At a small company, the “Jack of all trades” is often more valuable than the “Master of one”. Each team member must wear a number of hats at any given time. When I’m helping our awesome customers I wear my support cap, and when I’m working on themes I put on my coder helmet. Previously, my least favorite hat was the documentation ushanka – the “docushanka”. Bulky, uncomfortable, and when you wear it, you know you’re going somewhere unpleasant. But, that all changed when we rolled over to our new site.
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We’re extremely excited to announce Chalk; an innovative WordPress theme for the twenty-first century teacher. Chalk is crafted to bring the classroom environment online, and includes some exciting features to do just that: to-do lists, class conversations, podcasts and video lectures. Grab it today and start bringing your lessons to life in a dynamic and interactive surrounding.
Chalk features a beautiful responsive design, which means students have the flexibility to access class content on-the-go, from the convenience of their iPad, iPhone, or mobile device. This makes it easy for you to stay in touch with your students, wherever they might be.
To learn more about Chalk’s features and specifications, stop by the theme page. Also, don’t forget to check out the live demo and the video feature tour.
A huge thank you goes out to Rachael Baskerville for allowing us to use her amazing photographs on the demo site!
I’d like to tell you a quick story. A story about a website, actually. You might even call it a “coming of age” tale.
Behind every good website there’s a person (or people) and, in many cases, a business. And behind every rework and redesign, there is a reason – a “why” before the “how”, if you will. I wanted to touch on that a little bit. Don’t worry – we’ll get to the custom post types, bleeding edge this-and-that and JavaScript whizbangs for you propeller heads before long!
But first, let’s review the story up to this point.
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While reading Warren Buffett’s 2011 letter to shareholders this morning I was struck by this passage (discussing the insurance business).
Many insurers pass the first three tests and flunk the fourth. They simply can’t turn their back on business
that their competitors are eagerly writing. That old line, “The other guy is doing it so we must as well,” spells
trouble in any business, but in none more so than insurance. Indeed, a good underwriter needs an independent
mindset akin to that of the senior citizen who received a call from his wife while driving home. “Albert, be careful,”
she warned, “I just heard on the radio that there’s a car going the wrong way down the Interstate.” “Mabel, they
don’t know the half of it,” replied Albert, “It’s not just one car, there are hundreds of them.”
Warren Buffett. 2011 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report.
Great message, and it further reinforces our decision to shut down our affiliate program. It takes an independent mindset to successfully operate any business, whether you’re selling WordPress themes or ice cream cones. In either scenario, following “the other guy” is surely the fastest way to the bottom.
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.
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If you’ve been subscribing to our “theme specific” RSS feeds, please update your reader with the new “Theme Updates” feed. Going forward we’ll always release our updates in batches, making the individual theme feeds unnecessary. All update posts going forward will only be posted to the “Theme Updates” category and corresponding feed.
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.
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2011 was a big year for The Theme Foundry. Some highlights:
- 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.
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Here at The Theme Foundry we take the craft of WordPress theming seriously. We’re constantly scrutinizing everything: how we code the themes, what features we want to add, and ultimately what features we need to leave out. While developing our latest theme Duet, we had some passionate discussion about theme options.
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.
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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.
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