We’re pleased to announce that the Caribou demo is now online.

Caribou is probably the most flexible, powerful and yet easy to use WordPress theme available today. It’s very much a platform theme and will form the basis for other premium themes for Interconnect IT. It’s designed to be easy to work with, fast to load (important for a busy news site), fast to render and be light on the server.

“Caribou’s development has cost us more in both money and man-hours than any other theme we’ve built, including client work - it introduces new concepts to WordPress while at the same time maintaining standard functionality, working on multiple installations and being tolerant of server issues. It really is a tour-de-force and will be the basis from which many varied designs will come.” — David Coveney

We also test all our themes with real data. Not carefully selected, carefully trimmed excerpts that just fit a certain space perfectly, and Caribou is designed to look good even if you have a team of writers who know nothing about layout, html or design. “It Should Just Work” is a guiding principle at Spectacu.la.

Beta Download †

Caribou-beta1.zip

† Please note that this theme is for members only, and may lag behind the demo in terms of features and design.

We’ve just uploaded Grassland. This is really a straightforward blogger’s theme. It’s not overloaded with features, though it obviously does the usual Spectacu.la stuff like widget support, clean CSS and XHTML, and all with a nice line in style.

We’ll be using this theme as the basis for a number of other blogger themes, most of which will be released as member exclusives first, before being exposed to the bigger world of GPL.

We’re setting out to make a wide range of themes - we’ve noticed a lot of rival theme designers produce heavily commercialised themes, designed with advertising in mind. We tend to concentrate on building themes for businesses, clubs and non-commercial individuals. So Blend, for example, allows you to create a brochure style site while at the same time running a blog, all within WordPress. Anvil and Grassland, however, are all about blogging. They’re customisable and flexible but most tend to keep things as they are, or just change the logos used.

There won’t be any new themes for at least a couple of weeks while we prepare for the release of our magazine theme. Watch this space!

This site’s now in Alpha.  That means some people are trying it out, but a few things still aren’t fully in place yet.

However, we’re expecting to go beta with the site in early July 2008, with an official launch at the UK WordCamp.

So keep checking back, or pick our rss feeds, to see the beta launch.