Here at WooThemes HQ, examining, refining and streamlining our product offering is of paramount importance to us. This helps to ensure you all receive the best possible offering across our various product ranges.
Now firmly into the second quarter of 2013, we felt it to be an appropriate point to examine the themes area of our product range and apply some of our regular pruning.
Part of our 2013 strategy here at Woo is continued simplification and refocusing. One way in which we do this is to retire older themes. The reasoning behind this is that we feel we’ve managed to replace them with newer themes that boast more functionality / features and better designs, and also because only a very small percentage of our customers seem to find value in them within our catalog. We approached all customers who purchased any of these themes within the past 5 months, asked questions and analysed the data before settling on this decision.
So from the end of April 2013, we’ll be retiring these 15 themes:
- BoldNews
- Busy Bee
- Backstage
- The Station
- Delegate
- Optimize
- Continuum
- Aperture
- Feature Pitch
- The Journal
- Elefolio
- Sealight
- Boast
- Over Easy
- Daybook
Support
We’ll continue to support these themes via our help desk after we retire them, so current users of these themes can continue using them if they want. Current users can still also update their copy of the WooFramework. We also would like to give those users a chance to upgrade to a new theme at a discounted price, so if you own one of these themes and you were thinking of upgrading, be sure to make use of the coupon code below.
If you purchased any of the above themes within the last 5 months, you will receive an e-mail from us with a 100% coupon code to download a theme of your choice. Please allow up to 36 hours for this e-mail to arrive.
Grab any of our themes (except Resort, which has it’s own coupon code) with a 15% discount coupon, valid until 24th April, 2013. Just use THEMERETIRE2013 as your coupon code on checkout.
About
Nice coupon codes. Thanks for taking care of your customers!
Happy Woo customers make Happy Woo employees.
Thanks for the comment, Jeff. Glad our gestures are appreciated! 😉
Idea: Why not put a time limit countdown, e.g. # of days available, on every theme when launched to get a sense of time scarcity? After that period, a keep vs. retire decision is made by you guys.
Benefit: Customers have a sense of how much time they have left and there’s social proofing – it’s retiring because we, the community, didn’t buy it.
There’s not an easy way to go about this necessarily, they are retired based on a few factors. There isn’t ever a date set from the outset of the theme release when it will be retired.
This doesn’t mean the theme is automatically dead in the water either though! We’re still supporting them. 🙂
I love Garrett’s suggestion. I was thinking along the same lines.
When you retire one of my themes that I purchased, I should get to choose a replacement theme free of charge (not at a 15% discount).
We are doing this if it was a recent purchase, you’ll receive a coupon!
Coming from our perspective though, you’ve potentially gotten quite a long life out of these themes. They’ve proven very valuable to you and your business/site/shop etc…
It just doesn’t make much sense that you potentially purchased a theme package over a year or more ago, and we should be providing free themes each time one is retired.
I totally agree. You get a long life out of a theme, but they can wear out, like tires. So you buy a new one or put on some retreads. 🙂
As mentioned in the post, if you purchased any of the above themes within the past 5 months, we’ll be e-mailing you a coupon code to cover the purchase of a new theme, not just the 15% discount coupon. 🙂
Why not just revamp / rebuild the themes and make them better instead of pruning the themes catalog?
It’s not a bad idea, but some of those themes would essentially become completely new themes. On average it takes less time to build a new theme than to tear one down and rebuild it.
And thats just from a coding perspective, providing support for a majorly rewritten theme or plugin is a lot of work! 😉
How about open-sourcing the retired themes? I mean, they ‘re GPL anyway, right? But why don’t you set up a GitHub account and have them available to download from there? Just make it clear that they’re unsupported.
We’ve done this before and it wasn’t well received with those that had purchased the theme.
Over Easy was one of my favorite. The one I really started to promote Woothemes for my clients… RIP 😉
Very many thanks for your kind offer. All the best.
It might be useful to make these dead themes skins for Canvas. Charge a nominal amount per skin.
That’s actually a f******* awesome idea. At least for themes where it’s possible (not advanced listings / support / learning themes).
Should be pretty straight forward to make a canvas child theme, mimicking the look of these old themes frontpages.
We’ve toyed with the idea of making child themes for Canvas with different designs. Be sure to suggest it here though: http://ideas.woocommerce.com/
Done 🙂
Vote this idea up people!
http://ideas.woocommerce.com/forums/72423-general-ideas-/suggestions/3876759-new-themes-created-as-canvas-child-themes
Thank you WooThemes for taking care of your customers. This is great! How long do I have to use the code to get my new replacement theme? I received the email with the code, but it did not list an expiration date…
thanks