This has been a very important year for Orange Themes. Last year we realised themeforest platform has exhausted its potential and it cannot get its sales back up. So we faced a need for a new trading platform and made a strategic decision to move away from Themeforest and sell themes on our website. Being professional WordPress themes developers with years of experience that we are, we decided to build our platform from a scratch, leaving aside any frameworks or CMS. All you see here is pure PHP/MySQL. So after some months of hard work, in June our new website was born, offering you to buy WordPress themes in packages: with just one payment you get access to all our themes (instead of paying for each one). Six months later we are ready to look back on our successes and failures.
Members
In six months 1819 people have joined us from all around the world: USA, Canada, Germany, UK, Romania, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Turkey, Netherlands and even from a corner of the world called Aruba, a small island with just a bit more than 100 thousand inhabitants.
We have also developed a new support platform, so we are gradually migrating to our new system and our users have opened 234 support tickets by now, which is quite small number (we believe it’s thanks to that our products work smoothly and no assistance is needed). Anyway, our support service is always there for you – welcome!
An even better start we had in social networks: our Facebook page exceeded 2000 users and we are quite sure to add another thousand to it by the next New Year’s Eve!
Themes
2016 has been one of the most fruitful years in the history of Orange Themes: we have published 14 new themes. Five of them are available free of charge, and Asterion is going to be available on wordpress.org soon, so we are about to start offering themes on a free platform as well. We can proudly present you our TOP5 bestsellers:
- Benavente – confident winner!
- Viral Kaboom – strong runner-up.
- Portland – has a good chance to beat Benavente: the most downloaded theme since publishing.
- TechMag – appearantly we have a lot of tech bloggers among us, if this theme ended up on fourth place.
- MaterialZine – our ascetic theme for those who value exquisite style.
Currently we are working on three new blogging-type themes, which are about to be aired, and there are templates for magazine themes coming soon. So stay tuned for the next year – it is going to be bright and rich of new offers, since are determined to get even more productive and make even more new products for you!
Another good news is that we have developed a publicly available plugin for support of our themes. We have always strived to put everything within the theme to avoid unnecessary features and countless plugins. Now we have put everything you need in one plugin that is friendly to all themes – you won’t lose your data after switching to another theme. It is our pleasure to make your user experience as comfortable as possible.
One-click installation
About a year ago we introduced one-click install feature, which was a big step forward for us and made it a really small step for you on the way of installing a theme. You just need to click one button and your theme installs demo data, widgets, plugins and everything else you need: in a few minutes your blog is ready for work. Also we have improved our Orange Themes PageBuilder: it is now faster and richer of options. A little “facelift" is on the schedule to make this builder a bit more modern visually. Stay tuned!
To sum up
This has been a labour-intensive year: countless hours of design and programming, sleepless nights and lots of nerves sacrificed in migration from themeforest to independent trade, but it was worth it! Now we are much more flexible and can offer a much more convenient and highly individual approach to every customer.
Big thanks goes to you for being there with us this year! It has been a great pleasure and motivation to work for you, creating even better products with ever-growing value added.
Happy New Year, folks!
See you in 2017!
Faithfully yours,
Zigmars & Edgars of Orange Themes
