I thought I’d write a little post about how I actually managed to sit down in front of my new 24″ monitor, boot up Photoshop and design my site in a little over 24 hours. And by 24 hours, I don’t mean 24 hours of straight working, cause that would just be silly to work that long. The effective work hours is probably about half of that, since I had to eat, sleep and get my daily fix of The Office US in as well 
So how did I go about designing and coding a fully fledged WordPress theme in that short amount of time? Simple.
I cheated.
Yep that’s right… I consider it cheating, because I didn’t code my site from scratch, but instead used Over Easy, my latest contribution to the ever growing WooThemes theme collection. I finished making Over Easy a few weeks ago, and I liked the simple layout I had created in that theme. The only big difference between my new website and Over Easy is the front page, which took me the longest to code. But as you can see from the blog page, the layout is pretty similar, although I have changed the sidebar and the list styling.
This should be good proof of the usability of a standard WooThemes theme, and as you can see from our showcase, there are quite a large number of web designers doing the same as me; cutting corners. So is this kind of “cheating” a bad thing, or is this becoming the norm for designers wanting to save production time and increase profit from their clients? Let me know what you think by posting a comment!
October ended on a high for WooThemes, with the first WooContest coming to a close. We got a lot of great designers joining in, and I was really surprised over the quality of some of the entries. We ended up picking one winner and two runner ups, and also got our hands on several other designs which we thought were a good match for WooThemes.
So as thanks to all the participants, we thought that we should release the first theme for free. The design is from the very talented Armono Wibowo, who lives in Jakarta in Indonesia, a place I visited last year when I caddied for my buddy on the European Tour.
View the demo, download the theme and enjoy!
Wow! I’ve been working with WordPress for over a year now, and it has taken me for a wild ride. The funny thing is that I haven’t even been using WordPress on my old portfolio! Shame on me, I know… So after I finished up my latest theme for WooThemes, I was left with a bit of time on my hands.
Previous draft
Now this website has been in the running for some time now, but after my failed attempt at getting my previous design online, frankly because I got bored of it, I thought I would follow in Adii’s footsteps (my WooThemes partner) and do a redesign that would not take more than a couple of days. And well behold, 24 hours later I had my new design designed and coded.
I also got it up and running on WP 2.7 Beta 2, which looks amazing, and hasn’t posed any trouble yet! The launch of the final has been delayed a couple of weeks, but you can upgrade from within the dashboard now, so it should be a breeze.
I want to give credit to the amazing function icon set and twitter icon from Liam McKay! I kinda went overboard with them on this design 
With our affiliate programme, you have the opportunity to earn affiliate commissions way beyond the initial sale. We have designed a system, where you will earn a whopping 20% from any initial sale (on our products or subscriptions) and then if a user renewes his / her subscription, you will earn a further 10% every 3 / 6 months when they do so.
During the first weeks of WooThemes, there have been a lot of affil sales, and people are really earning good money through our program. So if you have a website or blog you’d better join the WooThemes affiliate program now.
I’m so happy to announce that Premium News has finally evolved and has morphed into our new offering: WooThemes. We are extremely proud of our new baby and super excited for the weeks ahead. Along with rebranding the whole website / business, we have also created a theme club and released two new wordpress theme templates; but more on that a tad later…
The main reason for the rebrand was that Premium News was only initially intended to house one theme: The Original Premium News. With the expansion of our range of themes, we felt that the name was slightly limiting, as we’d like to branch out from doing news- / magazine-style themes. Another consideration was the addition of a brand-spanking new themes club, where we’d like to give our members access to all of our themes!
Anyway, there’s way too much new stuff to talk about (a new support forum, theme tutorials, new themes, new website – you get the point!) – so just shoot over to the website and browse through all the goodies…
Yep that’s right… I consider it cheating, because I didn’t code my site from scratch, but instead used Over Easy, my latest contribution to the ever growing WooThemes theme collection. I finished making Over Easy a few weeks ago, and I liked the simple layout I had created in that theme. The only big difference between my new website and Over Easy is the front page, which took me the longest to code. But as you can see from the blog page, the layout is pretty similar, although I have changed the sidebar and the list styling.
