Creativity is contagious, pass it on
Albert Einstein
Susie is a creative. She is stuck behind her desk all day, at work, just waiting to get home to work on the oil painting she’s currently crafting, through her self-taught artistic journey. She makes her own jewellery as well, admired by all of her friends, which she sells at the local craft market on weekends.
If you’re like Susie, or know someone who is, today’s theme release is just right for you.
Ladies and gentlemen, artisans and craftspersons, meet Stitched, our newest theme for WordPress.
Express your creativity
With it’s uniquely crafted and elegant design, Stitched aims to place full focus on your content, helping you to express your creativity to the world.
Designed, and developed, by our very own James Koster (a creator in his own right), Stitched is ready to be shaped and crafted as desired with a few small tweaks in a child theme.
Stitched and it’s many uses
As a creative person, you’re sure to find interesting methods and techniques you apply to your work. Share them on your blog, using Stitched to create the perfect visual platform to do so.
The time of a craftsperson should be spent on being creative and crafting artworks, rather than setting up an online store. Stitched helps to make your store attractive from the first click, and get you a major head start on getting your attractive online store up and running in little to no time at all.
With the store functionality powered by WooCommerce, the entire WooCommerce extensions library is also at your disposal to take your online store to the next level.
A theme to suit your desired needs
While Stitched is aimed at artisans and creatives, you could also transform the theme into a standard business website, or a simple blog to keep track of new creative techniques you discover, inspirational artworks you find online or in galleries, or selling creative training courses online, using Sensei. With styling support for our Features, Testimonials and Our Team plugins, as well as a «Business» page template, your own design is just a few small tweaks away in the theme’s settings.
Stitched also includes built-in styling for our new Projects plugin, for showcasing your portfolio of creative projects, with rationales and a blurb about what inspired you for each.
As long as you have creative inspiration, Stitched is the theme for you.
To illustrate this, we’ve set up a demo website to showcase Stitched and to show off just how easy it is to get up and running with next to no effort.
We look forward to seeing what you all create using Stitched, WooCommerce and any number of our wonderful WooCommerce extensions and exciting free plugins.
Grab this theme with 14% off, until 5th March 2014. Just use STITCHED14 as your coupon code on checkout.
About
Hi WooThemes
Nice theme! I appreciate it’s hot off the press, though the Theme Options looks light in the amount of customisation you can do. For example, there doesn’t appear to be any options to add the business page modules you require for the Business Template that’s discussed here.
http://docs.woocommerce.com/document/stitched/#section-5
Along with the regular functionality to alter the left / right footer content.
It looks like a promising theme if you can have some control over the homepage widgets / modules or create a widgetized Homepage area like Whitelight.
Thanks!
We’re stripping back options in our newer themes as we remove functionality into plugins. The plan is to move all display options to the WP Customizer eventually so you can enjoy live previews and other good stuff. The case of the business template is tricky, but we decided that it’s better to not include settings in the theme options for a feature that a lot of people might not want to use. This keeps things nice and clean.
Having said that, you can still customise everything as you’re used to, using the hooks and filters built in to the theme. I will be updating the docs to include some examples of how to do this in the next couple of days.
Hi James
Thanks for explaining and the approach makes sense. That said, some flexibility over ordering where modules appear would be handy. For example, featured products before projects or testimonials etc.
Some examples would be most helpful too. Thanks.
In terms of the ‘Global Layout’ in the Theme options, I noticed that ‘full width’ had been removed too. Using the ‘Projects’ plugin [ which is great by the way! ], the base page when set inherits the ‘Global Layout’ option which results in a sidebar.
Again, some flexibility over these pages when plugins are being used/introduced would be beneficial too. Over riding the layout at page level in the General Settings panel at the bottom of the page and selecting ‘full width’ or even setting the Template to ‘full width’ still results in a side bar appearing on the Projects base page – which looks out of place if there’s no widgets.
I’m all for keeping things nice and clean, though removing flexibility and some customisation options might frustrate some users, such as in this case. Unless I’m doing something totally wrong or there’s a bug 🙂
Thanks for again for taking the time out to explain.
Hey. Our themes have never had a full width global layout option. If you want to remove the sidebar on a projects page you need to unhook the sidebar and tweak the main content column width. This is exactly the same method used in WooCommerce.
The page template selection will not affect the projects page because this is a post type archive. Again, this is the same behaviour as WooCommerce.
I’ve added some snippets to the FAQ section of this themes documentation. In there are some examples of how you can still rearrange content using very simple code.
Hi James
My bad – I’m sure there was a theme like Whitelight that did offer a global layout with a widgetized homepage.
Will take a look at the snippets – thanks for adding these.
I checked out the Business template with the Testimonials plugin installed and set that as my homepage. The page renders the Testimonials regardless with no control whether to switch them on or off in the Theme Options – which I’m guessing goes back to stripping stuff back. That said, this is a great example of where some control from the Theme Options maybe useful to users who don’t necasarily have the skills to use hooks / filters etc.
Thanks again and I really don’t mean to sound like I’m grumbling.
Nice theme! I appreciate it’s hot off the press, though the Theme Options looks light in the amount of customisation you can do. For example, there doesn’t appear to be any options to add the business page modules you
http://eltasweeq.blogspot.com/
Two months waiting for a new theme, and excuse me, but has been disappointing launch.
Why disappointing? Far from strengthening the themes with innovative designs and enhancements, you have removed functionality over other themes: automatically extracts do not like all the themes of Woo, no page «Business» and so on.
Woo I think should be clear and say, gentlemen, we will focus on the themes WooCommerce and leave in the background, so we would know who pay month to month so we stick to keep paying.
I tried reading that 3 times but still don’t fully understand your comment. You’re disappointed with the design? That’s OK, design is subjective. I’d like to reply to the rest but I honestly don’t have a clue what you’re trying to say 🙂
I will write again, sorry for me english, I am mexican 😛
Hi there,
Thanks for your feedback. 🙂
To clarify, the theme does include a «Business» page template, and functionality that is visual (design details, etc).
As James has mentioned previously, themes should not offer plugin-like functionality. This is why we have removes the kinds of features (testimonials, projects, etc) into plugins.
When shopping for a theme, the focus should always be on what the design offers for you, rather than the functionality it offers. Features can be added via plugins, with a few clicks within WordPress. 🙂
I hope this clarifies. If not, please let me know. 🙂
I’ll try again:
* It was too disappointing to wait two months for a new release and find that theme is like any other theme: no new options, same style design, and less funcionality, like business page wich is included in past themes like peddlar.
* this theme even create excepts automatically like any other theme of Woo.
* Is not a innovate theme.
You must say: Dear coustomers, Woothemes is now focused in woocommerce market and plugins, and themes are in second places of our priorities, and all we are coustumers of club membership, we’ll know what to except: nothing new, same designs, and a lot of plugins for woocommerce to buy.
This theme does include a business template.
We removed the option to display an excerpt on blog archives because it is redundant. You can use the more tag to do this.
Yeah, 2 months waiting for a new theme and I’m pretty disappointed too. Elements are way too big, busy, and cluttered for me to purchase or use for a client site. Your coders are the absolute best, but the designs seem to have been lacking.
I look on ThemeForest and see some great woocommerce theme designs, but I don’t purchase them for my client projects cause they don’t support them like you guys do for updates and other plugin integration (plus you awesome framework). For example, themes on ThemeForest like Flatsome (http://flatsome.uxthemes.com) has a great design and lots of great functionality built in (parallax, mega menus, shop page options, shortcode options, and more), I love it. I keep thinking maybe WooThemes next theme will be like this. Your last great theme was superstore (Peddlar was pretty good), but since then they haven’t really been up to the level I’d hope. Maybe next month. Keep up the good coding, and I’d love to see a step up in design. Thanks!
We’re not going to be releasing themes with bundled functionality like that. In fact we’re stripping out as much functionality as possible in favour of integrating with plugins. This is better for you and for us.
I’m sorry you don’t like the design. You can easily change the scale of the theme by tweaking the body font size, maybe give that a shot.
Ok here goes….
Style looks greatBut so many options like widgetized home page, footer customization etc to order are missing, this has been one of the great things about past themes.
Now I understand stripping out certain aspects makes sense and favoring plugins etc makes perfect sense, however taking away options to do a lot of things out of the box will cost you customers, why?
Because people like me – used to be able to do a lot of the grunt work and then simply hand it off to professional designers and developers (who we have to pay) to finish it off.
What you are doing by stripping out many options, is making your websites more expensive for small developers. Not smart, ands not entirely thought through
this one thing I have try to say, but woo answers with simply answers: design is subjetive and they remove options for «redundant».
Themes more expensive than before, with less options and all seems identical… not inteligent.
There is, in fact, much method and thought behind this process. This is purely the first step in our thought process. 🙂
Stripping away options, as James and I have both mentioned several times, is a way for us to ensure a theme focusses purely on design.
While we may have been a bit heavy-handed in stripping out options, how else would we know which options our customers *really use*? Remove them, see which options everyone really misses, and then consider adding them back in.
Build > Measure > Learn. 🙂
Just because an option has been removed, doesn’t mean it won’t be added back in, if there is significant request for it.
Thank you, as always, for your feedback. We really appreciate it, and I hope the above helps to clarify our thought process here; build a product that is in line with our vision for themes, gauge customer feedback and align that with our vision. 🙂
You would have saved yourselves a lot of hassle but communicating this in the post above 🙂
Hi Johnny,
To clarify, we have communicated much of this in previous posts as well, in particular our «whats coming up in Q1 2014» blog post, where we detailed our theme strategy. 🙂
Keep an eye on our blog for more, as our theme strategy is applied. 🙂
Thanks Matty, I must have missed that point then. I’m sorry for the above comment then.
«Just because an option has been removed, doesn’t mean it won’t be added back in, if there is significant request for it.»
This is weird! Do we have to pay good money for themes, then use our time hassling you for options, then wait and see if you can bother… ?
Me no like!
Why does the blog have excerpts from the first two entries and then full length articles under it? Also full length articles on the About page. Is that by design? Can I get around that with the more tag?
I love the overall look and want to use it for a quick site for a non profit, but worried its going to need more than the usual easy changes that I am used to from Woo (like modules on the home page). Is the business template the About page on the demo?
Hi Don,
Please do log a ticket in our help desk, where our ninjas are on hand to assist.
Thanks. 🙂
The first two posts are using the more tag.
I’ve been biting my tongue the past several months but simply can’t do it anymore for several reasons.
First, the woo community has been promised awesome themes month after months only to be disappointed. When a paying customer voices their frustration they get back a response such as «design is subjective». While this is true, you should realize you have an issue when every time you post a theme, you get more dislikes than you do likes.
You release half-finished themes and most of them are similar. I doubt that this is a surprise. You’re not ignorant running all those «happiness» reports! You should change your company name to WooCommerce and call it a day cause it’s obvious you don’t care about your themes.
Secondly, and the reason why I’m writing this. A course in customer service could be a nice investment. Here is one of your employee’s (an ambassador of your company) response to a customer’s concern (see above responses):
«I tried reading that 3 times but still don’t fully understand your comment. You’re disappointed with the design? That’s OK, design is subjective. I’d like to reply to the rest but I honestly don’t have a clue what you’re trying to say»
While this wasn’t directed at me, I ticked me off! You might as well have given the guy the virtual finger!
How about:
«I’m sorry to hear that you’re disappointed with the design. We are continuously working to ensure we design the best possible themes for all our customers. Having said that we do understand that design is subjective and hope the next theme will suit your needs. We invite you to visit our «Submit you Idea» page and tell us what you like to see. I would love to respond to the rest of your concerns but can you please elaborate so I can understand.»
In conclusion, substandard themes + poor, borderline rude customer service is not a good mix.
Anyways, I’m glad Woo has changed their subscription policy as with the way things are going, I don’t think I could’ve lasted any longer paying monthly!
Hi Peter,
Thank you for your detailed feedback on this.
We’ll examine further and see where and how we can apply your feedback, and improve. 🙂
Thanks and regards,
Matty.
Chief Product Officer at WooThemes
I apologise for any offence caused, there was certainly none intended. Happily FireIFA did post again and I was able to reply, but I agree my original response could have been worded better. Dealing with ones and zeroes all day is not a good precursor to being social I suppose 🙂
Thanks for the feedback, like Matty says all feedback is evaluated and carefully considered.
There’s a double breadcrumb ‘projects’ on the single project page ? Huh ?
You’ve mentioned that the theme supports ‘Sensei’. Do you mean that’s it’s ‘stichted’-styled.
If yes, why not show it ?
Does the projects-plugin has filters on which visitors can select projects on categories/tags ?
My opinion about the theme: average on first sight. But as for al the Woo-themes i try to see it as a starting platform to build on. One thing: the header. Why always so high ? Tablet users are getting finger-injuries when full-time scrolling Woo-theme pages because of the big headers. 🙂
Anyway, that’s an easy fix in my child themes, but as a designer i still wonder why.
Hey guys,
Whilst some feedback is difficult to digest we do appreciate the honesty and we listen to your concerns. We pride ourselves on our customer service and everytime we hear from an upset loyal customer it hurts.
We do hope that the positives of this theme release and our strategy are not blinded by the aesthetics and lost layout controls.
Whilst we’ve removed a few theme options that control certain parts of the layout, all of which are still perfectly achievable through hooks, filters, css, the real benefit this theme offers is business value. Monetizable tools for your website – perfectly integrated and scaleable.
We launched a free projects plugin allowing for a very flexible portfolio section to your site (which we still have loads of exciting things planned for), we have ecommerce facilities allowing for a versatile online shop, and we have styling for our Sensei plugin allowing you to offer training/coursework. That sounds like an incredibly powerful theme platform to me.
It will become more and more difficult for our themes to be compared with ThemeForest themes, but we are confident in the direction we are taking and hope you share our vision for where we can help our customers the most in propelling their businesses forward.
«Whilst we’ve removed a few theme options that control certain parts of the layout, all of which are still perfectly achievable through hooks, filters, css, the real benefit this theme offers is business value.»
I’m sure not everyone knows how to work with hooks, filters and css. Does it mean that your themes will be catered for developers and not for an average Joe, who would like to customize it using theme options?
Nope. 🙂
It means we’ll observe where our customers are experiencing pain points, and fill those gaps with the most appropriate solution (be it a custom plugin we develop, recommending an existing plugin or writing a tutorial, if the the result requires multiple pieces to achieve).
We believe that theme options should be used sparingly, and that a theme is purely a single piece of a WordPress website, with core, plugins and custom code making up the remaining pieces.
Our philosophy is to build, measure and learn. Once the cycle is completed, we loop back and build, measure and learn again.
As we discover pain points with our customers, the role of our product team is to help to close those loops and resolve those pain points in the most future-proof way possible, while also creating value for those who aren’t experiencing the pain point, yet could perhaps do with a slightly quicker means of achieving the same result.
Theme options affect only the active theme. If we add an option to theme A, customers using theme B would lose out… unless we add the option to theme B, creating potential inconsistencies over time, as each theme’s code base gets updated.
Creating plugin solutions for common features help us to centralise our code base, ensure everyone benefits from the product (in most cases, whether using a WooThemes theme or not) and helps us to consider as many customers as possible with each decision we make, rather than making decisions which only benefit a select few.
I hope this helps to clarify our strategy a bit more. 🙂
Yes, thanks for the explanation Matty.
Ok here goes for MUST HAVES…..
1. Footer Customization
2. Home Widget Area
3. Subscribe / Connect (and widget)
This is one thing you have to remember, the majority of your subscribers are not developers or are people that know a little bit about development.
Most web developers use theme frameworks (like canvas) the rest are people who like to just get in and build a website and then call on designers and developers to make a few little changes.
What you are doing here is adding around 4 – 5 hours of developer time (at an average of $60 – $100 per hour per project, over and above the usual 1-2 hours.
So in effect Woo’s themes are going to become to much more expensive to get to go live stage than all of your competitors and that is going to cost you – but perhaps this is your thinking anyway. Woo Commerce has become such a big part of your business, that maybe we are just a burden now and this is a way to purge us.
Now, you may fall for the trap that the only people who comment are complainers and to an extent this is true. However talking to a few of your subscription members, many for the first time are starting to use competitor themes.
Now Mark and Matty, if you want to discuss these issues with me. My USA number is (1 617 513-0082) I currently have around 200 websites out of 2000 using your themes, these are mostly very small businesses with very small budgets.
Peter
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your feedback on this.
We are currently working on updates to address each of the three points you’ve mentioned.
If a feature is removed from the theme options screen, that doesn’t mean it’s not available, nor does it mean a UI won’t be made available via a plugin («Subscribe & Connect», for example, is becoming a plugin which is currently in it’s beta testing phase).
Thank you, again, for your personal feedback and recounting of your experience, here.
As we discuss this theme strategy more and more with our customers, we learn more about what our customers are looking for, and how we can apply features which are 100% useful to the majority of customers, while also combatting the «fluff» features which are perceived to be useful and actually aren’t.
Keep an eye on updates to Stitched, as we receive feedback from everyone. 🙂
Thanks and regards,
Matty.
Chief Product Officer at WooThemes
Great, thanks Matty
I know many options are available with hooks and filters, but these are really for developers and not site crunchers like myself.
Exactly ^ I feel as if WooThemes has completely lost touch with their customer base.
Yet…. here we are!
Was the .01 update to address those 3 concerns?
«We are currently working on updates to address each of the three points you’ve mentioned.»
That’s two updates gone and not one of the things you said would be addressed in the comment above……
3rd time lucky?
Peter
+1
Hub is another theme that should have those 3 must haves.
Hello,
I must admit that I am also disappointed by the latest theme. My business is based on customizing WordPress themes, and I must admit that except Canvas, I no longer use your themes. For instance, I have not used the latest 9 themes and I probably won’t!
I miss really business-oriented themes, simple and effective…
Please…
Olivier
Hi Olivier,
Thanks for your feedback on this.
Stitched can be turned into a business-oriented theme with a few clicks, and the use of the «Business» page template.
It’s also possible to activate only the modules required for your homepage, creating a more business-focussed use of the theme.
If your decision is purely design related, we have a great selection of existing business themes, which offer different design approaches to that offered with Stitched.
http://woocommerce.com/product-category/themes/business/
Any theme, with a few small tweaks, can be transformed into virtually whatever one’s imagination desires. Our themes provide the building blocks, and a recommended configuration of said building blocks, which can be activated or tweaked to desired needs. 🙂
Thanks Matty: I already know that. I’m Affiliated Woo Workers 😉
You can see a selection of websites I realized, based on woothemes:
http://www.gd6d.fr/wordpressfr/portfolio-gallery/woo/
I’m just saying that I will not use ANY of your last 9 themes for my clients and I fell a little bit sad about it…
I totally agree with you and now that we know they’ll all be ditched within a year or two, what is the point of using anything other than Canvas? I guess this is what will happen by the end of the year or so. Just Canvas and WooCommerce plugins.
Olivier, Sarah,
Thanks for both of your feedback on this.
It’s important to preserve context around all of this, as we’ve had quite a few changes to our theme strategy over the past few months.
Before I clarify, I’d like to mention one or two of these updates, to provide some pre-context:
The All Themes Package- This is a product instead of a subscription service, and the «1 theme per month» offering is no longer in place.
The 2014 theme retirement- This is where we have announced that we will discontinue development on several of our themes, due to a slowing of customer uptake of these products, as well as not aligning with our larger theme strategy.
Taking the above two items into account, we will be releasing fewer themes, and focussing on placing even more fine detail and craft into each.
This also opens up time for us to revisit older themes, spruce them up and give them new life (this is a project we have already started on with one of our oldest themes, which now going on 5 years old).
Coupled with this, our ears and eyes are always wide open, in particular when corresponding with customers and loyal WooThemes users via our help desk or our blog (the comments on this post are an example of this). We’ll be sure to take everyone’s feedback into account and ensure that we align our theme strategy with our customers’ needs, while also ensuring a scalable, sustainable pathway is created for developing websites quicker, easier and in a more efficient manner.
Due to the age of our catalog and the number of moving parts, it’s not always possible for us to achieve the greater end goal in a single step. Cutting back on theme options, for example, is just one of the initial steps towards achieving our greater goal, as mentioned in comments above.
We’ll be sure to keep listening at each step, and ensure we keep to our mission and vision of offering intuitive and attractive themes and tools (which we use ourselves) for building websites on top of WordPress. 🙂
So if WooThemes releases a online portfolio theme that is perfect for showing of your clients work and will be a perfect theme for said client you´d rather make a child theme for canvas?
Isn´t that tricking your customer? Instead of a one simple cost they have to pay you for Canvas and then the amount of time it takes to customize it?
Just wondering. Sure Canvas is a godlike theme for customisations, I will be working on a project concerning Canvas in the near future as well. But if I find a WooTheme that works exactly like what my client wants then I´ll send him to view the theme and tell me what s/he thinks about it.
I see some uses for the latest themes they´ve released. Why reinvent the wheel if you don´t need to?
Just a reaction from me.
I really do think Woo should set up a Subscription Customer Advisory Board (SCABS 🙂 , select 30 or so highly active members and maybe have a Google+ Hangout once a month for 30 minutes to get feedback.
We are definitely exploring ways in which we can interact more with customers, at a similar level to what you are referring to, Peter. 🙂
Agreed. Hopefully soon, too. It’s hard enough even getting a hold of support around here!
I am looking for quicker updates really on the Canvas theme/framework because I am using it now more than ever. I like this theme but really in terms of 2 or 3 years in I can only justify keeping the canvas theme up to date.
I was really hoping that sooner or later Canvas would essentially become the WooFramework, with subsequent theme releases having the current customization features of Canvas as their minimum starting point. The WooThemes blog comments area is full of people praising Canvas and its feature set, but «meh»ing other themes, often because they are lacking quick and easy customization features that are often referenced as «like Canvas has» (yes, I know, hooks and filters). I understand that WooThemes has a direction that it’s planning to take its themes, but anything bar pushing Canvas forward as a framework, with new theme «designs» essentially being «Canvas childs», seems crazy given the feedback in blog comments. I think Canvas’ set of features should be the minimum feature set that any theme comes out with. Just my 2c, but I don’t think I’m alone in wanting a strong and consistent feature set across all theme releases. Making new designs atop of Canvas seems like the obvious choice seeing as Canvas is by a country mile your best horse in the race…
I think I get why breaking features off of your themes is the plan: 1 – Having a bunch of plugins in the WP Repository gives you greater exposure to folks in the WP world. 2 – Breaking the features off from paid themes maybe means there is less obligation to support any issues/support tickets for these segregated features, thus reducing the support load and obligation WooThemes carries on its new, more streamlined themes.
I guess the risk is, with stripping so much out, that folks loyal to Woo start looking elsewhere for a framework with a strong, quick to customize feature set. Again, I know there are hooks and filters, but I’d imagine anyone from beginners, through to website crunchers or full blown design teams would appreciate a bunch of easy buttons, dropdowns, etc than having to remember every hook or filter they use or having to spend an hour looking for plugins that do the basic things they wanted in a framework.
Again, only my 2c. I as a consumer, could be looking for something different than Woo is looking to provide and that’s just business. So, no hard feelings. 🙂
In a nutshell, what I’d ideally like from Woo is what Genesis and it’s child themes have going on, just with the easy to use Wooframework panel when fully loaded a la Canvas.
Hey, I just wanted to touch on your reasons for splitting functionality into plugins. This is definitely not a way to shirk any support responsibility. If there is an issue with the theme/plugin integration we will support you. The plugins will of course be actively maintained also.
The main benefits of this approach are:
* Folks can add new functionality to their site regardless of whether they’re using a WooTheme or not. Said functionality is also portable between themes.
* Code is separated instead of duplicated. Now, a bug can be fixed in one update to one plugin rather than many updates to many themes.
* Plug & play – You now have the control to choose which functionality to install. This vastly curtails overall theme bloat and potentially reduces your overall security risks.
* … And best of all: allows themes to focus on their true purpose – applying design to your content.
On Canvas; I know we’ve said this before, but skins are something we’re considering. It has to be done correctly though (IE still allowing you guys to create your own child themes for customisations). Remember to vote on the idea if you haven’t already.
I’m in complete agreement with Fluffy (and I never thought I’d be saying that to someone called «Fluffy» :). Canvas needs to become more of a framework rather than a theme. I use it exclusively when I need to build a custom site for a client.
I understand the choice to strip out the functionality and put it into plugins. Of course, when customers use these new plugins on non Woo themes that will create its own headaches for Woo.
What I don’t understand if you’re truly separating site functionality from the visual skin, why you don’t have a base parent theme from which to create all these new visual children (I’m looking at you Canvas). Then you only have to make sure that plugins function with the base theme and you create all the child themes off that. It helps us as designers and developers because we only have to become familiar with the base theme and add the visual «skin» or child theme client likes plus the plugins for specific functionality. It also helps us maintain the sites more easily.
When you create themes like Stitched with stripped down functionality, you’re going to lose the very customer base you’re trying to appeal to — non web developers, single site builders, artisans, craftspersons. Web designers/developers will have to work hard to «sell» this theme to clients because of the amount of additional dev work that will need to be done to add all the bells and whistles they are seeing in ThemeForest themes.
Hi,
I would like to share my opinion and be positive so it could be useful to get better products and service from Woo.
I agree with the recent Woo strategy (themes, plugins, prices…) if finally Woo increase quality of products. I am a user but developer, and I also agree with most of users here. So, from my point of view, quality of Woo themes means the following (and what expect from woo because I am all theme pack customer):
(a) I miss old themes with a lot of page templates. If you think it is better to split themes and plugins, I believe in you. But I think you must assure we can obtain the functionality we are expecting for from a wide range of plugins, with perfect integration, good designs at free cost. I know now there are free plugins (testimonials, features, projects), but I think business look sometimes needs wooslider plugin, which is not free. I can understand courses is a particular functionality that has a non-free plugin, but business is a must in themes nowadays.
(b) If you think you should keep theme option panels simple, I think you should provide us with an extensive beginners guide with examples to use hooks and filters, in order to customize themes. Most of us we are users not developers and we want to set up a theme fast without the need to thinking as a developer (all my consideration and respect to developers…). I think you cannot simply say “…use hooks and filters…” because will finally end up with woo themes and we will use themes from competitors. So, please, give us advice on it.
(c) I strongly suggest you to improve design in futures themes. I think is one of critical issues for us, the users, as has been said in other comments. I think you could do an effort on it. “Stitched” theme is a good design for the purpose you explained in the theme abstract. Bu also we need new business or corporative designs.
(d) I also would like to have old themes which have not been retired updated to new technologies (plugin integration, responsive…). E.g. I love INSPIRE theme but I do not use it because it is not responsive.
I hope my comments will be useful. You have a highly engaging users community that you have to take into account and consider.
Thanks,
Javier
Regarding your point b) I have added a whole bunch of snippets explaining how to perform some common tasks with this theme, to the documentation. Please take a look.
There are many, many articles all over the web that offer an introductory guide to using WordPress hooks and filters. We don’t want to re-invent the wheel. But if there is a big demand from our community of course we will investigate writing something like this ourselves (tailored to our products). Please post these suggestions on our ideasboard.
Thanks, James.
I have to agree with the rest of the comments here. Your themes lately are uninspiring and I haven’t felt the urge to use any of them in recent months.
One thing that is very telling about where your minds are at is how you presented this theme, and others too. This is supposed to be a theme for people who running a crafts store. But if you see the pictures you selected they don’t even match the theme.
It tells me that you couldn’t even be bothered to try «sell» your theme by making it as appealing as possible and making it look like a crafts store. You just used your regular pool of stock images which don’t really match this theme.
Even the blog titles have just been lifted from another theme. What does «Why no Bankers Go to Jail» have to do with arts and crafts?
That to me shows a mindset of complacency, that you believe you don’t have to go the extra mile because you believe you have a captive audience.
Just read your own copy and see how it all makes no sense. 🙂
«Susie is a creative. She is stuck behind her desk all day, at work, just waiting to get home to work on the oil painting she’s currently crafting, through her self-taught artistic journey. She makes her own jewellery as well, admired by all of her friends, which she sells at the local craft market on weekends.»
That’s who you are pitching your theme to, but all the articles are unrelated to that and the front page refers to the person being a photographer.
There is no consistency at all, a theme intended for showcasing artisans is filled with general news stories and the first thing you read is Matty saying «I’m a photographer».
How do you guys not notice these obviously contradictory things when you are busy creating your promo material?
I’m late to the ranting party so I’ll just sum up what I think.
Most of the comments here hit the nail on the head – I’m paying more than ever before to WooThemes and am getting less and less every product launch. The Projects, Features, etc. plugins are great but the theme options framework is basically useless at this point. Sure, I could do a bunch of coding using hooks and filters to customize your themes, but what am I even paying you for then? The design? Might as well go over to Theme Forest and get thousands more themes with tons more functionality at a way cheaper price. We shouldn’t HAVE to do all of the leg work in our themes, especially for those of us dropping $400/year on your theme club. Fix your themes, stop taking away utility, and start creating useful products.
More than ever before I need some reasons to continue using WooThemes… you have been nothing but bad news for at least 6 months now.
I am very angry, very very angry.
I start to use it to a coustomer, and this theme doesn’t have anytthing, literally: no widgets, no excerpts, no woo suscribe, no searcher widget of woo, no option to optimize header or initial message, no lightbox like other themes, no slider (of course, wooslider what is sold can be used).
Two months waiting for a amazing theme to begin 2014, and you launch this, with a increase of prices, a slow support and answers like «design is subjetive», sir of woothemes, design is subjetive just when one of two says not ok, but in this article we are too many people, and message is: coustumers, if you don’t like designs, we don’t care, we are busy creating and selling a lot of plugins (of funcions wich was included in all themes before) and extensions of woocommerce.
You must change your name, from Woothemes to WooCommerce.
Clearly, Woothemes didn’t showcase any creativity with this turd.
What happened to you guys?
Timmy
Hi
1. I think the strategy to move functionality to mostly free Woo engineered plugins is great.
2. The problem as others have noted is where functionality disappears or was never there in the first place (eg extra ability to change typography elements as in Canvas) but there is no plug in to fill the gap.
3. I think the strategy of updating some of the old designs to be responsive and to work with the new plug-ins is also great. Some of those designs are simpler and less quirky or have particular uses which are not open in the absence of new features – without excessive development time (Inspire, Whitelight would be two I would pick to upgrade).
3. I don’t see why all themes can’t have maximum control over home page elements. It’s frustrating to know that of the last 9 or so themes Theme X would be perfect if only it had the widget that is in theme Y – I know this is behind the ‘move it to plugins strategy’ and that’s great – eg making team plugin available.
4. I do agree that it’s hard to pick a design since Whitelight that was a huge step forward or in anyway out of the box [On Topic perhaps]. Design is more than just colors and shapes but how the site functions as a business or content marketing platform, or a tool for a particular purpose including the front end for an eCommerce store. The innovations in web design are around what you can do on mobile/pad and in ways to keep users engaged in your content. In the content space the innovations in design are things like qz.com and medium.com; having a woo functionality that included infinite scroll, sticky headers, related posts following ..]
5. One neat feature of Stitch is that pages seem to followed by blog posts! Hallelujah. Unfortunately individual blog posts are followed by comments (yawn). Can you do a theme or change one of the recent simpler themes (Hub eg) to add that feature?
6. I think a challenge that you have is the perceived need to come up with a ‘design’ in the sense of the visual elements. Usually the themes that have those end up being difficult to work with and I fear stitch with the quirky sewing elements is going to end up in the same bucket. I suspect that its’ the simpler visual designs like Apply, Peddlar, perhaps Hub that are most usable out of the box.
7. On the point about not selling your stuff well I agree with the post about showing irrelevant blog posts and ‘quirky’ pictures not doing your themes justice. And some more attention to the copywriting when you cut and paste would help eg is this theme called Stitch or is it called Hub – form the About page on the demo.
«Stitched is a theme for artisan creators. The homepage displays popular posts from all authors as well as other content in a distinctive minimalist style. Whether you’re running your own blog network or just want to display your own content in beautiful fashion, Hub is the theme for you!»
Best
Good catch with the «Hub is the theme for you». It just prove my point even more, you guys just recycle the same content from theme to theme.
But then you can’t understand why people think your themes look alike. 🙂 Part of the problem is you make them look even more alike by using the same content to showcase them over and over again.
Hey, thanks for your feedback (some of which I take as positive :-)). To address some of your points:
2. The custom typography functionality is present in Stitched (and 99% of our themes). But we are investigating moving this to a plug in also. I believe there already exists a number of typography plugins any way.
3. We’re working on a project right now which I think you’ll be happy to see.
4. Infinite Scroll and Related Posts are not functionality that belong in a theme. There is already an infinite scroll plugin that you can use with our themes. There are many, many related posts plugins to try as well. These kind of features definitely fall in to the ‘install as you need it’ category. As has been said, we do not want to bloat our themes with functionality that perhaps only 10% of people actually need/want.
5. I’m not sure what feature you’re requesting? The vast majority of people want comments on blog posts. Might be «yawn» but we need to satisfy the majority.
6. The irony here is that if we were to release a bunch of themes similar to whitelight for example, we receive endless complaints that all our themes look alike. I appreciate that themes like Stitched fit a relatively small niche but we want to cover all bases.
7. Noted – again thanks for the feedback.
This is one problema with you Woo, James: you don’t listen o maybe you don’t know to listen.
We are not speaking about one specific function, we are speaking about a attitud of Woo: themes with, every launch, a less funcionts respect last one, no one theme innovate, all seems same, this for example doesn’t have woo suscribe, excertps automatically, lightbox, any widget useful or inusefull.
You always want to solve situation with your actually slogan: design is subjetive. Sir, your themes are too expensive: 100 bucks, and who are membership, pays even 400 bucks in one year and they are telling you: we don’t like last 10 themes, is it too hard to understand? really?
You eliminate support forum for a tickets system that now are slow and with a policy to stretch, and seems that all comments in blogs or social networks are ignored, you answer some points but not the general complaint: themes are ugly, last 10 themes sucks, you are focused in woocommerce and their plugins, and themes look done with canvas with some CSS different dependig niche of theme, that’s all.
If you don’t wanna listen, tell us, but not talk to us like we were suckers.
I have been a woo paying monthly subscriber for several years, but I have also started to look elsewhere for themes. I must admit I haven’t really liked your new themes for quite some time. Every month I hope for something new, but the themes feels like they are just a tweak from each other.
Also the elements have started to be way to big. The last theme is a good example: The intro part, «Hi, I’m Matty» is so big that you get no feel for the rest of the site. To me, it’s a really bad design. But I’m not giving you up yet… maybe next month?
Yesterday, I went to look for a new car. I went to one dealer who showed me several nice looking cars on the outside. The one I sort of liked didn’t have air conditioning, headlights, radio or a steering wheel. He told me those were all functions and not part of the visual design of the car. They could easily be added though the vehicle by their mechanic for an additional cost. When I asked about another car on their lot, an SUV, it had a radio, steering wheel, a/c and headlights but no seats, heating or speedometer. Again, he said those were functions and not part of the visual design of the car but could easily be added by their mechanic for an additional cost. Or he suggested I could do it myself for free using their online tips.
Then I went to a dealership with hundreds of choices of amazing looking cars and SUVs. Each not only looked visually appealing, but already had all the functionality built in: seats, headlights, radio, a/c, heat, steering wheel, etc. And many had extras like leather seats, sun roof, GPS navigation, cruise control…all at the same price or less as the other dealership. I could drive it right off the lot and start enjoying it today. No mechanic needed.
Yes, I know this is a silly example, but fair or not, this is how clients perceive Woo’s theme trend toward visual design only with plugable functionality. As a web designer, there’s little I can do to persuade a client to buy from the first dealer. The car looks nice but certainly is nothing to get excited about. And the demo version isn’t convincing as a test drive. So, I’ll usually try to argue that the cars in the second lot, though they have lots of bells and whistles (I’m thinking of a Ford vehicle here), are not that well made. Plus they will not have great support. That doesn’t seem to matter much–clients continue to make decisions based on perceived value and stripped down theme functionality with little to offer that is new in the visual design arena just doesn’t seem to cut the mustard with them.
I don’t think there’s a person that comments on this blog that doesn’t want Woo to succeed in every theme release. It’s good for Woo, our clients and for us as designers. As other devs and designers have said, with each release it gets harder and harder to use a Woo Theme other than Canvas and the WooCommerce plugin for a client project. We hope that changes.
While the analogy somewhat falls apart, I understand what you are saying.
I’m going to try and relate them better if I can… If you add a feature (leather seats) via a theme in WordPress, when you get a new theme (new car) those leather seats don’t transfer over to your new theme (new car) very easily or at all.
While our philosophy is add functionality (new features), not related to a theme’s purpose, via plugins. So when your client wants a new theme (aka new car), it’s really simple for them to keep their leather seats, sat nav, and heated seats, that were added via a plugin. Their data (features) are portable no matter how their theme (car) looks.
Plugins are simply the way forward to add functionality to your WordPress site. Even if clients don’t understand that right now. They’ve been taught for the past many years, buy a theme that comes packed with features. That’s the best! You need all the bells and whistles in your theme. 5 sliders, 100 fonts, ecommerce, form creation, directories, etc…
But take a theme we did ourselves like Listings. Your client is already using Listings, but wants to update/change the way their site looks with a new theme. What do you do, and how much more work does it take to move the functionality and their existing data from Listings over to a new theme? Instead if it were a plugin, you’d only have to add a plugin integration and styling to match the new theme.
Like I said, clients may not understand currently but this is the best way forward for everyone. Us, developers, and clients/customers.
This makes perfect sense to me.
I’m not a developer or designer. I have only two websites – one personal, one professional – and I spent a long time shopping for themes from several different suppliers. I ran into two problems in my search:
1) I’d find a theme that looked perfect, but lacked the functionality I wanted with few compatible plugin alternatives.
2) I’d find a theme that advertised all the functionality I was looking for, but turned out to be buggy and poorly supported.
For the two themes I’m currently using (one from Woo and one from elsewhere), I’ve purchased no fewer than six – the other four turned out to be unusable.
When (not if) I decide to change the look-and-feel of my websites, I’m going to have to find new themes that 1) look good 2) offer the functionality I need, and 3) work as advertised. Based on my past experience with the WordPress ecosystem this is a small target indeed. If I were in a situation where the functionality I need had nothing to do with the theme, but was instead handled by plugins, the search for and transition to a new theme would be much easier.
It seems to me that the purpose of a theme is to handle presentation – the look-and-feel of a website. The purpose of plugins is to add functionality. How does it not make sense to separate them?
Like I said, I’m no developer, but haven’t we already been down this road with coding in general? Once upon a time, presentational markup was mixed-in with semantic markup and other code, and it was a nightmare for designers. The purpose of CSS was to remove all the presentational code into separate documents to make design changes easier.
Doesn’t separating the theme (presentation) from the plugins (functionality) accomplish the same thing? From where I’m sitting, it seems like a smart move.
It’s great to hear real-world examples of how the separation of presentation and functionality is benefiting you guys.
Ryan, I have no argument with portable, plugable functionality. I like and agree with the theory but the practice can be much trickier. Even plugins require customization and styling to fit a theme’s visual style. So is there a real cost savings for the client when they switch themes? I would like to think so but am not always sure.
And despite the idea of «easy theme changes» that’s a continual selling point for WordPress themes, I find most site redesigns need complete overhauls anyway. I have a client site built in an earlier version of Woo Canvas (pre-responsive design). The client would like to redesign the site to make it responsive. Great! We’ll just upgrade to the new version of Canvas and voila, done right? Not so fast. Canvas is a theme meant to be customized, and customize it they did. Upgrading the old, customized, non-responsive Canvas version of the site to a new one is a major deal…almost a redesign in and of itself. So is the «easy to stitch themes» idea really realistic for client sites? Again I’ve not found it to be true in practice.
Your point about moving data over from a theme with custom post types like Listings and reintegrating it into a new theme is well taken. Would be much better to have that in a plugin. The problem is that it gets hard to separate design from functionality in a theme because design involves both form and function.
Back to the crazy car analogy, I think part of the problem with Woo’s removing functionality from a theme (note I’m not saying the problem is making it portable), is that what used to be considered a bell and whistle addition is now a standard requirement in the customer’s mind. So, moving slider functionality into a plugin (WooSlider) is great, not including in the theme is not. Sliders are standard now and when I tell a client they’ll have to buy the theme, the slider and then get me to integrate and style it, that won’t sell when they can buy a theme with all that already integrated.
So, make functionality portable? Yes, where it makes sense. But integrate and include that functionality in the theme from the release rather than as an add on, especially functionality that is now considered «standard» for customers buying themes. That will make our job easier to sell Woo themes as a superior product to customers.
The extra cost issue is a valid point. If a theme that costs $99 has had the slider removed, and the only alternative is an additional $49 plugin, that can start to add-up.
My hope is that many of the plugins that will handle formerly theme-based functionality will be free. We’ve seen this already at Woo with Sensei: Modules, Badges, File Attachments – functions that might be considered integral to Sensei itself – are offered as free extensions, which resolves the extra-cost issue.
Hi David,
We do that when it makes perfect sense. 🙂
Obvious things like our features plugin and testimonial plugins, etc… That was just us removing the code from being duplicated in each theme, and putting it into a plugin.
Sliders aren’t removed from our themes with us forcing you to then get WooSlider. If the theme’s design has a slider on the homepage, it’s included with no need for WooSlider.
We do include a business page template in themes that requires WooSlider though, as I explained in this comment in the thread.
https://woocommerce.com/2014/02/showcase-your-creativity-with-stitched/#comment-958910
Thanks!
Much understood and I really appreciate some civil discourse around the philosophies. 🙂
We still do include sliders on the homepages of our themes, if the design used them, and those don’t require WooSlider. WooSlider can replace them, but isn’t required for the homepage.
It just comes down to a technical issue when we want to start including multiple sliders and have them slide different content though. As is the case with the business page templates in our themes.
We’ve built that functionality into WooSlider already (multiple sliders with different content), and having one code base in a plugin to manage is great. It just is that WooSlider is a product we’ve decided has a cost associated with it, versus many of our free plugins that offer the same kinda of idea. WooSlider also does a lot more than replace the default slider in our themes though, which is unlike our other plugins (like testimonials, features, etc…) that simply replace that functionality for free.
I definitely understand the issue with changing themes a client may have customized as well, especially with Canvas. Another point of education we need to do better on is the wonderful world of child themes. 🙂
If someone is working on a theme, all their deep customizations are best done in a child theme. Then even when a huge change comes along, like Canvas from version 4 to version 5, your child theme wouldn’t need as much work to get it ready for version 5. Thankfully big changes don’t come along every version like that.
Like I said, your feedback is greatly appreciated and it helps align what we want to do with what you need and want. We hope the kind of problems mentioned here become easier with our moves forward. 🙂
Is there no custom css box?
Yes, I was wondering about this.
I was able to use a custom.css file and upload it every time I updated it, but I don’t understand the point of leaving it out of the dashboard.
The «Custom CSS» box has been removed, in favour of using child themes (which is the WordPress Best Practice for customising a theme).
If you’d prefer to add CSS via your admin, we recommend this plugin:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/css/ 🙂
Ninjas, you need to create Megazine (News) theme!
thanks for this article…
I really love it !!
keep it up good work !! 🙂
I really love this theme……………
I hate to labor a point…….
27th February
Me:
1. Footer Customization
2. Home Widget Area
3. Subscribe / Connect (and widget)
27th February
Matty:
“We are currently working on updates to address each of the three points you’ve mentioned.”
14th March
That’s two updates uploaded and not one of the things you said would be addressed have been addressed?
3rd time lucky?
Peter
Hi Matty
It is very important you do not make comments that you cannot backup on this site. I will give you a reason why your comments affected me and why they may have affected others.
I asked in late February whether you were going to fix this theme so someone who is not technical can do some of the basic functions we have been accustomed to in the last without having to learn how to code or pay a developer.
There were three main points….
1. Footer Customization
2. Home Widget Area
3. Subscribe / Connect Capabilities (and widget)
Your reply was an emphatic yes….
“We are currently working on updates to address each of the three points you’ve mentioned.”
Thats was the 27th of Feb……..Now since then I have created 3 client websites that are ready to show the client except for these 3 main ‘serious issues».
I have seen 2 updates to this theme come and go without addressing any of these and I still wait….
Now if you are indeed ‘not’ going to do these things then PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE respond (this is my third comment on this) I will then hire a developer to fix these issues before I show the clients.
I am sure others are in the same position as me…
I await a clear response !
Hi Peter,
Please see my previous comments on this post.
By «Updates», as clarified in other comments on this post, I am referring to exploring and creating the best possible solution for each of these points, where possible.
Our Homepage Control plugin is the first of these solutions.
With a single update to Stitched, and the Homepage Control plugin, homepage component re-ordering is now possible without any code.
We’ve also released a Subscribe & Connect plugin, to address point 3 on your list.
The Footer Area customisation is a feature we are currently exploring the best way to achieve.
I hope this clarifies your query. 🙂
Thanks and regards,
Matty.
Thanks Matty
This helped alot
For those interested; we just released Homepage Control – a nifty little plugin that will allow you to customise the homepage when using Stitched and other forthcoming themes.
James- I just installed Homepage control- it allows me to order these sections, but that’s it. In the actual theme documentation, there is an instruction that tells me to use the homepage option in the theme option, but its not there.
This is the toughest theme I have ever worked with- and I don’t want to give up, but there has to be an easier way.
Sorry you’re struggling with this.
It allows you to re-order and toggle the visibility (click the checkboxes). That’s all it is designed to do, I’m not sure what you were expecting beyond that?
You use the homepage menu link to access this, as described in the documentation (including screenshot).
Howdy –
I am definitely going with WooCommerce and want to choose an official WooTheme. I am leaning towards Stitched because it is new, but the comments seem to encourage using Canvas.
I am new to Woo, but can handle CSS & diggin into the php, I am more coder than designer.
I am having trouble understanding what the differences are between Canvas & these other themes. Why is Canvas more expensive?
At first glance it seems that Canvas is more configurable in the admin section – but that almost scares me more because configurations are difficult to version, vs a CSS file that you can revert to.
Which is faster? Which is more responsive? Thanks for any comments !
This premium creative WordPress theme has got great designs. the color scheme of this theme is really great. What’s more attractive about this theme is that, it is really creative. The two column layout and the E-commerce options are like the jewels of this theme. you can showcase your products in simple grids. Also I loved the way the menu is deigned. Its clean and classy. One more good part of this theme is the fonts. Your users will be able to read easily.