Year of change

Happy new year! Have you thought about your yearly theme? At Betheme.me, we’ve been successfully developing WordPress themes since 2015. After 8 years, it’s time to draw on that experience and move forward with an updated vision for Betheme—hence the ‘year of change’.

So what exactly is happening?

New website

The first change is our beautiful new website. Our old site was built on WordPress, as you’d expect, and from an infrastructure point-of-view it was fine, but the design was cluttered. Too many colours. Too many images. Too much text. Our new design addresses all that and puts the focus where it belongs—on our brilliant themes: BeFold, BeOnePage, and BeVersatile.

Some areas of our website maintain legacy operation for now but will steadily be updated…

Like our legacy documentation/knowledge base.

And login portal for existing customers to update and manage their licenses (while it’s still required—see below).

Our old blog is still available for historical reasons [Update 1 March 2023—our old blog has now been permanently retired], but new content will be released right here on our new blog—we hope you’ll find it informative and useful.

End of licensing

We’ll gradually be phasing out licensing for all our themes. In the past, when you purchased a theme from us, you’d receive a license key. That key would be used inside the WordPress dashboard to activate the theme, but you’d also need to login at betheme.me and specify the URL of the website the theme was being used at.

This was meant to reduce unlicensed use of our themes. But it also meant that users would receive notifications inside WordPress when a theme was updated. However, managing licenses puts a burden on users and our support team. For example, what if a user loses their key or wants to move their website to a different URL? Our themes are inexpensive and we trust our customers to purchase multi-site versions if they want to use our themes across multiple sites.

In the future, we hope to build a lightweight system for notifying users about updates without the need to manage license keys. In the meantime, we’ll ping you an email if a theme update is available.

Our first theme for Shopify

Finally, we’re excited to tease our first ever theme for Shopify coming in early 2023. A modern, stylish, fashion-themed theme for one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world. This will be the biggest new product Betheme has ever launched in its 7 year history. There’ll also be a WordPress version using WooCommerce.

Thanks for taking the time to read about what we’ve got planned for the ‘year of change’. And thanks to all our customers who’ve supported us in the past.

P.S.

The original name for our new theme has been taken 🥲. Email us your theme name ideas at [name@betheme.me] and, if we choose your name, you’ll receive a free copy for WordPress or Shopify.