The Blog

Responsive web design brings a whole new set of interesting challenges and one I've been thinking about at Obox is the use of a responsive slider in our themes.

This is an article about helping mobile site viewers find what they're looking for more quickly and directly, removing barriers and hopefully making a better navigational experience for everyone (with a focus on e-commerce).

The Obox site is always in a constant state of change. Not a week goes by where either Marc or myself push a new update to the site in the aim of improving user experience or conversions.

One of our missions this year was to focus as much as possible on User Experience and then take those learnings and apply them to User Interfaces.

We were tired of just going by feel and wanted to actually see and know what was happening when a user experienced Obox in any shape or form.

Setting up a Premium Theme is never an easy task. Obox themes can be difficult but we know we are not alone in this.

Having installed and setup themes many times in my life I can say without a doubt that no one has really got it right yet.

I can run through a few issues with you but for me the primary issue is that settings are not centralized. Set your home page here, do your menu's there, add your logo over there and set your widgets here.

Today marks the relaunch of your Profile section. For a while now we have been looking at a way to make the Obox Profile section more "sticky" and useful.

Read about the challenges and benefits after the jump!

Though we get quite a few theme modification submissions a month we only choose to feature the best that come our way. We like to keep a high standard in our showcase so that we can display the edibility of our themes.

Here are three of our faves that we felt needed a special mention...

There has been a tendency in the Premium WordPress space for business themes to look a bit 'samey' lately. Layouts tend to follow one formula with the difference being in the design details and colors.

So when Izzudin Helmi showed us the first concept of what is now called Done Deal, we snapped it up right away.

One thing that we are dead set on offering you is a wide variety of themes to choose from. Sometimes they don't fit into a specific niche absolutely, but they are capable of filling many, incredibly well.

99% of the theme designes on Obox were done by Yours truly and I believe that up until now it's been a pretty good run. However, with the word "variety" now on your mind I want to let you in on one of our worst kept secrets...

While we wait for approval on the new Posterous themes I decided to get down and start creating our next WordPress theme.

Lacking from our current collection is a genuine magazine theme, so I decided to get cracking on creating one.

The theme will be called mag.Press as it will carry a similar philosophy to our successful Press theme in terms of the design. It will have a modern edge to it and is inspired by the kind of designs that you see on Swiss sites, black and white, thick borders, great use of fonts and white space.

It is that time of the month where we preview some of the upcoming work that Obox is busy with.

This month we are looking to release four new Posterous themes, so we decided to post some screenshots of the work in progress.

All four themes will feature the full Posterous list of features and will also include our new one-click install feature.

Design wise they vary a great deal and we are quite excited to show you the finished products once they are ready. It will be the first time we use the @font-face declarations in a Posterous theme and in some cases the typography will be front and center of the design.