; so vote with your head not your heart. Here’s the voting poll then…

For everyone of you that has been involved in arguments / discussions / heated debates over the licensing & legalities of WordPress themes in the past 18+ months, you’ll know that it was probably the hottest / trending topic in the community. So to finally see the argument laid to rest, is definitely a very welcome change in my mind.

I’m also happy to see that the the Software Freedom Law Centre has announced that the images & CSS within a theme never inherited the GPL license of WordPress. Even though we are fully GPL-compliant now, we got a lot of bad vibes in the past for wanting to (rightfully) protect our designs; so it’s good to know that we at least weren’t entirely wrong for standing our ground.

That said, we’re happily GPL now and kudo’s must go to Matt & his team for continuing to fight for the cause in this regard; as irrespective how much this argument really meant for the WP community –  I think that the WP team’s spirit (in this regard) in general has resulted in us having an amazing platform, which we get to use for so many diverse projects every day.

Hatchet = buried.

Ever since we first started WooThemes, all of you have shown us that you love modifying our themes, ripping them apart and creating incredibly beautiful websites. You just need to spend a few minutes on our showcase to understand what we mean.

So what’s the showdown then? Basically we’ll select two of these incredible user-modified versions of our themes every week and then have them square off against each other for the title of Showdown Champion. We’ll select the contestants based on submissions on our showcase and we’ll always select two contestants who used the same theme as the basis.

How will you select the champion? In every week’s showdown, we’ll profile the designer / developer responsible for the modifications and then write a little review to explain why we think their modified version is great. BUT thereafter it will be up to you guys & girls to decide which of the contestants will be walking away as the champion. We’ll include a voting poll on each post and you’ll have 3 days to cast your vote.

What can you win? We’ll give each week’s winner a $50 voucher to spend with WooThemes (on either a subscription or an individual theme package), as well as a brand-new WooThemes t-shirt, which we’ll start selling soon.

So sure, this is all about winning yourself some Woo-(street)-cred, whilst having some fun at the same time. We look forward to feature our first two contestants next week and hope that you’re just as excited about this as we are.

Battle stations ready!

Making Money Online

I deliberately decided that the title of the post should be “Making Money Online”, purely because it’s still such a buzz-word for everyone looking to profit from an online venture. So the thing with our latest theme – Feature Pitch – is that it was designed to do just that: make you some money.

One of the things that probably frustrates me most – online & off – is that the salesperson doesn’t seem to get the recognition that he / she did in the years gone by. So whilst marketers (probably) have seriously devalued the skills and expertise of top salespeople, we still believe that selling yourself / your company / products / services is an art. With Feature Pitch we have thus tried to add a simple, yet effective tool to increase your conversions online.

If you have a look at the homepage, you’ll see that the design is reminiscent of a layout trend that have been made popular by Mac OSX applications in particular. The header includes a nicely emphasized  feature block to introduce your product / service, whilst the rest of the homepage contains smaller bits of information that will continue to enhance the supposed awesomeness of whatever you are selling.

The inner pages are uncomplicated in both design & function, and they were crafted with ease-of-use in mind. Once you have sold the reader on your product / service (on the homepage already), the rest of the website should read easily and the reader should jump into a purchasing process with a smile on his / her face.

We believe that Feature Pitch accomplishes all of that.

So if you have been using an out-of-date design, that just hasn’t been converting your leads into sales; we seriously recommend you give Feature Pitch a try. We don’t really believe in those “30 days money back guaranteed” deals, but we almost believe in Feature Pitch that much, to actually consider offering you something like that…

We also reworked some of the coding on the front page of the theme, so it now acts more like Busy Bee in functionality. To be more specific:

• You now don’t have to setup a “featured” category and add posts to it for them to look like featured posts.  Simply set X number of posts that you want to look like a featured post (basically just a bigger image). If you want them to stay featured, just use the sticky post function in WP.
• The front page now uses the standard navigation (prev/next) instead of a link to the archives, and if you install WP-PageNavi plugin, then it will also work like in our demo.
• You also have the option of showing the normal posts in 2-column default fasion, or showing them as 1-column posts, so it looks more like a blog.
• You can specify if you want the featured/normal posts to show the full content or only the excerpt of the post (default).

The next big improvement is that the sidebar is now widgetized except for the sidebar tabs. This makes it way more flexible than the older theme, and you have 4 widgetzed areas (Sidebar Top, Sidebar, Sidebar 2-col left, Sidebar 2-col right).

The video player widget is also a lot easier to use, since all you need to do is drop the embed code for your video into the posts “Custom Settings” field under “Embed”, and the widget will resize the video to fit in your sidebar and also resize it to show in your archive/single post. Check demo for examples.

See our documentation for instructions on the new features and also the changelog for current users who wish to upgrade their theme (also found in the theme zip file). There are a lot of changed/new files so if you haven’t done any major modifications to your theme, we suggest thatyou simply install a fresh copy instead of trying to upgrade.

So what did you do? Well, the previous set of affiliate banners – which have been around since we launched WooThemes for the first time in July 2008 - still had our “old” identity, instead of the slightly, polished new look. With the new banners, we’re also trying out some new tag lines / marketing messages, so we hope that those will prove worthwhile for your users (and ultimately increase your earnings from affiliate sales)!

To get an idea of what the new banners look like, have a look at these previews (the complete set includes 32 banners in 10 different sizes):

• 125 x 125
• 300 x 250
• 120 x 240

How does this affect your current affiliate links?

We’ve just added the complete set of banners to your affiliate dashboard (if you’re an affiliate already) and both the new & old set is still available to you. You can thus continue using the old banners (for now)…

But in 2 weeks’ time, we will be removing the old banners from the system and those won’t be active anymore. This means that by the 5th of July, you need to have switched over to the new banners, otherwise you may be losing out on some pretty nice affiliate commissions.

So the last time we posted some teasers, was way back in March this year (here & here) and from those lists we still have Feature Pitch & “Big Easy” (from Dan Rubin) in the backlog. Feature Pitch will be released next week and then Big Easy, along with Groovy Photo & Blog (from last year’s WooContest) have been scheduled for release next month. (Don’t hold us to that, because we’re a fickle bunch hehe…)

For this post then, we’ve got 4 amazing new theme concepts that we’re working on. You’ll see that we’re only showing you very small teasers in Part 1, but as soon as all 4 concepts are completed, we’ll be publishing more in-depth teasers of the upcoming themes. So here we go (in alphabetical order)…

Some Max Voltar awesomeness

Antisocial by Tim van Damme

We’ve been in love with Tim’s network design ever since we first saw it and apparently we’re not the only one’s that have wanted to create a design inspired by his original work. So we’ve been working with Tim to create a design which includes all of his network design’s elements, along with a little blogging & lifestreaming. The result is a very early concept called “Antisocial”, which is totally unique to anything we’ve released before. [Tim has also given his blog followers a little preview here.]

VIP Access

Backstage by Elliot Jay Stocks

Elliot finally makes a comeback and Backstage will be his second contribution to WooThemes (only because we love Elliot & Proudfolio has been a very popular theme among you lot). Since Elliot has had multiple affairs into the music scene, we thought it would be great to ask him to fill another gap in our theme collection; a design that would primarily work for musicians, artists & bands. The result? An amazing new concept – Backstage – which comes in 3 different style flavours (grunge, glossy & minimalist). You really want this theme (too)…

Great photography exposed

Exposure by FRESH01

And yes… We are still designing in-house as well… Cobus (FRESH01) only joined our little team earlier this year and whilst he’s been responsible for polishing both of my recent themes (The Station & Feature Pitch), he hasn’t contributed his own, unique design yet. But that is officially changing when we’ll be releasing Exposure in the coming months. Exposure is a photoblog design (guess, you could use it as a digital portfolio as well) and has been heavily influenced by the popularity of Aperture. The idea was for Exposure to have a really minimalist feel (even though Cobus has already designed a grunge style alternative as well) and totally focus the attention on the photos.

Showcase your work

SophisticatedFolio by Tony Geer

Personally I’ve always been a fan of Tony’s work and I was pleasantly surprised a while back when we got an e-mail from him, suggesting a little collaborative design effort. We have thus been working with Tony on a new portfolio (and blog) design, which should draw a lot of inspiration both from his current design, as well as the previous iteration, which got a lot of linklove from design galleries. SophisticatedFolio is thus just an upgraded offering on our already-great range of portfolio themes, since we haven’t released a portfolio theme in quite some time.

What you waiting for?

If you haven’t joined WooThemes yet, you really need to think long & hard about why you’re not sharing in this fun. We think the above teasers are enough evidence that things here at WooThemes are only gonna get better and the themes collection is sure to hot up towards the end of year.

In addition to these themes, we’re also negotiating more collaborations with some top-notch designers. Magnus (who hasn’t designed a theme for a while) also has a new theme concept in the works (a design that was initially used as an early iteration for WOO2) and rumours suggest that Mark is designing the follow-up to Aperture. So you’re missing out on the fun if you’re not involved…

OH: and how awesome are those teasers? Bet you can’t wait for Part 2…

Tell us a little about yourself, your design / development skills and how this translates to your (freelancing) business.

I’m Kirstin, a 25 year old full living on the Isle of Skye (a small island off the north west coast of Scotland). I’ve been a webdesigner specializing in wordpress for the last 4 years and I’ve been a full time freelance designer since January. Although I’ve used a number of platforms, I homed in on wordpress as it offered a lot more flexibility and control. Most of my freelance work is tweaking and coding themes, writing plugins etc although I also do a lot of work with integrating forum and gallery softwares. I’m definitely not the best graphic artist out there, so I tend to be drawn more towards the coding and tweaking jobs.

What is your favourite theme by WooThemes? And why?

That’s a hard one. It would have to be either Busy Bee or Over Easy.

So you’re an Affiliated Woo Worker, right? What does this actually mean to you and what does the “job” basically entail?

Basically it means that I get more job offers than I previously did. I’ve found that my work load has tripled since becoming a AWW. As for what the job entails, it totally varies from job to job. 90% of the time it’s tweaking certain parts or creating custom widgets etc.

How has working with WooThemes influenced your business and / or earnings as a web designer / developer?

Although I occasionally work with other themes, I now use WooThemes for most of my freelance work. This has allowed me to work with the same basic framework which has increased productivity by reducing the overall time it takes to complete a customization, allowing me to take on more clients.

Would you recommend WooThemes over other, alternative free / premium WordPress themes? If yes, why?

I’ve used a number of ‘Premium’ themes from various different designers, but unlike some of the other themes, WooThemes has the same basic framework and and consistency in all its themes which in my opinion makes it more attractive to me as I know I’ll be working with a theme that has a solid foundation.

What do you think about the ease-of-use and customizability of our themes?

From my point of view, I prefer getting my hands dirty in the actual code, although for new wordpress users and people who need a ready-to-go theme, I’ve been told by clients, that it’s one of the main reasons for purchasing a WooTheme.

Anything else that you’d like to add? Maybe a little compliment or something?

It’s more of complaint. Some of the themes are just to good and as a designer is becomes incredibly hard to come up with ideas to customize!

Some recent theme modifications by Kirstin

• http://www.watchtheguild.com
• http://www.triciahelferfan.com
• http://beta.iamchangingtheworld.org.za
• There more WooThemes customizations over at Flickr