Our first business theme in 2012 is a beauty! We wanted to let Chris Rowe have another chance at out-designing his previous top seller at WooThemes; Simplicity. So it goes without saying that we have high hopes that Whitelight will be our most popular business theme to date. In addition to being a very clean and great design, here are some of the reasons we think this theme will be big…
Responsive is the way forward!
Whitelight follows in the footsteps of our previous new releases and is fully responsive, meaning it works on any browser, be it on your computer, iPad or mobile device. The featured slider is full width and responsive, and also has an alternative normal width option if you prefer that.
Modular homepage for increased flexibility
We’ve also made an effort to make the homepage modular, so you can easily add or remove the sections you want, and also order them through a widgetized area.
WooCommerce compatibility from the start
Whitelight also has a WooCommerce child theme which enables full compatibility with WooCommerce and adds a custom module to hightlight latest additions to your shop on the homepage.
That’s not all the features of Whitelight, so be sure to head on over to the theme listing page and also check out the demo!
Grab Whitelight with a 12% discount coupon, valid until 14th February, 2012. Just use WHITELIGHT12 as your coupon code on checkout.
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very impressive …
cannot switch the styles
it gets more to business themes now which is good, but the design (so to say) is not really something new.
It is too clean – nearly boring. Companies need a branding.
But maybe I just cannot see the styles yet and this would change my point of view.
I realized, that the big slider looks nice, but the clients do not have such big pics and if they have, this would increase the load time of the page a lot.
A very nice point: you are focusing every new theme also for mobile. Great
Thanks for your thoughts 🙂 I certainly hear your complaints about the theme being “too clean”. You must however consider that we are trying to have these themes cater to as wide a range of customers as possible.
If the theme is too unique in it’s branding, users won’t be able to customize it according to their own branding, and that is ultimately the idea here 🙂
good point – I childtheme all woothemes!
This is definitely the best approach here for users building client’s sites with our themes as the foundation.
Separate your customizations from the parent theme to allow easy updates to it, and the ability to add to a already great theme. 🙂
If I install the Whitelight theme, and I then install Whitelight Commerce as a child theme, what is the best practice for applying my customizations to either so that future Wootheme updates to either are not wiped out.
I agree Cobus. This theme is clean and will load fast. The brand, logo and the products will then shine.
BTW can you rename the “portfolio” custom post type to “Products” or “Services”, and can you have more than one custom post type? eg. “products” and “services”
You can modify the name of the custom post type, just be careful. I’d be more inclined to add a new one via a child theme and simply remove the original or leave it. 🙂
That being said you can always add custom post types to WordPress.
Fixed the alt styles now 🙂 #mybad
A companies branding should be it’s own, it shouldn’t be supplied by a pre-designed canned theme that is going to be used by potentially thousands of other sites.
A theme like Whitelight, as well as ANY WordPress theme, should be looked at as a starting point. You then customize it and enhance it to reflect the unique branding of the individual company.
Good themes are going to be clean and not brand specific, the more branded and specific it is the less wide appeal it is going to have and the harder it’s going to be to customize to suit the needs of a specific brand identity.
Whitelight looks like a fantastic theme to build on top of. It’s a great layout with great features. That is what is important, not the pre-defined branding or styles which should be customized on a per site basis to suit the needs of the individual site.
Proof is in the numbers too, this is why Canvas stays on top of our leader board all the time. We’re hoping Whitelight can join Canvas or even topple it! 🙂
Thank you 🙂
Thanks Carl! Agree with you that a theme is a starting point and should be customized on a per site basis.
Agreed!
Yes! Please provide better branded themes, so that my business website can look exactly like 1000’s of other businesses sites.
🙂
now the styles work. Pageload was slow- so this could have been the reason.
well…… style?
Just changes the header bg and somehow below slider? The buttons are not really in good contrast somethimes (e.g. white leather)
I would rather look to be able to change the whole bg and make page semi-transparent.
This would be a nice function for backoffice.
Define color and be able to set opacity.
This would really open new ways to style the page and brand it. Who would use the style to change the small header bg?
comon
You need look no further than to your options panel to add your own background and styling touch to customize all that 🙂
As a big WooThemes fan I have to say that this is a disappointment. There is no design as such and I think this is a big WooThemes issue at the moment, the new designs are functional not designs.
It also looks not great in Opera. I know I’m probably the only person who uses it but it is still annoying. The tags break off and the sitemap looks bad. The font is all jaggedy.
The different styles are OK but I’m fed up of all these big images.
The blog layout is nice but the whole thing just doesn’t excite me.
Sorry.
I can only speak for myself and the designers on our team, and we all think this is an absolutely beautiful design. But as always design is subjective so hopefully not everybody thinks it is bad 😉
I have to say, I’m a little disappointed in this response! You guys know design; that’s always impressed me about the WooThemes team. You should know as well as anyone that design is *not* subjective, it’s objective.
Forgive the abstract digression in the middle of a discussion like this, but this is crucial to an understanding of our discipline:
Design is about solving problems. Just as a problem always has one solution that solves it better than all the others, there will likewise be one design which accomplishes its goals most effectively. Can we always recognize that one best design? Probably not – we live in a fallen world where the truth is often unclear. But it is still important that we recognize the existence of a single best solution, and that we continue pursuing it, even with little assurance of unearthing it.
Design is oriented towards people, but since people are unique, different design will better serve different people. The best design for a situation is the design which best serves the needs of the most people in that design’s target demographic. That design might not be the best possible design for any one person, but it will still be the best design for its collective constituents.
This becomes especially tricky when designing prefab themes. WooThemes has no idea who its final users will be, and it’s much harder to create a design meant for general usage as opposed to a specific case. WooThemes doesn’t get the luxury of doing extensive research prior to designing a theme, since it doesn’t know its precise audience. So, they’re forced to design for a genre rather than a specific case.
Whether someone likes or dislikes the resulting theme is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether it accomplishes its goal – in this case, is it a clean, readable, multi-purpose business theme? I think it will prove to be so.
As for the theme itself, Sarah, I believe it is well-designed. It may not be *decorated* as such, but it is certainly designed.
Jordan, that insight was very thoughtful and shows that it’s not easy to design themes that everybody will like. Thanks! 🙂
I have to agree with Maggie. This is almost the perfect theme in design, proportions and features. The clean design allows the content to shine through, but the theme options allow for individual customization. With a little custom CSS, the possibilities are endless.
Sorry to hear you are disappointed Sarah.
Let me explain the theme a little.. When it comes to designing pre-made business themes, one of the key features I have to consider is the flexibility. As business covers such a vast array of areas, it’s hard to a give a theme that unique and individual look without either a) reducing the amount of possible users significantly or b) making it a lot harder for users to customise it. So basically, whether you are a small local tradesman or nationwide corporate company, Whitelight gives you a great base to work from to create and customise your own individual and beautiful website.
I hope this explains the reasoning behind the theme.
Yes, I understand what you are saying and I do like elements of it.
I think I’m just preferring some of the more ‘designed’ themes at the moment because you can do most of everything in Canvas really and I’d prefer other themes to be more specific and designed.
But, it is totally subjective. I still think you’re great!!
I love the wider slider (had been looking for a theme with that) and of course the fact that its responsive. Clean is great, you can dress it up with your own unique look when you need to. Great job Chris and Woo!!
Does it have the portfolio with gallery option like simplicity or could that be added? I use it for things besides portfolio, such as recent pictures from the client’s events and it would be a better presentation than having to scroll through pics.
Also don’t overlook how cool and useful the scrolling client testimonials feature was in its predecessor :).
I’m glad you like the design! We opted for showing all portfolio images in a row on single portfolio page to keep it simple, but might add the carousel back in v1.1 if there is much request for it. We will also add feedback functionality and widget in v1.1 🙂
Thanks for the plan to add the feedback.
Come on, somebody else out there has to like the very useful carousel!
Nice! I looking for this theme. ))))
Very nice,also “responsive design” should be part of wooframework 🙂
It is 🙂 so it’s also a standard feature in most of our new themes.
I’m very excited about this theme. With Simplicity currently being my go-to theme for clients, I can’t wait to try this one out. The full width slider is a huge plus for me.
Only things I noticed I didn’t like came from viewing on my iPad. When choosing to have responsive design it seems that you lose the ability to zoom in on content. This leaves the viewer with having to just live with your choice of font/content size. Since I zoom a lot I will miss this function.
Also, the dropdown menus seem to be impossible to activate on an iPad(iPhone works great!). It just takes you to the top navigation item every time.
Great job guys! Look forward to playing with it!
Hi,
The zoom disable is just one line of code in includes/theme-functions.php which you can remove if you want.
We’ll look into the dropdown nav on iPad!
as you promote business themes, I would also add some practical small tools like:
1) member login (as a widget or to place it discret on the page without showing the backend direction)
2) nice event planer
if a company wants to promote, when they will have their next presentation, webcast, show, whatever.
This was a nice idea for UNSIGNED. A user should be able to download the event to iCal or Outlook.
3) some really interesting shop designs – the currents are looking nearly all same.
Example: http://www.elegantthemes.com/demo/?theme=eStore
4) and of course: CAPTCHA security for the forms! This should be standard.
I don’t see how that shop design is any more ‘interesting’ than ours? It just has a different slider on the homepage. In fact it wouldn’t be too hard to achieve a similar slider using Whitelight.
Or do you just mean different styles of shop design? IE more hand-drawn/handcrafted aesthetics?
There’s a login widget built into WooCommerce.
login widget not only in woocommerce. For the page itself. The most of my clients want to login to write posts or feed the blog.
Frontend editing would be easier for them. Is there a way?
Not sure what you mean. If people are logging in to write posts can’t they just go to /wp-login.php ?
forgot to say…
I like the submenue look of this shop.
this would be great, if we could design massiv subpages with some style, so this would not result in long submenues.
but anyway – I love you Woo guys and I am a big fan.
Please look into some points.
Thanks
Damn! I purchased a standard package yesterday and I can’t download this awesome theme 🙁
It’s exactly what i need for my next project..
Shoot us an email so we might be able to deliver some happiness. – support[at]woocommerce.com
Hey guys, are you working with breakpoints? and if yes can i easily add a ‘1240up’ class to this one?
thx
Sure. We are using CSS media queries to target different resolutions, and you can easily add you own custom ones.
As i’ve mentioned before, woothemes are all about functionality for me so this theme looks like a fantastic addition.
I would however like to add my name to the list of people looking for “events” functionality to be woven in to future releases of woo themes.
Great work again woo!
Our genius developers are perhaps working on something behind the scenes to help with this, nothing confirmed but an idea is floating about. 😉
And when you say genius I know that you really do mean GENIUS!
I just love WooThemes! They are 100% awesome!
Wow.
Responsive – Check
Full Width Slider – Check
E-commerce Child Theme – Check
All this built onto Woo Themes incredible framework that is fantastically coded and easily modifiable…It’s like Christmas in February..
Does that mean we’re late or early? 😛
Thanks Alex 🙂 Christmas in February…I like that! 😛
Amazing! Glad I upgraded my account now! 🙂
Thanks Calzo! Still think your mod is one of the coolest. 😉
Random side note, did you go to the SuperBowl? If so, we should have met up!
Very nice clean design. We actually just a did recent modification of Canvas that looks very similiar to this. It will be very nice having this in stable of themes to choose from.
Well done!!!
Question?… Is there an easy way to see what Theme Options a new theme contains (without out downloading it and installing it). We compare every new site we start with “Should we start with Canvas” or something else. It’s a tough call and I can’t tell how many times we’ve started with a different theme and went back to Canvas because of the ease-of-use with all the theme options. Even a screen grab of the Theme Options page would be helpful. Just a thought. Thanks for all Woo do!! 🙂
The Theme Playground would be your best bet – http://test.woocommerce.com/
Thanks Michael!!!!
WHITEFIRE! well done guys… it’s clean and sleek and has all that Woo-goodness I love to see.
What would be great would be some more ways to add custom content to the homepage, rather than the usual “features, works, blah blah” … a la http://www.visitphilly.com/ I think you did something similar with teamster but instead of people, you could do it for custom posts… just my 2 cents! 🙂
Hi Maya,
I believe you could add our shortcode tabs to a text widget and achieve the same tabbed layout as the link 🙂
Hey Magnus,
The short code tabs is definitely a good start. but I was referring to having tabs display dynamic content (fresh content / posts). Anyhow, this is just too nice… I’m back on the Theme Club wagon! 🙂
I have found Simplicity has been my number one go-to theme for business clients as of late…looks like I just might have a new favorite.
VERY nice work Chris.
Cheers,
Steve
Awesome, I have to agree, Simplicity has got some competition here 🙂
This design is really outstanding. Last theme I purchased was Kaboodle. I’m fairly certain this one is going to end up in the mix sometime soon.
Glad you like it, and I also think Kaboodle is one of the best designs we have, but still quite different from Whitelight 🙂 It all depends what the usage is right?
Really liking the look of this. Nice one guys.
Just having a mess in the playground. Is it possible for the slider to be powered by posts, or do you need to create specific slides?
Cheers 🙂
It will require a tweak of the query inside the includes/featured.php file to show posts instead of the Slide post type, so fairly easy mod 🙂
Sweet. Cheers, Magnus.
Really like this new theme!
Trying out your demo on my ipad, iphone etc – I just have the regular full size layout on my iphone not the screen shot you have in this post – am I doing something wrong?
Hi, I just tested this on my side, and it works fine. Please report the problem in our forum with further details if you require some assistance with the issue 🙂
Make sure you click the red x in our demo theme switcher, it loads the theme in an iframe I believe and the media queries don’t work then.
Otherwise visit the demo directly here. – http://demo2.woothemes.com/whitelight/
Well, I like it a lot. 🙂
Well, thank you! 😉
Hey Ninjas, I love this new theme, really badass….except….
Is responsive design gong to be the way of all of your themes? If so, I beg at your ninja feets to provide an easy way to turn it off. I, along with many of my geek friends, hate responsive design. I get the intelligence behind it, but it’s not always desirable.
Now one problem I have with this theme in the responsive design is on the iPhone. First, when I load it up it shows just the navigation and I suspect a lot of folks won’t even think to scroll, missing out on the homepage. Of course, this would have to be tested, but I assume this would be true for a lot of folks. However, even more of an issue is how the slider looks on the iPhone: the navigation buttons are huge in the response and the top one is cut off, the text box takes over half the slide space, and some of the text is cut off. It looks not so good 😛 Everything below turns out fine. (of course turning the iPhone sideways makes it all better, but…)
In general, I find my response, ahem, to the responsive design on the iphones to be less than slick. It favors a certain usability over other factors.
That being said, I still might use this theme because it IS bad ass. I just pray to the Woo Ninja Gods to give me an option in future themes to easily shut off responsiveness if so desired without having to recode the puppy.
thanks and keep rockin!
-ryan
I hear you, responsive design might not be for everybody, so we are looking into showing you how you can easily turn that off in our designs 🙂
That would be excellent if you could.
Thanks, Magnus:) y’all rock!
I hate this logic. The “users won’t know to scroll” argument circa 1998. If people have an ipad or iphone they know how to use a responsive website.
The future is responsive design. Get on the wagon.
Great theme. My question is, why aren’t these features being incorporated into the latest version of Canvas: responsive, modular homepage, woo commerce compatibility and integration out of the box (vs a child theme)? Sort of frustrating for those of us who have been asking for a while to see these things in Canvas and are still waiting. I’m sort of baffled why this happens regularly with new WooTheme releases when Canvas is the flagship product for WooThemes. Why not make all these clever new features that come out with each release a modular add on to Canvas that can be purchased as a mini app/plugin?
Each time a new WooTheme comes out with features not in Canvas, it weakens your flagship product. Or maybe as Ryan mentions above, that is the aim, to replace Canvas with other products that people will have to buy to get the newer features.
In my opinion, it’s important to think of the support for such an update to Canvas. Trust me when I say this: Even members of the WooTeam are desiring a responsive Canvas and it’s no doubt in the future. With it being the most popular and having the most widespread use, there is a lot to consider before releasing such an update or feature.
Remember that one of the huge benefits to WooThemes themes is the modular framework, features, and coding. Many features from one theme can be easily ported into another.
There are lots of interesting things happening in the background and we’re in for exciting times, Frank 🙂 Part of what you’ve mentioned seems almost like you look into a crystal ball. If Canvas is planned to be phased out, I’ll eat my shorts hehe. Ryan was going in a totally different direction 🙂
We hope to blow you away soon enough instead of leave you baffled.
Cheers!
I have no doubt that Woo will blow me away with what’s coming next. You always do.
Hi,
We are going to incorporate responsive design into Canvas and make it more modular in the next version, but with Canvas it will take longer to incorporate this, since we have to think about all the existing users and installations.
WooCommerce functionality is available via Child theme in Whitelight, the same as it is with Canvas.
So yes we are going to make a lot of the new features available in Canvas, it just takes a little longer to implement it there, as we can’t just rewrite Canvas from scratch 😉
Thank you for a new great theme. I find the discussion about the clean design / functionality / branding quite interesting. I accept that most themes must have a clean design, as the users have different needs and flexibility is a key factor for selling the theme. I can just speak for myself, but I am neither creative nor a good designer, and find uniqe details included in the themes quite handy. Yes, it is possible to customize the CSS, but is that defined as good design? I googled web design trends 2012, and a big # 1 is responsive themes. Check. But most of the list focus on branding; header design, typography, vector art, infographics etc. And woothemes has great designers. Just look at your office and your coolest ninjas. I am not sure where I am going with this, I just need to point out, in my opinion, that good design is not something everybody can do. So I would like some help. Integrated in some of the themes or as an extra …. something!
But. I love woothemes. I learn new things every day and the support from the ninjas are outstanding. Thank you!
I agree with you, but I think that Whitelight, although a clean design, is a slick design that features perfect grid design and nice typography to fit with all the elements. That isn’t something you can just whip up with some custom CSS, it takes hours of design work in Photoshop to get that look.
Really like the full-width slider!
Where can we make theme suggestion ideas? Because I really like some of the ideas on this site. (I know its not wordpress, but it looks good)
http://www.libcky.com/
– header design (extremely clean)
– individual page content backgrounds
– footer widget divider design
One other request!
Tab shortcode – they are really hard to customize and could really be powerful for site design. I vote for more effort there! (Padding, colors, fonts, etc.)
Hi, Our ideas board is the best place to do that 🙂
Loving the theme, especially the really easy way to change the backgrounds for the various sections on the homepage and the ‘Portfolio Items Link To’ option! Any chance you can be persuaded to add testimonial functionality to the individual portfolio pages, and a widget or some other way to add them to the homepage? Seems odd to have a business theme without this…
Wonderful suggestion, I think we could get that added in at some point. 😉
I second this.
HI
I like this a lot, and while waiting for the responsive Canvas it would serve my purposes well for several projects, … except for the single post and (especially) blog and archive pages design. In particular the fact I can’t easily move the meta from taking up a column on the left and the thumbnail from being above the excerpt is a huge problem.
I realise you can’t design all themes of this type to suit all tastes; but noting the comments from Kent above, it would be good either to have a tutorial on cleaning that up if we can’t have some built in options.
Thanks for considering this.
I have the same concerns as Gordon as far as the blog layout and the excerpt section on the home page. The 100 x 100 thumbnails worked much better for business sites that put things like press releases on the front page. Having the thumbnail above it takes up too much space, and with some businesses its going to be hard to find pictures that would fit in that ratio.
Made a note of this and will see if we can add better options to control this in v1.1
that’s exactly why Woo ROCKS!!
Having complained about how single posts, blogs and archives look on a big screen, I have to say that they look *great* on an iphone; and I note that users that do have wide images can also make them look great. But where you are using member logos or headshots or organisations spokespeople or icons then you have a problem on a larger screen unless there is an alternative blog/archive page.
Gordon
Great job guys! I really like the theme design. I am about to talk to a customer and this is the theme recommended for the job:)
Hope the chat went well, Whitelight would make a great site for them. 😉
Any chance the Portfolio section can be Videos and not just photos?
Yup, easily handles videos. 🙂 – http://cl.ly/1D3z1j1y3Q1X0d3k0C0r
Hi, i’m setting up a website for a book publisher. I’ve never used woocommerce and i’m wondering if it’s possible to add genre and author taxonomies, and if there is a method to visualize it in the product page.
There are, of course, a couple of ways to tackle this.
Products have categories as you would expect, one way you can organize books. – http://cl.ly/0V160v0M1I0P1N0N1R1i
You can add more taxonomies to the product post type. One for author and one for genre. That would be my best bet I think.
Then depending on how you want to display that information, you can make the call for that taxonomy in the theme somewhere. IE – sidebar, single product listing, etc…
Hi,
I have bought this theme, and it looks great.
I do have one issue concerning the load-time of the top-banner-slides. Although I have optimized the pictures in the slides to an absolute minimum, it still takes several seconds to load the pictures inside the slider.
Is there something I can do about this?