Oh its nice to be missed!!! Many of you had been asking why Theme.fm had taken a bit of a hiatus, and yes it had been a bit of a while since we’d featured any new articles and tutorials but we can finally reveal why. Over the past few months the team had been hard at work designing and developing a bunch of new themes and also putting together the new Theme.fm Store to host our themes.

Yes we’re passionate about everything WordPress and its one thing writing about themes but its quite another thing when you get down to designing and developing your own!  Its been a lot of hard work and many months going back and forth designing the new Themes and the Store itself. We’ve probably reworked, rejected and redesigned things more times then you can imagine but although there’s been much trepidation its finally time to let the cat out of the bag!

So Theme.fm Store launches today with a selection of our Premium and free WordPress themes to kick off and in the future we’ll be adding a lot more to the store and not just themes, we’ve also got a few plugins in store too. You’ll be hearing more about each of our new themes – Maxwell our Responsive Portfolio theme and SanScrit our Tumblog style theme – but for now we thought we’d take you behind the scenes and tell you a little about how we went about designing the store.

When we look back at the stream of messages that accumulated through Basecamp it’s been a relentless case of back and forth and when putting together feature lists we’ve probably ended up stripping more away to keep the store as simple and easy to use as possible. Why complicate things when you don’t have to?

Essentially the store includes;

• Home Page with our featured Themes (as we have a small selection at launch, the home page and browse themes page are ultimately one and all.)
• Single theme Page which includes a brief description, list of features, image slider, demo and theme details.
• Support through our very own Zendesk helpdesk.

Design Implementations

The store was designed by our wonderkid Aykut Durmayaz who also designed Theme.fm. Aykut used a 16 column 960 grid to design the site and its the same grid we used for Theme.fm and seemed to work just as well for the Store.

Probably the one part of the site that we really went back and forth on was the horizontal top navigation menu. Initially we thought we could work with the existing style of the Theme.fm menu but its diagonal slant didn’t seem to fit well with the layout of the new store and we had a few tryouts before we fixed on a simple navigation menu which would also be easier to expand.

Theme.fm had a freestyle approach about divs’ corners and to match the diagonal top bar we had diagonal title boxes and sharp edged boxes for smaller titles. When it came to the Theme.fm Store we used divs and buttons with 3px round corners and tried be more persistent on this for a modern look and a more serious stand.

For the web font we had used PT Sans Narrow in the titles for Theme.fm and Lato as the text font, but Lato didn’t impress us as much in smaller sizes. For the Store, we decided to change the dominant font from Lato to PT Sans for better usage in smaller font sizes (all of them are Google Web Fonts).

The theme single pages are actually my favourite ones design-wise, the huge laptop slider creates a good simulation on the site for the themes; the eye-candy and catchy theme title part gives a landing page look  to all of the single theme pages.

All in all, we finally feel we’re ready to launch the store. Of course there are a few more features we’d like to introduce in the future and have a few tweaks already in mind that we’ll be rolling out shortly.

No doubt more than anything else, all your feedback and suggestions will feature widely in our plans for the future and we’re very interested to know if there’s anything you think we could do better or something you’d like to see featured in the Store.