Ben
Ben is a lifelong Nintendo fan who likes to build websites, and make video games. He buys way too much Lego.
WordPress and Games
What a year – when 2016 started I didn’t expect it to play out as it did. It was an eventful year in more ways than one.
Personally the biggest change was becoming a father. My son, Sebastian, was born on Valentine’s day last year and is now a healthy 10 month old. I knew that being a father would be a big change, but I hadn’t appreciated just how big a difference it would make to our lives. He’s awesome though and despite the lack of sleep I wouldn’t change anything.
It was also my first full year working for myself. In August 2015 I left Miniclip after 11 years of working for them, to work full-time on WordPress themes at Pro Theme Design.
Thankfully, because Pro Theme Design is well established, I earnt enough for my small family to live comfortably. A lot of this was thanks to the fact I had spent time building up the collection of themes available on wordpress.com. If I had to rely on direct theme sales then things would have been very different.
Business wise – I got quite a lot done last year at Pro Theme Design. I only published 3 new themes last year – but in my opinion they are the best themes I have ever made. I also started ‘dogfooding’ my themes on this site. It’s been a great way to catch issues I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. To ease theme updates I developed a theme auto update system that integrates with my custom build process – so theme updates can be made as soon bugs are fixed. I also published an open source starter theme, called Granule, on Github.
I don’t like New Years resolutions – I think it’s daft doing resolutions to change your life at the start of the year. If you want to better yourself then you should make the change whatever time of year it is. Goals are different. They’re concrete objectives. I set myself goals all the time, but it’s nice to revisit them every now and then to make sure they are all worthwhile.
Some of the specific things I want to do for Pro Theme Design are: