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.

Happy 2012, everyone!

We try to keep our themes current by responding to customer requests and bugs every so often.

This time is no different – over the last couple of weeks we’ve gone through and made a round of updates to all of our WordPress themes, with mostly minor bug cleanup for many of the themes.

One major addition – we’ve added Google Plus icons to all of our themes that have “social site” support – that means Anthem, Linen, Paperpunch, Photography, React, Shelf, Titan and Traction all now feature a hand-crafted Google Plus icon, configurable on your Theme Options page.

Also, Duet received some much-requested stylistic tweaks – removing the author from pages and hiding the “Read More” link when there is no “more” tag on a post are the most notable.

Download the latest package from your downloads page, and check the changelog for specific details for your theme. Of course, we’re always looking for more feedback – so if you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to contact us or write a comment below!

• 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.

There are some themes that are designed to serve nearly any purpose under the sun – and they contain a vast amount of configurable options on the backend to help you get your site “just like you want it”.

On the other hand, there are those who say themes should have zero (or as close to it as possible) options – the idea being that a theme should “just work”.

At The Theme Foundry, we tend to lean toward the “zero configuration” side. We think requiring extensive backend setup is a turn-off for the average user, so we gear our themes to work “out of the zip”.

With that in mind, I’d like to share a story with you about some lessons I learned while building Duet.

Developing a philosophy

Personally, I’m relatively new to the WordPress theme space. As I’ve read over various WordPress development blogs and news sources, I’ve found that there seems to be a general outcry against too many options. In a recent WPCandy podcast, Ryan Imel mentioned that developers should be shooting for zero theme options as an ideal. Andrew Nacin wrote recently about “learning to decide” instead of just adding another option.

Death to options!

Such a compelling rallying cry – the thought of a theme that “just works” without a single configuration option seemed like a crystal-clear light to guide the way! I loved the principle so dearly, that during a company discussion, I suggested that we gear our efforts towards eliminating all options:

Talk is cheap…

The team rallied around the idea – we’d take a hatchet to options! At the time, we were working on our most recent release, Duet. Scott’s design was focused on typography and a beautiful reading experience, and it had a number of options to tweak the appearance. Duet’s options page looked like this, fully expanded:

We talked it over, and decided we’d go one-by-one through the options and scrutinize like madmen. Anticipating massive option slaying, we pictured the “after” screenshot to look something like this:

The Ethos of the Logos

Energized behind our new philosophy, we started with some substantial victories in the Logo Options section.

We asked: Do our users have any need to modify the alt text of their logo image?

The answer: No. Of course not – the site title works wonderfully as the alt text (this is for their logo, after all). Chopped.

We asked: Do we need an option to toggle the tagline display?

The answer: No. The tagline is only used in the header, and if the user wants to remove it they can simply remove their tagline in their settings. Any more complicated tagline requirements they have can be handled through template modification and/or CSS changes. Consider it chopped.

Boom! Two options down right out of the gate. We were feeling pretty good at this point, and our strategy looked promising. But (you knew this was coming), as we started trying to chop some of our other options, we found ourselves at a bit of a crossroads.

Color me unconvinced

The headings in Duet were a nifty orange color by default. Knowing that orange doesn’t suit everyone’s taste, we originally included an option for toggling the color of these headings to a color of your choosing, using a hex value and a color picker.

Then, we asked: Is choosing the heading color something a user should have to deal with?

The answer: No – but they need to be able to switch from orange. As theme designers, instead of leaving the user to try to find something that looks nice, we should be be providing some awesome choices that are stunning out of the box. It’s all about making the best decisions for the user, not adding options.

We decided to come up with some color schemes to choose from, which offered a few big advantages:

• Users didn’t have to mess around with hex color codes, trying to find a good fit.
• We could add additional colors to compliment the main.
• We could change the featured banner color (which uses image CSS pseudo-elements to get the banner effect) to compliment the color scheme.

Our slash-and-burn philosophy was starting to hit reality – and believe it or not, I started to feel a little anxiety. I wanted desperately to chop our options down to the bare minimum, and I suggested ways to get rid of the option:

• Provide tutorials on editing CSS that would show users how to modify their color schemes and select good colors.
• Include the banner elements as PNG and PSD files so users could make their own.

Drew and Scott quickly reminded me that requiring users to make modifications to their theme is a less than ideal experience. They weren’t buying it, so we kept the option.

So, after our changes we still had an option – but we felt it provided a better experience and prevented the user from having to make a nuanced design decision (that’s our job, after all) – instead, they had 3 lovely choices. I wasn’t thrilled, but I was overruled and we moved on to the next option for review.

The great reversal

Scott had included an option to control whether or not the tags would display on a post. If the user checked it, all tags would be hidden from all posts – aha! Something that could be easily controlled using CSS or a small template modification – victory was mine!

We asked: Do our users really need to be able to hide the tags on their posts?

The answer: No. Except that this is one of the most-requested modifications on any of our themes. Some people use tags, some people use categories, some use neither, and some use both. Hiding one or the other is useful to many of our users, and that’s something we’ve learned only through experience. It could be omitted, but we would then have to instruct users on how to modify the templates to remove tags or categories (not easy for the average user).

So, the real answer: Maybe…?

This was a toss-up. The option wasn’t necessary, but experience told us that a toggle option would probably improve the user experience. At this point, I was actually going through a bit of cognitive dissonance.

On one hand, I wanted options to die. On the other hand, I realized that these options were born out of real use cases. I knew this because I handle requests for removing categories, tags and authors on a daily basis in support. Modifying template files is difficult for many of our users, and hiding via CSS is not a very clean solution.

In addition, we sell our themes on WordPress.com – where users are unable to modify their template files, and CSS changes cost extra.

We left it in, and actually added a toggle for hiding the author and categories as well. It was sorta painful, but I was beginning to realize the flaw in my philosophy: It’s not about eliminating options, it’s about having the right options. I know, I know – hardly groundbreaking. It’s been said before by many wiser people than myself. But it’s very easy to get caught up in a philosophy without considering the real goal, which is making a pleasant experience for your users.

Don’t steal my Theme Options

And this is why I wanted to write this post – to counter-balance the anti-options, anti-configuration sentiment. It’s too easy to get caught up in a cargo cult – I know I did, briefly. Instead of making a theme either fully-customizable or configuration-free, I’ve realized that the ultimate goal is to add “just the right options” to make the user experience more pleasant. I think everybody would agree with that sentiment – but it’s easier said than done.

We continued through our options page, scrutinizing each one and considering ways to improve. We ended up reorganizing many options and adding a few (crazy reversal, huh?). Here’s what we ended up with, final (left) vs. original (right):

We actually ended up with more options (19 vs. the original 16). Many of our original options remained, though some were tweaked to be clearer. We added an option to control the drop cap styling on posts, since Duet is all about beautiful typography and we anticipated not everyone liking this aspect. Finally, we added some slider options that are commonly requested on our other themes.

And that brings me to the end of my story, a tale of a developer (and a team) who went from loving, to hating, to having a mutually beneficial relationship with options, all in a matter of weeks. It was a tremendous and rapid learning experience for all of us. We still have a lot to learn, but we’re making strides in providing top-notch experiences with each of our themes.

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