Since we launched Peaxl, a lot of people have shown interest in our themes and many of you actually bought them.

While waiting for some fresh themes coming early 2012 and as a thank you for your support, we’d like to offer you the opportunity the get the full current collection (or to complete yours), with an all-in-one package.

For just a little bit more than the regular price of a child theme, you can get the other themes. More, you can get them all. Valid until Christmas.

Merry Christmas.

- The bundle sale has ended, thanks! -

Wow, there is a lot of news from the Peaxl HQ these days! A few days ago we talked about our upcoming themes, we launched our Affliate Program and yesterday we made another move.

As you may now, we used Zendesk to manage the support requests we receive from our customers. This web app is really great… but not for us.

We think that solved support requests may help other users. We want to think the support as a community. So one of the main features of Zendesk (its private ticketing system) doesn’t meet our needs.

This is one of the reasons why we decided to drop Zendesk and to use a custom made solution, based on bbPress 2.

The deal remains the same, globally. Our customers have access to the entire forums and -obviously- can post and answer to any topic. And just like before, the full themes documentation is still free and public.

We hope you’ll enjoy our new community forums.

Les deux gagnants du concours sont @parcevaux et @agencehorizon. Merci à tous pour votre participation !

A l’occasion de la première édition du WordCamp Paris qui aura lieu le 25 novembre 2011, nous avons le plaisir de vous donner la possibilité de gagner 2 × 1 ticket donnant accès à la journée de conférences du WordCamp.

Pour gagner un des deux pass et avoir la chance, ô combien inestimable, de voir notre ami Francis sur scène, il vous suffit de tweeter et faire retweeter grâce au bouton ci-dessous avant ce mercredi 16 novembre à minuit :

Tweeter

Si vous préférez le faire à la main, n’oubliez pas le hashtag #pxlwc2011 :

Gagnez votre pass pour le WordCamp Paris 2011 grâce à @peaxl #pxlwc2011 http://cl.ly/Bnq0

Les gagnants seront tirés au sort parmi les tweets valables mercredi matin. Assurez-vous de suivre le compte Twitter @peaxl afin qu’on puisse vous contacter si vous êtes un des gagnants.

Si vous avez des questions, laissez un commentaire ci-dessous. Bonne chance !

Rappel : si vous avez raté le précédent article, sachez également que Peaxl propose maintenant son système d’affiliation.

Become a affiliate!

We did not have the affiliation offer available at launch because we were waiting for our payments and downloads provider, Digital Delivery App, to give us access their affiliation system. We gained access to it last week so we directly started working on it and we are happy to release it today!

What are the benefits of being an affiliate?

By becoming a Peaxl affiliate, you will get 35% on each theme transaction made through the Peaxl banners or links you will put on your website. For example if you have a banner in your sidebar and someone clicks on it, comes on our website and buys a theme, you will get 35% of that sale. Interesting, right? You can also promote our themes in an article and use your affiliate link to redirect it to our website. You will also get 35% on every sale generated through that link.

How do I become an affiliate?

Just go on the Peaxl Affiliate Program page, sign up for our affiliate program and make right away easy money. If you have any question, don’t hesitate to comment below or to contact us.

Our affiliate program is going to be more and more interesting as we are going to have more themes to sell. We have great news about that too!

The upcoming Peaxl themes

We are actually working on different themes for different niches and areas. First of all, we plan to release a Portfolio theme soon, Vitrine, which will be of course responsive, like Aeronef. Il will be based on great textures and typography. The homepage will be fully customizable, and it will have different sections such as the portfolio and project pages for those who’d like to give details and write case studies about their works.

The second theme we are working on is a blog theme with post formats and is called Diary. We are big fans of Tumblr and we think it was a good idea that WordPress considered such similar features. But we think the community still lacks some great themes with post formats. This theme will feature a great design in order to offer the best experience regarding post formats. It will obviously be written in HTML5 and, up to now, uses no image for its design as everything is done through CSS3. We are sure you will love it and will use it to share your posts, videos, links, photos, etc.

Then, we have two other themes we started to work on: a magazine theme and a minimalist blog theme. These themes are just sketches right now but the ideas behind these themes is to offer new directions for using a magazine and a blog theme. The magazine theme is going to be thought with user experience in mind featuring a great layout and perfect typography. We don’t have any screenshot to offer yet but we will post some via Twitter as soon as we can. The other theme is aimed to be minimalist in things displayed on screen. Great design in one column, focused on content and reading pleasure whatever the support: desktop, tablet or mobile phone. Here again, no screenshot but stay tuned.

We can’t announce an ETA for these themes but we expect to deliver them within a few weeks as we’re working on them almost full time.

After the exciting news, we also have a bad one…

Running a new business like Peaxl is never easy. Since the beginning we do our best and we learned a lot about “being a team”. But sometimes things don’t happen the way we would like them to and we have to make choices. That’s what Gilles did by deciding to leave the project and the team. He decided to go on his own, developing his own themes and maybe to sell them on Theme Forest. We will miss Gilles a lot but we understand his choices. Sometimes you try so hard to make the best choices… that you nearly don’t notice these choices are merely compromises, unfortunate compromises that nobody is happy with. So you may have to end that by taking a difficult decision. Gilles talked to us about that and we agreed that it would be positive for everybody. Thibaut and I will continue as a team and we wish Gilles all the best for his future business.

I think that is all for today! Don’t forget to become an affiliate, it is a really interesting way for you to earn money! And stay tuned on Twitter and Facebook so you will have some other teasers on the next themes to come.

Parent and Child themes

When you buy a WordPress theme, most of the time, you spend a lot of time removing things from it. You want it to have its own identity, its own personnality. Check out showcases of the same theme customized for different competitors websites and you will see that the results are sometimes far away from the original theme. Yet, if this is the case then, why not provide themes with less design touch and let the customer apply his own right away? This is why we decided to create and offer minimalist parent themes. No need to remove things. They are like dynamic wireframes, powered by WordPress, waiting for your own design layer.

“Ok, but where do I do my mods/customizations ?” In a child theme “bien sûr” !

Everybody should use child themes for customization. There should be no discussion about it. Whatever the theme you use, every change should be applied in the child theme. Let’s take the example of Aeronef. If you do modifications directly in the theme, what are you going to do when we will release an update ? Working with a child theme prevents from that kind of problems.

“What if I am not a WordPress dev or if I don’t want to spend time to customize my theme ?”

No problem. That is why we provide “ready to use” child themes. If you want, you can also use the parent theme as is, with its minimalist style.

As you can see, we really believe in parent and child theming. The parent theme brings you the WordPress magic and its functionnalities. It is also ready for a niche market. For example, Aeronef is built for single page portfolio websites. It is not simply a framework. From there, you can go wherever you want, build your own child theme, with its own identity or buy a Peaxl child theme !

Responsive Web Design

It has been a quite big buzz in the web design community for the past year. Being able to experience the same website on different devices such as desktops, tablets and mobile phones is amazing. Actually, that is a big move for the industry. We could not create a single page portfolio WordPress theme without that feature. It is not a trendy way to build websites anymore, responsive web design is now part of our daily activity.

So now, are we going to release every theme with responsive web design ? It is hard to say. We would like to but we cannot assure 100% that we will. We will consider responsive web design from the beginning for each theme and see where it goes. We are already actively working on the idea to “think mobile first”. We will let you know as soon as we have more to share !

What’s next ?

We are actively working on new themes, parents and children. We have lots of ideas, just not enough time ! We are working on “more commercial” themes but also on small niches ones. We try to attract new customers with classic themes but also with more innovation and creativity. We hope to be able to send you some more teasers soon.

Talking about ideas, we did implement “ideas forums” on our support. If you have an idea to share, something you would love to see in one of our next themes, don’t hesitate ! We offer an English as well as French speaking forum.

I still remember the first time Thibaut, Gilles and I met to discuss the idea for this project. That now seems ages ago. It was just an idea back then. And now this idea became real. Here we are today. Peaxl is finally live!

What is Peaxl ?

During the next days and weeks, we will take the time to explain to you in detail how Peaxl is so different from any current approach to marketing WordPress themes. Like the whole concept of using parent & child themes or the integration of responsive webdesign, multi-lingual functionalities and google fonts into every theme right from the start for example. Or the incredible ease of use and customization or many many more features that we hope will excite you just as much as us.

Not today though. Today, we would just like you to browse our website and discover our first themes. Today we would like to celebrate our launch with you by offering you a 50% discount, just for this first week.

We are launching the website with 1 parent theme, Aeronef, designed by Gilles Vauvarin and 3 child themes. I designed two of them and we asked the talented Aurélien Foutoyet to design one more theme for you. Please use the coupon code PXL-LAUNCH to be eligible for the discount when you buy your themes !

What’s coming next ?

We want Peaxl to become a true community. We thrive to engage you in every step of the value creation: the designing of new or the improvement of existing themes as well as the marketing of Peaxl.

We are already working on 2 other parent themes at the moment that we will ask your input on via our Peaxl community. We also asked more designers to create other stunning child themes for us. We hope our parent themes will become a kind of “wireframe” that known or rising designers will be able use to create themes for us. We envision the parent themes like canvases that they can express all their creativity on.

Affiliation is the next feature, we are working on for you. If you like our themes and get others exciting about them, we would like to reward you via our Peaxl affiliation program. We will let you know as soon as it is ready.

Finally, as we are all French speakers working and living in France, Belgium and Switzerland. We thus thought it would be great to offer the Peaxl community also in the language of Molière. Our themes are already available in French and English, there is a section in our support dedicated to French speakers and the entire website will also be available in French soon.

So follow us over the next couple of days and weeks for more exciting news to come!
There are different ways to follow us: first, our Twitter account, @peaxl, our Facebook page and our RSS feed for blog posts.

We really hope you will like the Peaxl community and our themes. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or remarks.

We decided to kick off our “Peaxl” month with a week where we would meet face-to-face and work together. There were so many things to discuss like the business model, the Peaxl website, etc. I can tell you now that in the one week we spent together, we got almost more stuff done than in the entire year before. You might think that thanks to Skype we don’t need to meet physically. Well, no! The interaction is totally different when you are in the same room, when you can feel the ideas flying around. That was a real brainstorming week.

So, what happened during that week ?

First of all, we decided on the business model. The way we want to sell our WordPress themes evolved a lot. Actually, the final idea showed up in November already, but we still needed to fix the prices and the strategy. It is all done now!!

Wireframes and mockups for the website are also almost done. Development should start shortly. We needed to change the UX/UI of the website to meet our «brilliant» idea. It took some time to find the best way for clients to understand the whole concept. The website will be ready in a week or two (but ready does not mean online ! ).

The payment solution was the toughest part of the website to organize. We had a look at our competition and found out that there are two main streams in WP themes business :membership and shopping cart.

If you buy a theme from Woothemes for example, the membership way means that you become a member and you can have direct access to the themes you bought from the website. You also have a member page. The biggest drawback is that you cannot order several themes at a time. You have to place a separate order for each theme you want to buy because there is no shopping cart. This process involves a solution called aMember.

The other way is about using a shopping cart : you buy as many themes as you want at the same time and when your order has been processed, you receive an email with a link to download all your themes at a glance. No membership, no member page. You need to bookmark the link to your themes. The most common shopping cart solution is eJunkie.

We had a long discussion on which solution to use. We finally decided to go with aMember and the membership solution. We also decided to organize our business model around that solution.

After discussing the website we moved to the themes. The first theme was almost done before we met. We needed to work mostly on the admin panel. We had a great brainstorming session to decide on what to include (or not) in that admin panel. What is useful and what is not. Nowadays, the Premium industry seems to think that the real added-value comes from the tons of custom options and features you include in your admin panel. We think that the real value is about how you implement these features (custom post types, shortcodes, etc…) and not by giving the user so many cards he won’t play with.

Francis : «Another point on the admin panel was how to design it. Thibaut did a great job giving us the first directions. Really great work.»

Shortly, here is our current status:

• Business model: done
• Website: done by end february, early march
• Payment solution: implemented by end february
• 1st theme: done by end february

More photos from the Peaxl Camp are available

Thanks to our week together, we see things much more accurately now. We still need to work hard on one or more themes to come out at the launch of the website, but this will now be a matter of weeks, not months!

What is Peaxl ?

As a reminder, here is what Peaxl is about: We are going to offer WordPress & Tumblr themes. Nothing original you will say and you are right. But it is the way we are going to offer them, especially WordPress ones, that is going to make it different and original.

“An elegant way to dress up your website” says our landing page. Thanks to free and premium themes, we will also offer you pixel-perfect and high quality ressources to enhance your WordPress and Tumblr experience.

Who is Peaxl ?

The team behind Peaxl is all about design. We are 3 freelance designers who decided to team up associate their skills and passion for web design:

• Francis Chouquet, from Switzerland (Twitter)
• Thibaut Ninove, from Belgium (Twitter)
• Gilles Vauvarin, from France (Twitter)

Yes, Peaxl is kind of a European project.

The notepad

This notepad is a temporary placeholder until the final Peaxl blog is launched. It’s something between Twitter and an actual blog. We will publish short notes and updates about the project and the themes we are working on. Comments are obviously welcome.

To contact us

If you want to contact us, please use our Twitter account, @Peaxl or on our Facebook page. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter directly from the “coming soon” page. This is the simpler way to stay up-to-date about what’s coming up and to know, before anyone else, when we will launch Peaxl. This mailing list will also be used to send you promotional offers or… freebies. 100% spam-free, of course.