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Archive of posts with the News topic

Introducing Foundry Pro

By team on April 10, 2012

Today we’re super excited to introduce Foundry Pro, a new subscription based pricing option. Foundry Pro gives you unlimited access to all our themes, tutorials, and support for a one year period. You’ll also get instant access to new theme releases and a cool Pro badge next to your name in our Help Center. We’re kicking it off with an introductory price of $125 per year. Introductory price is no longer available, now $249 per year.

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The Theme Foundry Reloaded

By team on February 22, 2012

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.

Why we’re shutting down our affiliate program

By team on January 19, 2012

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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2011: Year In Review

By team on January 4, 2012

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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Introducing Duet

By team on December 14, 2011

Duet

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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Anthem on WordPress.com

By team on November 17, 2011

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.

Theme Updates: November 2011

By team on November 8, 2011

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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