A few months ago, Adii started talking about a new charitable organization that he wanted to create that would benefit amazingly talented, yet underprivileged young girls (through educational opportunities, love & great support structures) in South Africa. Last week, the dream took another step closer to formalizing when Adii & his team launched The Rockstar Foundation.
In October, we managed to raise more than $5k for breast cancer awareness. But going forward, we’ve decided we’d like to be more involved in helping worthy causes. So we’re teaming up with The Rockstar Foundation, where we will be sponsoring all of their general overheads & day-to-day expenditure on a monthly basis.
If WooThemes were a work desk, it would be one of those really messy desks littered with sketches and papers at the moment. We have so many theme concepts we are currently working on both in-house and with theme collaborators. It’s most certainly a creative place to be.
A couple weeks back I opened up Photoshop and dusted off the toolboxes to start experimenting with a travel blogging theme design, fresh after my recent holiday to the Greek Islands.
I’m excited about this theme! Almost a month after teasing you with some original screenshots of Liam Mckay’s awesome design we have finally completed the conversion to a flexible, neatly coded WordPress theme. You commented, and we listened and built some awesome functionality into this theme.
Breathing some new life into the incredible success of Gazette Edition we wanted another news/magazine based theme that was minimalistic enough to let your content speak, whilst customizable enough to brand however you like. We approached our friend Liam McKay as we thought this was just up his alley, and did he impress!
It’s been quite a while since I’ve contributed anything to the WooThemes repository, so when I finally managed to sneak in some Photoshop time, I wanted to draw inspiration from our own WooThemes website design, as we have been getting quite a few e-mails asking if our theme is available for sale. Obviously we want to keep our own design unique, but IÂ designed Coffee Break with a similar layout, so we could offer the public something similar in style.
The homepage layout consists of a jQuery slider at the top, which is great for showing of your most important content. We then added a nice mini-featured area below the slider, similar to the one we have on our homepage. You can add the sections with an icon to the left by just adding WP pages, and adding them to your options panel. We also added two sidebars, one for the homepage and one for the blog, and also a nice 2-column footer where you can have some basic information about the website.
A custom home page featured area to showcase your work or products with style, all powered by jQuery.
Custom Homepage
Custom home page layout with Mini-features area, and option to insert any page above/below mini-features area.
Custom Post Types
Coffee Break has been upgraded to take advantage of the new WordPress 3.0 custom post type functionality, so adding slides and mini-features is a breeze!
Custom Widgets
Custom Woo Widgets for use in the sidebar and in the widgetized footer: Twitter, Search, Latest News, Feedburner, Campaign Monitor, Flickr and Adspace.
Some theme launches here at WooThemes are hyped for weeks and weeks on Twitter and in our blog, others we silently and secretly work on and launch for our community as a nice little surprise. Mortar is one of those that I’ve been working on for a few weeks.
Built on an awesomely flexible grid structure that enables you to select how many columns you want on your home page and archives page and then arranges your posts according to their height and width using the JS Masonry layout plugin built by David DeSandro (Source code available here). The rest of the design is governed by the fabulous Grid 960 framework for easy modifications.
We’ve had the pleasure to collaborate with another hugely popular half-English web designer – this time the graphic designer, web developer, musician and Apple enthusiast Dan Rubin. This collaboration has brewed and matured over months and months, in fact we got our first preview of this theme in November last year! Hopefully this demonstrates to a lot of users that we don’t rush our themes in order to release two a month – quality and quantity go hand in hand here at WooThemes.
Dan is a genius when it comes to web design, he gives a lot of careful thought to his designs and with Big Easy his personal style shines through. For his alternate styles to Big Easy he scanned and tweaked an old (circa 1970s) leather case with some lovely stitching, and a book cover from 1934 to form large repeating patterns. For the neat typography Dan introduced us to Cufon and implemented it meticulously with some “graceful degradation of text-shadow” <– You know you are working with a hot shot designer when he throws in words like that!
It’s not an every day thing for us here at WooThemes to give away wonderful free WordPress themes, built on our renowned theme framework, but today is one of those lucky few.
Last week, late one night, Adii spent some time with his good friend – a glass of whisky – and dreamed up Mainsteam in Photoshop – a vibrant blog theme for serious, yet personal bloggers. A couple days later, Cobus spent a day slicing and dicing the Photoshop file into neat standards compliant code, battling the odd Internet Explorer gremlin – minus whisky I might add. Then it was another day, building in our feature rich theme framework which eventually brings us to today where we can launch Mainstream upon the world wide web.
Roughly 4 months after the release of Groovy Video and 9 months after the theme contest where we picked Izzudin Helmi as the contest winner with his Groovy Series we have finally done his beautiful designs justice and WordPresserized all three of them. Today Groovy Photo and Groovy Blog join Groovy Video in the 3 part, colourful trilogy.
Fresh News is the all time most popular theme here at WooThemes, so we thought it should deserve to be one of the first themes to receive the new Woo Framework update treatment (see video of new framework). What this basically means is that the theme is now easier to setup and use because of the improved functions in the framework (options panel, new widgets, easier image upload, easier to update in future etc.).
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:
Our second Woo Worker Interview is with a freelancer the other side of the pond of another Woo Worker who we interviewed last week (Josh of Cubicle Ninjas).
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.
Josh Farkas, the creative ninja of the Chicago based creative company spends 5 minutes with WooThemes explaining why he uses WooThemes.
Tell us a little about yourself, your design / development skills and how this translates to your business.
Howdy! My name is Josh Farkas and I’m the lead ninja here at Cubicle Ninjas. We’re a creative design firm that strikes fear into the heart of boring websites. Our experienced designers have something special – passion.
Our goal is to build websites that are:
1.) Functionally Intuitive, and
2.) Emotionally Impactful.
Our unique advantage is that we’re a one-stop shop for all logo design, print design, and illustration. This means we can help you build a brand is beautiful across all forms of media, or match your current brand in the WooTheme of your choice.
What is your favourite theme by WooThemes? And why?
We honestly fought over this question…I guess the official answer is it depends on your goal. WooThemes are amazing because whether you’re building the next YouTube, making a portfolio, creating an online newspaper, or blogging to your heart’s content, you’ll have a handful of stunning options to choose from.
So you’re an Affiliated Woo Worker, right? What does this actually mean to you and what does the “job” basically entail?
In short: making people happy.
WooThemes, and WordPress in general, are being adopted by all shapes and sizes of people. This is no longer the domain of web geeks. So our mission is to ease first-time website owners through what can be a scary process, understand how we can be the biggest benefit, and provide speedy design and development to make their WooTheme perfect for their needs.
The Cubicle Ninja's Website - based on VibrantCMS
How has working with WooThemes influenced your business and / or earnings as a web designer / developer?
Before becoming a WooThemes worker, Cubicle Ninjas focused exclusively on larger projects. These tend to be with big companies where it can be a year until the final project sees the light of day. WooThemes has allowed us to work with real people on very small projects. It has been wonderful to see customers get so excited about our work, and has reminded us why we love waking up each morning.
Would you recommend WooThemes over other, alternative free / premium WordPress themes? If yes, why?
I would recommend WooThemes over the competition in a heartbeat. There are many reasons, but here are our top five:
Beautifully designed and coded
Infinitely customizable (usually through the back-end)
Exceptionally supportive community
Consistently Updated Themes
WooThemes Workers (Just in case…)
What do you think about the ease-of-use and customizability of our themes?
They’re as easy as can be. A simple administration menu featuring all of the options, with links to a clear and detailed explanation if there are any questions.
And if someone has heavier customizations in mind they can expand this theme to their hearts content. All they’d need is a little web design experience or a friendly WooThemes worker.
Anything else that you’d like to add?
A big ninja thank you to all of the nice people across the world we’ve had a chance to work with. And equal thanks to WooThemes for creating websites that are so much fun to play with!
Headline news today – “WooThemes launches The Journal“.
Joining a growing portfolio of hugely popular newspaper based WordPress designs “The Journal” has been in development for the past month and boasts some impressive new functionality.
The Journal was brilliantly conceptualized by our friend Firman Firdaus and given to us in Photoshop format. After some serious brain storming we simplified some of the functionality and typography and began the WordPress wizardry.
Foxinni came up with a nifty backend option feature to assign certain tags to different parts of the home page. Making it really easy to move things around and not have duplicated content clogging up key areas of the home page.
There is also a neat javascript carousel to display content and 6 widgetized areas to play with, not forgetting 10 different styles to apply to the theme.
The Journal is very light on template imagery making creating your own styles an absolute breeze by tweaking some css colour values.
The guys at Web Designer Magazine have been keeping busy revamping their website. With it now running off none other than WordPress and it sporting a beautiful new theme design, with lots of new content it is definitely worth a visit.
Last week we recorded a podcast interview with Web Designer Magazine which is now available for your listening over on their website.
Podcast Episode 4 features:
CSS legend, respected author and standards consultant Eric Meyer talks candidly about how he got into the business and what the future holds for CSS3. Plus, we catch up with Mark Forrester of WordPress design team WooThemes and ask whether CMS-based blog building is good thing or bad thing for the modern art of web design.
A few months ago, Adii started talking about a new charitable organization that he wanted to create that would benefit amazingly talented, yet underprivileged young girls (through educational opportunities, love & great support structures) in South Africa. Last week, the dream took another step closer to formalizing when Adii & his team launched The Rockstar Foundation.
If WooThemes were a work desk, it would be one of those really messy desks littered with sketches and papers at the moment. We have so many theme concepts we are currently working on both in-house and with theme collaborators. It’s most certainly a creative place to be.
