Re-introducing the Original Storefront Theme

It’s been long overdue, but we’re so excited to finally announce the 2.0 version of the Original Storefront theme, hereafter called “Storefront Original”!¬† The first version of this theme was one of the best-selling themes in ThemeForest history, being listed in the weekly best-sellers every single week for over a year a now.¬† Now, we’ve completely rewritten most of the code, added new options and packaged it with our new theme options panel to give this modern classic and brand-new feel!

Alright, enough of the sales pitch.¬† Let’s check out the goods!¬† We’ve got a demo site up that features one of the new theme styles that we’ve included in the theme.¬† Check out the theme demo here!

Also, we’ve recorded a brand-new high-def tutorial video for the theme and of course, our support forums are now open to take support requests for it.

Check out the list of features and buy the theme from our themes page today!

Also, for those of you who bought the “Elegance” theme package before October 13th, you may want to wait for a surprise announcement concerning this theme before you buy it…

Improving the Member Experience

First, I want to say that it has been a great first month for Storefront Themes! We’ve had some great feedback on our first theme, Storefront Elegance and I think we’ve done a good job of improving that theme already.

While we’re busy at work on 2 brand new themes, I want to focus the next couple of days on improving the customer experience. ¬†Specifically in two areas…

1) A few of you have noticed that we’ve had a few server problems in the last week or so. ¬†I apologize for the error pages…they kill me just as bad as they kill you! ¬†After working out solutions with my hosting company, I’ve decided to make a move to a new host that I was planning to do anyway. ¬†Bottom line is that I want to be able to scale faster and be on the best possible hosting, so I’m working with Terry at VPS.NET right now to switch our service over to them. ¬†I believe everyone will be a lot happier with the results!

2) A few people have made some great suggestions for the members home page and I am going to incorporate those suggestions in the next 48 hours.  The changes will allow you to access your theme downloads, and support forums and video links directly from your members home page without having to navigate back to the theme page.  A small change that will require some medium-sized coding work and should reap large dividends (word play!).

So that’s about it! ¬†Thanks for being our customers and look for a new and improved Storefront Themes site by Wednesday!

New Contest – Name that theme!

So we have a brand new theme that we’re working on! ¬†My good friend George Ortiz is designing this one. ¬†You may have seen George’s work on other themes that I’ve put out on ThemeForest like WPA Parade and WPA Delight. ¬†He’s got a great eye for design so I’m totally stoked for this new beauty to go live…we’re just now getting into taking his html design and converting it to WordPress. ¬†After that, we need to write some custom WP E-Commerce goodness, integrate it with the theme options, record the video tutorial, etc. ¬†All that to say that we’re a little ways away from letting this bad boy onto the market.

Having said that, we have a little problem that we’d like to address now…as you can see from the logo in the screenshot below…we don’t have a name yet! ¬†Can you help us out? ¬†We’ll be giving away one free lifetime subscription to this theme (or another theme of your choosing) to the person who comes up with a name for this theme that we like and decide to use. ¬†Here’s the rules…the theme name has to be one word. ¬†That’s it. ¬†One word to best describe the look of this theme. ¬†We’ll put the word “Storefront” at the beginning and that will be the theme name (like “Storefront Elegance”).

To enter, all you need to do is leave a comment on this page with your one word idea…we’ll pick the one we like before the launch of the theme and let you all know the lucky winner!

PS – Don’t tell anyone, but we are working out the details on a formal partnership with George’s hosting startup at¬†Kloude. ¬†Until then, if you would like some rockstar hosting for your online shop, you can use the coupon code ‘STOREFRONT’ to get your first month free hosting with Kloude as well as free installation and support of wordpress and any theme you buy from Storefront Themes!

Theme Giveaway Winners Announced!

A few weeks ago, as we were preparing for the launch of Storefront Themes, we had a promotion to give away 2 free themes. ¬†One theme was for a random person who liked us on Facebook and the other was for a random subscriber to our newsletter list. ¬†To enter the contest (twice!) all you had to do was “Like Us” on facebook and subscribe to our newsletter list.

I’m happy to report that the winners have been selected and notified! ¬†To select the winners, we listed all the people on our facebook page and then used random.org to randomly draw a number between 1 and the number of people we had on the day of the drawing. ¬†We did the same with our newsletter list. ¬†For example, for the newsletter, we generated a random number between 1 and 813 (the number of newsletter subscribers). ¬†The number was 270. ¬†We then found the 270th person on our list to be the lucky winner!

So the results are in!  From our Facebook page, the winner was Albert Steed! For our newsletter list, the winner was Daniel Mckenzie! Congratulations to both of our winners and I hope that you enjoy the themes!

Storefront Elegance theme gets big update!

We recently put out our first update to the Storefront Elegance theme and it’s a doozy! ¬†We did a couple of optimization things, but the real focus was on 3 BIG upgrades…

1. Powerful new Carousel Options – You can now select how many items to show in your carousel (2, 3, 4, 5 or 6) and even set the height of your carousel images! ¬†You’re no longer locked into one aspect ratio with your images!
2. New Footer Widgets – Want to put more stuff on your homepage and page templates? ¬†We’ve included the option to have 2, 3 or 4 widget areas appear in your footer area! ¬†These areas can be populated from the widgets area of your wordpress control panel to add blog links, custom text, video or whatever you want!
3. Support for Gold Cart Features – If you happen to be running the Gold Cart upgrade available from getshopped.org, we’ve included styling for the Product Grid View, Product Search and Single Product Thumbnail Galleries! ¬†These styles are very subtle and take the shape of the custom colors that you select from your theme options panel so that they look perfect with your site!

To top it all off, we’ve even put out a¬†new video for customers showing you around the new features…you can navigate to it on the Elegance tutorial video page once you log in.

So that about wraps it up! ¬†If you’ve purchased the Storefront Elegance theme already, simply login and go to the Elegance theme page to download the updated copy. ¬†If you’ve been sitting on the fence about whether or not to buy the theme, hopefully this will entice you!

Our first post!

Okay, we’ve gotta start somewhere, so here’s the deal…it’s late here (3:06 am to be precise) and I just got finished uploading the first major update to our first theme – Elegance. ¬†Storefront Themes has been live for 10 days now and while I haven’t officially launched it or even told anyone (except all 95 of our facebook fans ) that we’re live, I have to say that I’ve really enjoyed things so far! ¬†The feedback from our first 20 or so customers has been really positive and I think they’re going to be thrilled with the latest update to the theme.

So what’s next? ¬†Well, there are a lot of things that I need to get done right away, but I’ve pretty much prioritized it this way…

1. Produce some support materials for the plugin itself
2. Get started on a new niche theme as soon as possible
3. Recode the original storefront theme to better integrate with the plugin and our new theme options
4. Get ready for the 3.8 upgrade of the WP E-Commerce plugin

So that’s what you can expect from me for the month of September. ¬†I hope to release at least one new theme in the next few weeks and I’m going to try to make it really unique. ¬†Other than that, I’ll be on the support forums everyday and trying to help everybody out as best I can.

Stay tuned for an official upgrade announcement for the Elegance theme coming tomorrow!