WooThemes: WordPress Themes

Web decompiling has always been source for joy and education for me. I love unraveling someone’s expert code and learning how they did created this wonderful, dynamic communications piece.

About three years ago I was deep into one of these mad excavations when I became completely and utterly stymied by a disconnect of information: There were too many holes. I couldn’t make out the source file paths, I couldn’t find the javascript library, the image library was nowhere to be found; I was utterly lost.

I contacted the designer, who graciously replied and told me that he had built his site with the WordPress framework.

“What great magician are you?” I demanded. “What is this ‘WordPress’ and how have you come upon such terrible powers?”

Non-plussed, the designer replied with a link to wordpress.org. Tricky bastard changed my life.

WordPress has changed everything about web design for me. It has given me the ability to provide my clients with a remarkably easy interface for administration. It provides automatic backups, restoring, cataloguing, indexing, tagging, databasing…it is a miracle pill that makes web design more complex and infinitely more useful for my clients.

WooThemes (http://www.woothemes.com/) is a company out of Australia that sells “premium” WordPress themes. A premium theme is, at its very basic definition, a theme that you pay for. Premium themes can run from $25 – $300 depending on the level of complexity. From a designer’s standpoint, a premium theme provides several benefits:

1. Support (in most cases)
2. Tried and tested code
3. Plug and play options
4. A jumpstart on site design
5. Value for our clients

As a designer, we can speed up the development, cut costs for our client and do pretty much anything we need from an design standpoint. Beautiful stuff.