Our first theme was uploaded to ThemeForest on December 14th, 2009. Now, 1 year and 5 months later, we are celebrating 1,000 total theme sales! Check out our profile page on Theme Forest to see our stats. While you’re there, check out our updated profile page, and also take a look at the new Theme Forest site design.

Our newest theme, Continuum, is selling very well. In fact, it was the fourth highest selling WordPress theme on Theme Forest the first week it was released! We’re very glad that people are finding our themes useful, and it motivates us to get to work on more themes to come. In the meantime, we’re focusing all of our efforts on customer support for Continuum, as there have been a wealth of requests for features and modifications. Thanks to all of those who continue to support our little web design studio. Here’s to the next thousand themes!

After almost 5 months of development, Outer Spice is pleased to announce the official release of Continuum on the Theme Forest Marketplace! After just over 2 days it has garnered 41 sales and a five-star rating. We are also celebrating passing 800 total sales on Theme Forest, and hope to hit 900 very soon. Thanks for all your support during our development phase! Here are some Continuum details:

Stop fussing with lengthy setups; Continuum immediately works perfectly. Of course, with almost 200 theme options, you can customize it to no end. Continuum was designed an built by a die-hard blogger who has used magazine-style WordPress templates for almost 5 years. It is best used for newspaper and magazine blogs, but because of all of the custom widgets, shortcodes, page templates, unique sidebars, and custom menus, it can be molded into whatever kind of site you want, like a portfolio site for example. Continuum fully supports and was designed specifically for WordPress 3.0+. Continuum features an extensive Feed Framework which intuitively groups and displays your posts, and lets the user sort the posts several ways depending on which part of the site they are on.

Continuum is great for Magazine & News blogs, Gaming sites, Movie & Music review blogs, product review sites like Cnet.com, portfolio sites, personal blogs, and book review blogs. Continuum: Engineered for the pros. Crafted for the up-and-comers. Made for you.

View all the details of Continuum or play with the live demo here »

First of all, we forgot to toot our own horn when we hit 700 total sales on Theme Forest. We have 733 to be exact. Caulk seems to be the winner of our two themes as far as the long haul goes. That sucker will not stop selling. We’re so glad people are finding our themes so useful! We’ve got a new theme in the works that we can’t wait to finish and release on the Theme Forest marketplace. It takes full advantage of all of the WordPress 3.0 features, and it’s by far the most complex and interactive theme we’ve designed. The last theme we released was in May, 2010, and we had hoped that we would have released another theme during 2010, but the business that the release of Socket brought us has been overwhelming and we’re just coming out of the other side of it. Finally.

So, our new theme, to be titled “Continuum”, is a magazine style WordPress theme with multiple jQuery enhancements including four different featured sliders, comment sliders, breaking news sliders, fancy hovers, fancy drop downs, as well as four unique home page layouts to choose from. This is going to be a theme for content-heavy magazine sites that need to display as much as they can on the page without over-crowding it with the purpose of keeping the readers’ attention for as long as possible. Look for a release date sometime around early to mid March.

We recently hit a new milestone on ThemeForest: 600 total themes sold, and we did it in under a year (8.5 months to be exact)! ThemeForest is exploding with popularity, approaching 50k items and 500k users. Recently, they lowered the “level up” tiers in their commission rate tables across the board, which is extremely good news to all theme authors. In order to obtain the coveted 70% commission rate, authors must hit $75k in total sales, instead of the previous requirement of $300k. That’s a HUGE decrease. What that means for us is, our commission rate is jumping from 46% to 54% – an immediate 8% increase – by the end of September. That’s extremely good news for us as it means we will be earning over half of the total sales of our themes from now on. So, look for more new themes from Outer Spice in the coming months.

We’re currently working on several other projects and will be updating our portfolio page and the features slider on our home page as soon as we get a spare moment (not easy to do these days). Also, look for more frequent blog posts and tweets in the coming months. Having a baby really edges out all the extra stuff we had time to do before, but now Jesse’s son is over 8 months and my son is 5 1/2 months, and things are starting to finally get a little less crazy around here.

Pick up Socket for $37 from Theme Forest today!

In under two months Socket has surpassed the 200 purchase mark. It’s still selling more than twice as fast as our first theme, Caulk, which has itself seen a surge of popularity recently (we thought Socket would have passed it in overall sales by now). Here are a few of our notable numbers from ThemeForest:

• We have 517 combined sales
• Socket has been rated 20 times and currently has an average rating of 5/5 stars
• Socket has 117 total comments
• We have achieved the coveted Sliver Bear Claw badge (sold between $10,000 and $50,000 on ThemeForest)
• Our ThemeForest items have earned us clients from 5 different continents

We are greatly looking forward to creating our next template. Pick up Socket for a mere $37 from Theme Forest today!

Isn’t that amazing? We had no idea our very first theme would take off like it did. Thank you to everyone who has purchased and given us such positive feedback on our flagship theme! Now, let’s break 300 with Socket! We’re currently at 150 sales with Socket in under a month, which should put us on pace to hit that mark. A few other Theme Forest landmarks of note:

• We recently received our sliver bear claw badge for exceeding $10k in gross sales (currently at $11.5k)
• We cracked the 44% commission rate tier a week ago, and are a few hundred bucks shy of cracking 45% tier
• Our total lifetime volume is 430 sales
• Our newest theme, Socket, is rated at 5 out of 5 stars after 148 purchases

To keep up with our progress and subscribe to our future theme releases, view our Theme Forest portfolio.

We here at OSWC are students of the newest design trends in the biz. We love shiny new things. If there is a new toy out, we have GOT to get our hands on it. We don’t know why, but that’s how it works with us. The same goes with web design trends. jQuery is very hot right now, and we’re getting our hands on it and playing with it like it’s the newest smart phone. We already employed some of the hippest CSS2 trends when we built this site, like image sprites, background image hover effects, and purely CSS drop down menus. Since then, we’ve leveraged a lot of the newest jQuery techniques too, beginning with the Twitter plugin, continuing with a validated AJAX contact form, adding in some nifty portfolio sliders, and rounding it out with some cool quote rotators (e.g. the Outer Spice Buzz panel on the Services and Portfolio pages, as well as the bottom-right panel on every page). So, we’re continuing that trend today with a few more features.

Our shiniest, most notable new feature is the star animation in the header. Undoubtedly you’ve already noticed, but just in case you missed it, scroll to the top of the page and check it out – Outer Spice is now flying through space! There is a subtle animated image made up of stars that slides across the original image in the header, making it seem as though we’re meandering through space on a galactic quest of domination and adventure. Those are indeed strong words, but once day you’ll see – we will take over the universe. The animation is done using jQuery (no flash here!), specifically by leveraging a plugin called Spritely. Check it out for yourself, it’s pretty awesome. And we’re only using about 20% of what it can actually do (we’re not actually using the “sprite” feature – just the “pan” feature for now, but we’re planning to implement some sprite animation in the future).

The other feature we just implemented is the brand new Google Font Directory via the Google Font API to produce awesome fonts that render in any browser without the use of jQuery or images. That means the page loads faster and is much more SEO friendly. We were previously heavily using a font called Yanone Kaffeesatz in images as headers and text all over the site. However, Google just added that font to their directory of free fonts, so we were able to do away with all those images and lighten up the site a bit.

Check out this awesome font – it’s really a font – no image or jQuery is used!

Cool, huh? We were going to employ the cufon font replacement technique, which uses jQuery to transform embedded fonts into images on the fly, but thanks to the Google Font API we were able to go one step further and put our special font directly on our page. Natural. Pure. Indexable. Gracefully downgrading. That’s what we like to hear at OSWC. Stay tuned for changes to our portfolio and services pages!

We are pleased to announce that the HTML (PHP) version of our Socket WordPress template has been approved for sale at Theme Forest. At only $17, it’s definitely a steal. It’s got all the glorious features of the original Socket, but without the limitation of having to use WordPress. 34 page templates, jQuery enhanced, Piecemaker 3D flash slider, font replacement, fancy menu dropdowns, 9 gorgeous skins, and 2 AJAX contact forms are just a few of the features that round out Socket. Best of all, the code is intuitive, commented in-line, indented, spaced, and accompanied with a documentation help file that explains how to use it. Check it out on Theme Forest. Here is the description:

• 34 page templates
• 6 different portfolio page layouts
• A unique theme design not yet seen on ThemeForest
• Piecemaker 3d content slider
• 3 separate jQuery content sliders
• 9 gorgeous professional skins
• cufon font replacement
• superfish drop down menus
• 2 AJAX contact forms
• JQuery enhanced elements including multiple jQuery sliders
• Easy to customize
• Twitter & Flickr integration
• Slick “more” panel slides out to expose non-critical content from under the menu
• The best free template icons out there
• Valid XHTML and CSS, and compatible with all modern browsers
• Completely styled blog pages (archives, single post, post list, comments, related posts, etc.)
• Lots of white-space and modern styling techniques
• Indented, spaced, commented, and intuitive code (HTML, CSS, and PHP is all commented in-line)
• Superb, prompt customer service
• Excellent documentation
• Lots more!

Socket is a very powerful and flexible CMS for corporate and/or portfolio use. It was developed using the latest technologies and web coding standards, and employs state-of-the-art features such as jQuery enhancements, font replacement, AJAX contact forms, social media integration, and more. Here are a few of the most notable features:

• Over 30 page templates (6 different portfolio layouts)
• 9 gorgeous professional skins
• Unlimited widget combinations using 15 distinct widget panels
• A huge, beautiful featured area to showcase your work
• Tons of back-end theme options

To really get a feel for everything Socket can do, check out the live demo and explore all the pages. The features are described on each page, and you can also see the different skins. Here is a list of each skin with a link to see it in action:

Skins (click to see live)

• Slate
• Aluminum
• Epoxy
• Carbon
• Neoprene
• Iron
• Brick
• Malachite
• Magnet

You can create 2 websites that look completely different from each other using Socket, since it has so many options for arrangement of widget panels, number of columns, colors, styles, and page templates. It truly is a premium theme by any and all standards. Here is a full list of features:

Features

• Over 30 page templates
• 6 different portfolio page layouts
• A unique theme design not yet seen on ThemeForest
• 3 separate content sliders
• 15 distict widget panels
• 9 gorgeous professional skins
• cufon font replacement
• superfish drop down menus
• 2 AJAX contact forms
• JQuery enhanced elements including multiple jQuery sliders
• Organized and easy-to-use theme options page
• Twitter & Flickr integration
• Slick “more” panel slides out to expose non-critical content from under the menu
• The best free template icons out there
• Valid XHTML and CSS, and compatible with all modern browsers
• Forward-engineered to work with WordPress version 3! (currently tested with WordPress 3 beta 2)
• Integrates with post thumbnail featured introduced in WordPress 2.9
• No plugins required
• Nested and paged comments
• Related posts underneath blog posts
• Lots of white-space and modern styling techniques
• Indented, spaced, commented, and intuitive code (HTML, CSS, and PHP is all commented in-line)
• Superb, prompt customer service
• Lots more!

Here is a website I came across with over 100k icons. The problem I’ve found with other free icon websites is that it’s hard to browse through the myriad of icons available, and when you do finally come across a set you like, you discover it is not free for commercial use. The great thing about this website is how it lists the icon sets out thumbnail style so you can easily view many at once, and it lists the license directly below each thumbnail. The only thing it’s missing is a way to sort by license, instead of just sorting alphabetically by icon set name. Check it out for yourself: FREE ICONS!.