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:

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.

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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 WordPress 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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Today we released Anthem on WordPress.com! If you’re a WP.com user, buy it straight from the Anthem showcase page, or directly from your dashboard by navigating to Appearance → Themes → Premium.

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’m excited to announce our Photography theme is now available on the hosted WordPress.com platform! If you’re a WordPress.com user you can buy it straight from the Photography showcase page or directly from your dashboard by navigating to Appearance → Themes → Premium.

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We’ve released a round of updates to all of our themes! Head over to the downloads page to grab the new theme packages. Be sure to read the upgrade instructions before you upgrade.

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.

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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.

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I had the pleasure of joining Adam Stacoviak last week for Episode #22 of Founder’s Talk over on the 5by5 internet broadcasting network. We chatted about life, growing a business, selling themes and products around WordPress, why we built Forge, and designing the 5by5 logo.