A couple weeks back I opened up Photoshop and dusted off the toolboxes to start experimenting with a travel blogging theme design, fresh after my recent holiday to the Greek Islands.

The end result is hopefully the perfect theme for a world traveler eager to share his travel experiences with friends and family around the world. The design has a prominent featured post styled to look like the front and back of a postcard, with a caption overlay on the front and the post meta information styled in the post delivery details section of the postcard.

More recent posts will feature below, together with a Google Maps plugin in the sidebar tracking where each post was written and the journey that has been thus far. There will of course also be lots of widgetized goodness in the sidebar and footer zones.

This theme is still in the initial design development phase and could still evolve, but this post is only to serve as a teaser anyway, to judge the interest in such a design, and to hopefully get some constructive feedback to help improve the usability of it.

Backstage was first conceptualized by the talented British web designer extraordinaire – Elliot Jay Stocks way back in June. We thought Elliot was well suited for this kind of design as he himself is quite a musical genius.

Fox has spent the past few months, off and on, hard at work creating powerful widget goodness and theme options for Backstage. With custom category templates for the discography, latest news, video and image archives this theme really helps empower artists and bands with the tools they need to promote themselves. An upcoming shows widget helps manage your events, whilst a home page featured slider can easily be enabled/disabled via the theme options panel.

It’s probably best letting the images below, and the demo, do the talking don’t you think?

We hope this theme helps continue to grow our long tail of theme offerings and we look forward to seeing it in action on the interwebs soon. As with any theme please provide us with your constructive feedback so we can continue to improve this beast of a theme.

Have a read over the theme listing and view the alternate styles on the demo switcher before reaching into your pocket for your wallet. Trust us, this theme holds huge potential.

After the rip-roaring success of Magnus’ Coffee Break design (which is probably our fastest selling theme of 2009), he opened up his Photoshop for one last hurrah (for this year anyway) and got designing on another cracker of a business theme. Since we launched WOO2 back in June of this year, we’ve been getting so many requests for us to release our (custom btw) design as a theme, so with Magnus’ new design, we needed to take that into account as well (since we love giving you exactly what you want).

The result is a slick new design entitled Optimize, which builds on Coffee Break’s success, as well as the popularity of our own design. Take a look…

We’ll be covering the features & functionality of Optimize in the release post (Optimize should be ready at the end next week), but in the meantime you can have a squizz at our beta demo that is online now. So if you want more, you’ll just have to wait for next week.

Our Business Themes collection is still one of our most popular ranges on WooThemes and to an extent this popularity was sparked by the release of the grand-daddy – VibrantCMS – back in July last year.

So in a recent little internal study to decide which type of themes we should be working on, we decided that since VibrantCMS was still selling really well, we needed to release an updated, more modern and younger brother for it. The result is an awesome new design – entitled Delegate – which we produced internally, with FRESH01 at the helm of the design duties.

Taken from Dictionary.com, this is what Delegate means:

a person designated to act for or represent another or others; deputy; representative, as in a political convention.

So what does this supposed awesome design look like?

Delegate – Homepage

Delegate – Innerpage

As you’ll see, we haven’t tried to reinvent any wheels and Delegate features a similar dynamic, sliding featured area (on the homepage), which made themes like VibrantCMS, Over Easy and more recently – Coffee Break – extremely popular. The design borrows some of it’s glossy, modern styling elements from Apple- / Mac OSX-inspired website designs.

The theme has been purposefully crafted to serve as a professional representation of your business online and along with the sleek, stylish design we think you’ll make a good impression on your existing & prospective customers.

What do you think? Have we nailed it with this design? Any features or specific functionality we have missed?