Archive of posts with the News topic
We’ve been working hard on a new service for well over a year now and I’m really excited to share it with you. It’s called Memberful, and we’re now accepting beta customers. Memberful makes it easy to sell your digital downloads: software, graphics, fonts, icons, templates, themes, plugins, etc. You can also use Memberful to monetize your content by selling monthly or yearly subscriptions to your website. Head over to the site to learn more and sign up.
Memberful is really easy (like point and click) to set up. It also optionally integrates quickly with WordPress via a plugin. We’ve been using it for a year now here at The Theme Foundry to sell our WordPress themes on this WordPress powered website. If you’re the technical type, we also have an API available for integrating Memberful with any third-party CMS or custom application.
We’re really excited about Memberful, and hope you are too!
This week, I am joining The Theme Foundry team as a Developer and I am absolutely thrilled! I have been a big fan of The Theme Foundry for a long time. Their themes are beautiful both in regard to design and code quality. I look forward to helping the team continue in this tradition.
Read more
Does building beautiful and functional WordPress themes for an audience of thousands sound like fun? If yes, we’re hiring a smart and self-managed developer like yourself who communicates effectively and loves getting things done.
You’ll spend your days here at The Theme Foundry building new themes with the team, fixing and improving existing themes, and working with the terrific folks over at Automattic to launch and support our themes on the WordPress.com platform.
We take pride in how we build our themes. We discuss and debate what features really matter, and more importantly, which features don’t. We’re not held back by the whims of a client or the narrow scope of an internal project. We build for the end user. This gives us the freedom to make the right decisions and the satisfaction of seeing those decisions applied in real life.
You won’t just be implementing basic features. We’re looking for someone who wants to make an impact. We need you to take our themes and service to the next level by delivering big picture solutions that do real jobs for our customers.
Read more
We’re looking to add a community manager to the team! We’ve grown this year and the number of emails and support questions has increased quite a bit. Up until this point, Andy, Scott, Jennifer, and I have been sharing the load. It’s time for someone special (maybe you!) to take our support to the next level.
Support is great source of pride at The Theme Foundry. You should be a proficient communicator with excellent writing skills and naturally enjoy helping people solve problems. You should also know WordPress inside and out and have lots of experience using and customizing WordPress themes. You don’t need to be a developer, but you should be capable of writing CSS, HTML, and basic PHP.
Read more
Our very own Portfolio theme is now available for WordPress.com sites and blogs. You may purchase the theme directly from your WordPress.com dashboard or from the Portfolio theme showcase page.
When you buy a theme on WordPress.com you get the same quality support, but your theme and website are hosted in the WordPress.com environment. It’s easy to use and you don’t have to worry about updating WordPress or your theme.
Read more about the differences between WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress and browse all our themes available on WordPress.com.
Today we’re super excited to introduce Foundry Pro, a new subscription based pricing option. Foundry Pro gives you unlimited access to all our themes, tutorials, and support for a one year period. You’ll also get instant access to new theme releases and a cool Pro badge next to your name in our Help Center. We’re kicking it off with an introductory price of $125 per year. Introductory price is no longer available, now $249 per year.
Read more
We just started working with the talented Dave Ruiz on a brand new responsive photography theme. The whole team is super excited about it (to say the least). Dave has also posted a screenshot over on Dribbble.
We’re excited to announce that our latest release, Chalk, is now available for WordPress.com sites and blogs!
When you buy a theme on WordPress.com you get the same quality support from us with the ease of a WordPress.com-managed site. Check it out – and as always, let us know if you have any feedback!
You can also browse all our themes available on WordPress.com.
This past weekend we flipped the switch on a major overhaul and re-design of The Theme Foundry website, and guess what, we’re excited!
The new website represents months of hard work by the whole team, and we are all proud to see it finally go live. Below is a quick overview of the changes, along with some fun facts about the new site.
- Powered by WordPress, bbPress, and Memberful. We were previously using a medley of static pages, WordPress, bbPress 1.0 Alpha, and aMember.
- The layout is responsive, built with HTML5 using a mobile-first approach.
- We’re using web fonts, specifically Brandon Grotesque and Proxima Nova.
- The theme itself is built with Forge, our handy command line tool for developing themes with Sass and CoffeeScript.
- We completely overhauled our Help Center, focusing on ease of use and better documentation. We hope you enjoy it.
- We added a Customer Stories page, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the new website. Be sure to check it out.
We’re planning to share some more details about decisions we made and tools we used in some upcoming “From the workshop” posts, so stay tuned.
As you may know, we’re currently working hard on a responsive refresh of our website here at The Theme Foundry. Part of that refresh is a shiny new backend, powered by our upcoming Memberful product.
Change is exciting, and it provides an opportunity to re-evaluate all aspects of your customer experience. On that note, we’ll be officially shutting down our affiliate program on January 31st. Let me tell you why.
Why we had an affiliate program in the first place
When we first started selling themes we added an affiliate program for two reasons:
- Everybody else was doing it.
- The software we were using had the feature built in.
Two really bad reasons. On top of that, an affiliate program always felt a bit slimy to me (we’ll get to that in a minute). On the positive side, it does generate revenue for us almost every day, and we do have a few honest members of the program who do a great job.
Wait, you hate money?!
I was surprised last year when Brian Gardner of StudioPress mentioned on a panel we both participated in that their affiliate program generates somewhere between 30% – 50% of theme sales (24:23 in this video) in any given month. Our affiliate revenue percentage has averaged somewhere in the 5% range, which obviously makes it much easier for us to shut down the program.
To make this clear, we don’t hate money, but we do hate the fake endorsement, toxic sludge, and miscreant behavior that we’ve seen generated by the affiliate program. Let’s dive a little deeper.
Read more
