Ahead of exciting new features and improvements on deck for 2016, we’ve been busy this fall, brainstorming, planning, and visioning the future of the theme. Today we’re launching a fully redesigned home for the project. Check out the new Make site.

We’ve spent a lot of time chatting with community members, talking with other developers, and getting to know our users and their projects. A multi-purpose theme like Make can be a lot of things to a lot of different people. Make powers the websites of big corporations, local shops, educational institutions, startups, consultants, coaches, artists, writers, and even hobby bloggers. But even with all that variance among our users, we started to notice certain trends emerge. Uncovering those patterns has helped us refocus the future of Make around what matters most:

Your business.

To that end, we spent some time remodelling our branding, retooling our copy, and reimagining our product showcase and documentation in ways that help you find the most important information first. We also chose to redesign the site using cutting-edge Flexbox — a nod to the future of Make.

We’ve rolled out a fully functional demo of Make and Make Plus, so if you’ve been wanting to check out the admin side of things, you can now do so.

Last year we started using Twitter hashtags to connect with Make users and we’ve been blown away by the response! We wanted to feature the #iusemake community more prominently in our redesign, so we’ve created a dedicated page to the amazing sites you’ve been building with Make and Make Plus.

And finally, based on feedback, we’ve changed the name of our Make Plus Developer plan to Make Plus Professional — because we know that there are others in the WordPress ecosphere — marketers, designers, coaches, and implementers putting together client sites. Make Plus Professional has the same features and benefits, access to our Slack channel and partner discounts as Make Plus Developer did, it’s just a new name to better reflect the diversity of our users.

Make is the most exciting project our team has had the pleasure to work on, and looking ahead we only see good things — for both the theme and for the businesses that rely on it to market their work and connect with their communities.

Check out the new Make site and let us know if you have any questions, feedback, or feature requests for an upcoming release!

UPDATE: This sale is now over.

“Make has made things easier for me to build AND for the client to control. I look forward to building just about every website in the near future with Make.”

Kevin Skarritt, Flock Marketing

It’s exciting to see designers and developers push the limits of what’s possible with Make and Make Plus, develop faster, and ship more. We’re constantly impressed by the incredibly valuable feedback we receive from our Developer community and continually wowed by the sites they’re putting together for clients. We rarely run sales, but for the next 24 hours…

Save 25% today only.
Get Make Plus Developer now →.

Here are just a few of the features our Make Plus Developers have flagged as favorites:

• Responsive design – Beautifully responsive on any screen or device, you won’t have to worry about losing clients or customers due to mobilegeddon.
• Clean, valid code – Professionally and thoughtfully coded with WordPress best practices in mind, and valid HTML5, CSS3, PHP, and JavaScript.
• Action & filter hooks – Action and filter hooks, complete with documentation, make it easy for developers to expand and customize Make sites for their clients.
• Ready-made child theme – Download and install a ready-made child theme for your Make site. Save your customizations while ensuring your site is up to date with the latest Make release.
• Sass files included – We have Sass files for you, in case coding the CSS by hand isn’t your style.

Make also comes with native styling for and integration with Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Postmatic, and the official Twitter plugin.

We hope you’ll consider adding Make Plus to your developer’s toolkit, and we’d like to extend a 25% discount on a year of Make Plus Developer.

Save 25% today only.
Get Make Plus Developer now →.

Have you launched your blog, brand, or business site with Make yet? If so, we’d love to showcase your work alongside other amazing Make & Make Plus users.

We love seeing you push the limits of what’s possible with Make & Make Plus. We know that without you—your content, your vision, your unique take on the design and layout of each individual page—the theme itself is a blank canvas.

Your success can inspire the next photographer, writer, designer, organization or entrepreneur to put together a professional, polished web presence.

Share your site with us so we can spread the word about your brand or business!

All we need from you is a tweet—tell us how you’re using Make. Be sure to include a link to your site! Each week we’ll select another user to showcase on the Make website.

Use the hashtag #iusemake or tweet to us @thethemefoundry so we can continue this conversation. We’ve made it easy for you with some pre-written examples (click the links to edit and then tweet!):

#iusemake

Hey @thethemefoundry – Check out our site! #iusemake

Drag & drop page builder + a ton of customizer options? Of course #iusemake

We created a new #WordPress website with Make by @thethemefoundry and we love it! #iusemake

We can’t wait to see your site up on our customer showcase! Keep up the great work!

If you’ve been hanging out in our Help Center, tweeted at us, or shot an email off in our direction over the past few weeks, we might have already bumped into each other. If not, hello! My name is Melissa and I’m so excited to be taking on the helm of Community Manager here at The Theme Foundry. It’s been such a treat to get to know the team and some of you — our friends and customers, and I’m looking forward to many more great conversations around the exciting projects we have planned for 2015!

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If you love helping others learn and are an all-around enthusiastic, accountable, motivated communicator, come work for us!

The Theme Foundry is hiring a full-time Community Manager. You’ll work as part of a small, distributed team that’s deeply committed to building beautiful, functional products for WordPress users. At The Theme Foundry, we’re focused on learning, discussion, and clarity – especially in writing! Our Community Manager will value these things, too.

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At the Theme Foundry, we strive to provide an effortless, enjoyable experience to everyone who visits our website. It’s with this objective in mind that we recently completed – and launched – our latest website refresh. Check out the home page if you haven’t seen it yet!

While the home page was the focus of this design update, every page on our website underwent several modest adjustments.

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A couple of weeks ago, to celebrate the release of Make, we held a contest. The only criteria was to show us a site that was created with Make. Our two winners, Kristyn Brady and Tracey Upchurch, did just that and we are happy to share their sites with you today!

As we were congratulating Kristyn and Tracey we took the opportunity to learn more about each of them and their life online. Here is what they had to say:

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To celebrate yesterday’s big release of our new Make theme, we’re holding a contest. Two chosen winners will receive a 1 year Foundry Pro membership, which includes Make Plus and all 12 of our WordPress themes. Foundry Pro is valued at $199.

Here’s how you can win:

1. Download Make for free and install it on your WordPress website.
2. Build a website with Make. The drag and drop page builder and customization options makes this part really easy! If you need help, don’t forget to read the Make theme documentation.
3. Add a link to your website in the comments of this post or tweet with the hashtag #maketheme.

The contest will end next Wednesday May 28th. We’ll then announce the winners and also feature their sites in a blog post.

If you have any questions, let us know in the comments!

The WordPress core project has a strong commitment to backwards compatibility. This commitment means that themes, plugins, and custom code continues to function when WordPress core is updated. At The Theme Foundry, we adhere to WordPress’ best practices when developing our themes to make sure that WordPress core upgrades go as smoothly as possible.

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We haven’t had a sale at The Theme Foundry since 2010! We’re way overdue. For the next 24 hours use coupon code springsale14 and take 50% off the regular price of any WordPress theme in our collection. You can also use the coupon to save 50% on Foundry Pro, which gets you access to all our themes for one year, and normally costs $199.

This is the perfect opportunity to power up your WordPress website with a professional theme. Who knows, you might have to wait 4 more years for the next sale 🙂