Aroxis is a new Thesis skin from Kolakube, and it’s pretty damn cool.

The main idea of Aroxis is to help serve your content to multiple devices, providing a more elegant experience for users on any device.

Or, in shorter terms, Aroxis rocks a stunning responsive design.

Go ahead, click the bottom edge of your browser and shrink your screen. Aroxis adapts and collapses the site to fit better into the smaller screens that more and more people are browsing your website on.

But the best part of this responsive experience isn’t for your readers. It’s for you, the site creator.

If you couldn’t tell by now, Aroxis is built on the Thesis theme framework (which it only will work with).

Thesis comes packed with a ton of great layout options.

You can set your own column widths, create one, two or three column layouts, and even reverse the order of your columns.

A problem with many responsive themes is that they remain static.

As in, you can’t change the widths of columns or set your own custom column order settings. Your stuck with what you get out of the box.

Aroxis solves that problem and integrates perfectly with Thesis’ layout options. And of course, it all remains responsive.

From Flexible Layout to Killer Design Options

Taking a page from Chronicl, Aroxis is a “design first, ask questions later” kind of skin.

Armed with killer design options, you can set your own background color, change textures throughout the skin and even create some beautiful logos:

Click the image above for a full view

The logo settings in Aroxis are impressive:

• Broken circle logo format (far left)
• Rectangle box (left)
• Plain text (right)
• Your own custom logo (far right)

…and you can align your logo any way you want. Left, right, center— and the layout adapts.

That’s Just A Glance…

Aroxis is a pretty powerful skin, and has opened the doors for current and future Kolakube skins to become perfectly responsive within Thesis.

If you want to learn more about Aroxis, click the link below to get started:

Learn more about Aroxis →

Responsive web design is probably the hottest topic in the design community right now. And no, I’m not just realizing this.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been reading all there is to read on the subject and been experimenting with a lot of different techniques.

Needless to say, I am ready to start converting my Thesis skins (and all future designs) to be responsive, just as I have on my new personal blog.

People who use my skins are always asking when I will make them responsive, and why it’s taking me so long to do it.

My answer? It’s simple:

Why is it such a big deal?

Believe me, I think responsive web design is a great thing. As a designer, it’s fun to create and as a consumer of content on multiple devices: it can make life easier (or all the more tougher).

But in all honesty… why do you want it so bad?

Have you taken the time to truly understand what a responsive website design does? Do you really need to serve your “mobile” visitors a different layout based on your current content?

Or, have you been programmed by all the hype and what the ‘experts’ are doing and suddenly decide you need a responsive website over anything else?

I Need Your Opinions

I have become so fascinated by not just responsive website design, but how people react to it. I want to know why you want a responsive website, and why this new way of design is such a high priority for your website.

I want to gather as much information as possible, because let me tell you: I am working on a monster post about everything responsive web design soon, and I want your opinion to use towards that post.

So please, leave a comment expressing your honest opinion about responsive web design and why it’s so important to you.

(orig. 3/19/12)

I’m not going to lie and tell you my premium Thesis skins haven’t been selling like crazy. Because they have.

And I also have to mention that I did decide to *proudly* ditch my affiliate program for a ton of reasons a couple of months ago.

Despite an inbox full of requests and tweets telling me how giant of an opportunity I was missing out on— I kept a hard head and kept it closed.

But today, I’m reopening it. And doing it a hell of a lot better than last time.

Here’s What New With The Affiliate Program

A quick look at it, there’s a lot of awesome things about this program:

• Earn a nice 30% cut of each sale (about $11 a skin. Just wait until the prices rise!)
• Access to a growing list of 50 beautiful affiliate banners
• Detailed click, sales, traffic, trends reports
• Full support at the awesome Kolakube support forum

You can learn more about it (and signup) by clicking the link below.

Click here to learn more

Why I Brought it Back

I want to go back and take a minute to respond to my article about why I closed the affiliate program. If you read it, you’ll think I’m an absolute hypocrite for bringing back the affiliate program. I did bash it pretty badly.

In business, there is a difference between being hypocritical and learning. Opinions change in an instant and like most things the past few months, this has been a learning experience.

So, I specifically wanted to address these points I made:

• The sales brought in through affiliates was not worth the time it took to maintain the program
• Many people used “spam” methods to promote through the affiliate program, making me look bad
• Affiliate programs lead to higher refund rates through that spam by creating unrealistic expectations

Note that I based everything in that article based on the old Kolakube of a few months ago.

I even came up with a detailed chart of the differences between the ‘old’ Kolakube and the ‘new’ Kolakube to give you an idea of the data I was working with at the time:

1. Not Worth the Time

The first time I ran my affiliate program, it accounted for about 5% of the overall sales. Between taking the time to pay the few active affiliates, responding to emails and promoting the program, I started to feel like it wasn’t worth it.

Truth is, it wasn’t. How could it be when few people would really recommend my skins on account of the bad service?

Opposed to now, where customer support is the biggest priority here, I think a lot more people would gladly promote Kolakube. And in the end, it will be worth all the time it takes to manage it.

2. Spam Marketing Methods

Let’s understand this now:

No matter what, there will always be spam. I wanted to close the affiliate program because people use spam methods to promote my skins. But why let spam win?

When you get email spam, do you close your email account? When you get comment spam, do you kill off your commenting system indefinitely?

I bet not, because that’s all crazy. You just need to have better management over these things, and accept that you can’t beat spam, but you can control it.

3. Higher Refund Rates

Through these spam methods, people were often promoting my products unrealistically. Advertising things they could not do, promising things that would never happen… leading to high frustration when people found out it wasn’t true, and blaming me. Then getting a refund. Bummer.

I can only trust that people truthfully promote the products around here, and that I continue to keep pumping out great updates to always make them better.

Those are my new beliefs about the affiliate program here, and it is here to stay for sure. But this was the one major drawback of not having an affiliate program:

Missing Out on a Huge Opportunity (For You)

If you’re a customer here, you know one thing Kolakube is all about is listening to what you want. And you wanted an affiliate program to promote the Thesis skins you used and make some money. I’d want that too, money is awesome!

With such a high demand for Thesis skins in the market, promoting a skin only seems natural to be a huge hit in affiliate sales.

So I invite you, whether you’re a customer here or not, to try out the FREE affiliate program and see what you can make with it.

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Ready to get Started?

The Kolakube affiliate program is new, it’s great, and I think you can make a lot of money with it. Ready to start earning?

Create an account    Learn more
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