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:

1. Everybody else was doing it.
2. 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.

Fake endorsement

My number one problem with affiliate programs and affiliate marketing is what I call “fake endorsement”. Plain and simple, we prefer our customers to do the talking when they aren’t getting paid for it, and plenty of our customers do just that.

When I’m making a purchasing decision, I want real reviews from real people, not endorsements from company shills. Not only that, it’s refreshing to buy from a business you know isn’t paying people to pitch their products. When you read a review or a positive tweet, you know it’s genuine, no research required.

Spam sucks

Jennifer is in charge of managing our affiliates, and she’s spent quite a bit of time chasing down spam generated by the program. This really bothers me. Our affiliate program is generating toxic sludge that’s polluting the interwebs. We don’t want to be part of that, even if it means a little less cash in our pocket.

Fraud

If you’re in the business of selling digital products, you know what chargebacks are. They’re a thorn in your side, because you almost always lose. Losing means refunding the money and paying a penalty of anywhere from $15 – 40 per incident. The credit card company will never side with you, because you’re selling a digital product. Even when it’s just a jerk who feels like stealing your hard work. But, you chalk it up to “the cost of doing business”, it’s a good problem to have right?

Jennifer’s the accounting wiz around here, and according to her, over 50% of our chargebacks originate from the affiliate program. The worst of the worst really. Someone trying to steal twice!

Strike three affiliate program, I don’t think we’ll miss you.

• Hired our first two full-time employees, Andy and Scott.
• Released 4 new themes: Linen, React, Anthem, and Duet.
• Helped WordPress.com launch their premium theme service and released 6 themes on the platform.
• Released Forge, an open source tool for building themes using Ruby and Sass / LESS / CoffeeScript.
• Welcomed thousands of new customers to The Theme Foundry community.
• Over 15,000 new posts in our theme support forums.
• Handled over 6,000 emails from customers and potential customers.
• Closed over 1,000 tickets on our internal bug tracking software and released free updates to our themes in January, March, July, September, and November.
• Attended WordCamp San Francisco in August (Andy, Drew, and Jennifer) and WordCamp Lisbon in September (Drew and Jennifer). Drew spoke at both events.
• Made lots of progress on our up-and-coming Memberful product.

Needless to say, it was an awesome year for our small company, and we couldn’t have done any of it without you. Your purchases, your trust, your great ideas, your words of encouragement, and your recommendations to friends and colleagues — you made everything that happened this year possible. Thanks so much for the support, it means the world to us.

What’s next?

As a company, we plan on continuing to do what we do best – delivering beautiful, handcrafted themes and top notch customer service and support. We may also have a few tricks up our collective sleeves – so keep an eye out, because we think this 2012 is going to be special :)

In conclusion, New Year’s resolutions can be a bit cliché, but we thought we’d each share a few things we plan on working on and learning in the coming months.

We’re extremely excited to announce our latest theme: Duet, a minimal, sophisticated WordPress theme tailored for writers, journalists, and business bloggers. We’ve worked hard to meticulously craft and refine Duet over the past three months, and we’re proud and excited with the result. Some of the features include: two-column layout (using CSS3), custom typography, custom color schemes, and a flexible featured slider.

We designed Duet using a mobile first approach; this responsive theme looks amazing in the browser and equally as awesome on your iPad, iPhone or other mobile device.

Be sure to check out the theme page, and demo video below to discover more about Duet’s exciting features, and the demo site for a live preview.

We would also like to give a huge shout-out to Agustin Sanchez for allowing us to use his awesome photographs on the demo site!

Video Tour

We’re super excited to be adding more themes from our collection to WordPress.com. We hope you’re happy with the option to get your Theme Foundry theme up and running quickly and easily on the hosted WordPress.com platform.

Browse all our themes available on WordPress.com.

I should point out that Photography on WordPress.com is not the exact same theme we sell here for self-hosted WordPress.org sites. The look and feel is the same, but the underlying functionality and setup has been modified to better fit the WordPress.com platform. The main difference being we use the Gallery Post Format on WordPress.com and a custom Gallery Post Type on WordPress.org.

If you’re confused about how the hosted WordPress.com platform is different from the self-hosted WordPress.org software see this article explaining the differences.

Browse all our themes available on WordPress.com.

On most themes we’ve added a bit of styling to fix an issue with image stretching in older versions of Internet Explorer – not exactly groundbreaking, but hopefully your sites will look a little nicer in old browsers! A few of our themes also got some small stylistic updates to tables and definition lists.

There are a few minor bug fixes for Shelf and we also fixed comment anchors so “Leave a comment” links throughout your site will correctly bring you to the comments form.

React got a couple of big feature additions:

• A page template with the sidebar
• The ability to add multiple Project/Portfolio pages with the projects of your choosing

Information on setting up multiple Project pages is in your theme documentation.

Photography also got some nice additions:

• A theme option for adding captions in two different styles
• The ability to create multiple Gallery showcase pages featuring whichever galleries you want
• Keyboard navigation on individual galleries

Information on setting up captions and multiple Gallery pages is also in your theme documentation.

We’ve gotten a number of requests for the React and Photography features, so we hope you’re as excited as we are!

Check the change log for your theme to see the changes in the update.

If you run into any issues please post in our forums and we’ll be happy to help!

Away from the computer, you will find me out on photo-walks, enjoying and capturing the beautiful Australian bushland. I have a soft spot for everything vintage. I love old cameras, books and hoarding all sorts of classic goodies. I’m also a sketchbook maniac, gallery-goer, Vegemite addict, and a huge movie buff.

It’s an exciting time for The Theme Foundry, we have oodles of awesome projects underway, and the team and I look forward to many years ahead.

We’re proud to announce our latest production: Anthem, a beautiful responsive tumblog-style theme that features a stunning display of various types of media and a clean, minimal design. Anthem is designed to look great on all devices including phones, tablets, and regular displays.

Anthem was designed by Ryan Essmaker, and is geared towards artists, photographers and other creatives who need an elegant way to share their work.

Check out the Anthem theme page for more details and the demo site for a live preview.

Also, thank you to Agustin Sanchez for allowing us to use his beautiful photos on the demo site!

Video Tour

I am excited to introduce Forge, a free command-line toolkit for bootstrapping and developing WordPress themes in a tidy environment using front-end languages like Sass and CoffeeScript. As part of Forge, we’re also releasing Struts, a simple theme options framework for WordPress.

How does it work?

Forge creates a neatly organized source folder with clean and simple scaffolding (base template files, SCSS files, and theme options). The source folder is automatically compiled to your local WordPress install(s) as you save changes and work on your theme. When you are ready to distribute your theme Forge will build it to a folder of your choice or bundle the theme up into an easy to install zip package.

Why use Forge?

Developing themes with Forge is more fun! Forge accelerates development by giving you access to higher-level languages like Sass and CoffeeScript. These languages are much quicker and cleaner to code, but still compile to normal CSS and JavaScript. Forge also makes it easy to quickly bootstrap into and work from a clean and modular development environment, while still compiling “by the book” WordPress theme code.

Just the beginning

Forge is still very rough around the edges, and we’ve just started using it for our own theme development. If you have any feedback we’d love to hear it. If you run into any bugs or would like to see any new features please open an issue over on Github.

We plan on adding more goodies like automatic CSS / JavaScript minification and built in support for LiveReload soon.