Hot off the press and in most UK newspaper/stationery stores is Issue 149 of Web Designer , the only serious tutorial-driven monthly publication dedicated to online creativity available in the UK .

Issue 149 focusses on the wonderful WordPress , giving you history and tips behind Web 2.0’s blogging behemoth.

We were approached by Web Designer last month and asked if we would contribute any of our WooThemes for this issue’s accompanying CD. After a brief chat Adii, Magnus and myself decided it would be silly to pass on the opportunity of marketing WooThemes to the huge following of this great magazine. After careful consideration we decided we would offer both Papercut and Proudfolio . That’s right two of our premium themes are avaliable for free with Issue 149 of Web Designer. Also in this issue is a step-by-step detailed tutorial on how to develop your own WordPress theme, albeit quite a basic one.

What are you waiting for? Make sure you pick up your copy today!

This week we interview Jeff Finley of GoMediaZine.

GoMediaZine is a group of guys and girls passionate about art and graphic design. Their website is a great resource for any aspiring designer with a massive following. Recently they re-designed their website. We ask Jeff a few questions about why he opted to base their new design on a WooTheme.

Jeff, first up, we’ve got to say that GoMediaZine is our favourite modification of a WooTheme ever and you’ve become somewhat of a flagship of inspiration for us. Can you give us a bit of insight into the design?

Thanks, it means a lot. I chose Fresh News because it had a lot of the functionality already built in and I just needed to tweak the look. I didn’t want to just change colors. It was a big deal for me to infuse a little bit of Go Media’s rich illustrative brand but still keep it clean and well organized. I felt a mild textured look was appropriate but I didn’t want to do a “grunge” design if you know what I mean. I used elements from the memorable Concentric Circles Series that Go Media’s Oliver Barrett did 2 years ago that have become somewhat of a Go Media staple. I figured it was an iconic image that people associated with us, so it fit perfectly. And the hand-drawn-looking “hair” or whatever you want to call it is another design element that I have been using a lot in my work that people kind of recognize as a Go Media thing. We have a “hair” vector pack that is very similar. The choice of a deep purple was a new one for Go Media. In the past, our Go Media sites have been focused on the yellow (which was initially part of our brand), which I honestly think is a hindrance. I want to explore other colors, and naturally purple is yellow’s complimentary color, so it worked nice. The texture came from the back of an old record sleeve. Nice and dirty.

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As mentioned in my previous post, 13 wonderful websites using WooThemes , our plan has been to introduce a CSS gallery showcasing only WooTheme based websites. The idea behind the showcase is to get our readers inspired about the possibitilities of our WordPress themes and drive traffic to our wonderful community of designers and bloggers already using WooThemes.

We’ve managed to put together our design showcase in record time and we are pleased to point you to it at showcase.woocommerce.com .

Have a browse around some of our favourite website designs, leave some constructive comments for the webmasters and give the designs your personal star ratings.

Just a quick note to point you in the direction of a post I’ve recently written featuring 13 wonderful websites using our WooThemes.

As our registered users are aware there is a showcase forum in our support forums where you can submit your customization of a WooTheme for others to view. A showcase gallery, viewable by all our site visitors, is in the pipeline for the WooThemes website, but we hope this will suffice for now.

Liam and his crew over at Function have had a go at making some grunge styles for Fresh News. The result is stunning and we are releasing this add-on for all you previous owners of Fresh News. First of all go check out the five new grunge styles on our theme preview, by using the lovely style switcher at the top right of the page.

Fresh news is now version 1.2 with this latest update. If you have already purchased the theme and just want to add the new grunge styles, here is what you must do:

1. Log in to your WooThemes account and download the v1.2 from “My Theme Downlods”
2. Unpack the new version and upload functions.php, style/*.* and functions/*.* with your FTP client.

You must also add a new div to your header.php and footer.php files. If you haven’t made any modifications to these files from the original, you can just overwrite your current files. If you have made modifications to your files you must manually add one line to header.php after the body tag:

You must also add the end tag for this new div in the footer.php before the end body tag:

That’s about it. If you have any trouble updating please don’t post in the comments. Our forum staff is ready to help you out with those questions.

One of the key features with our themes is the multiple styles they come packaged with, that you can easily select with a click of a button in our options panel. We are now proud to introduce our custom made theme/style switcher for our demo themes.

Now you can preview all the different themes by selecting your theme from the drop-down select box and then selecting the style you want to see! A lot of people have been asking for this so go straight to our new demo and check it out!