2011 was great. Lot of things happened in 2011. I won a guitar competition, got sponsored a guitar from another internet friend whom I have never met, was invited to the US and the WordCamp from my colleague/friend/partner, Thad Allender, whom I had never met despite having worked together for 3 years (it was a blast), met Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress, with which I am making my living), created some really nice Photographer’s themes at Graph Paper Press, got a working iPhone in my hand after 2 years (yes, I just received an iPhone 4S) and was blessed with a lovely baby girl.

To add to these wonderful events, I got some time to rework on my age old idea of this website (WPshoppe) and in real released a premium blog theme — Sleeek.

It was a wonderful year with so many great things to list. I hope 2012 brings more adventures in life.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very successful 2012. May this year bring you all the happiness, success and good health. Happy New Year!

Okay, been a long long time I have actually posted anything except for some small tweet updates. Anyway, I have been pretty occupied on things as usual. So, set these things aside, the BIG news is I am actually going to the WordCamp in San Francisco this month! YaY!!

This trip was actually made to coincide with the Graph Paper Press team meet-up. We have been working together almost 3 years now all from different countries and it will be exciting to meet each other finally. See where the world has come to. It seems like in Matrix sometimes I feel like I am living a virtual online world and a different real world. Anyway, can’t wait to attend the Biggest WordPress Meet ever and team meet-up as well.

If any of you are there, lets meet too. Cheers!!

Oh, I can’t stop to share to this news. I just saw WordPress Themes Page and to my surprise, simpleX has now climbed up into the Most Popular theme list (Top 15). This is an old theme as you know but its simple and thats why I guess most people love it.

Thank you all for your support and love to this theme. Cheers all!!

To all who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas to all of ya.

Also, wish you all a very very happy New Year 2010.

Photo by: srogan

I haven’t been able to come and check this site often these days. I just realized that its been exactly one year today since I set this site up and made my first post. Wow, how fast the time flows. So much have developed this year and many great things have happened to me and the wordpress community as a whole.

So, lets go back to history. I made my first ‘official’ WordPress theme and to start getting my feet wet on the already saturated WordPress market. My initial thinking was to launch wpshoppe.com first and then work on themes. So, I did a ‘crash course’ on developing themes on WordPress although I knew few aspects of it from previous work but I never had the opportunity to develop a full theme. So, studied on WordPress website, Googled and looked for video tutorials. It was the simplest and easiest thing I ever learnt and man was I hooked. So, just as a testing I started building the theme called SimpleX. I just wanted to grab the default theme (which I always do) and then just revamp the CSS file. Most part of it, this is what I did. I used the same (or most) part of it exactly as the default theme and started tweaking the CSS. Hence the name SimpleX. Nothing complex. So, there you go, I have the SimpleX theme on this site, ready to launch.

It was raw! I still feel its totally raw. Things weren’t so organized. I hadn’t gone to all the details of the theme. I just started, what would you expect? But then, I wanted to post this theme for public as well. SimpleX was posted on the WordPress site, but it took so long to get accepted. I didn’t know what to do, they had their own criteria to test and perhaps getting few hundreds of theme every day.

I was so happy when it appeared on WordPress site. The upclimbing wasn’t so easy. I used to track the downloads and which page simpleX was every day. It just brought so much happiness to see it climbing up the ‘charts’. Out came WordPress 2.7 and I had to update the theme to support nested comments, I had to act fast before everyone did it. Perhaps that helped boost the downloads. It soon make it to Page 2 of Theme lists and stayed on there for more than 8 months(?). I am really not sure why it was so popular a download, but I came to understand that people really like simple themes. It is now running in 11th month and the downloads in WordPress alone has crossed the 36k mark! and is one of top downloads in WordPress site.

Then came series of events. I am lucky perhaps. Making one amateurish theme opened ways to big roads. It lead to partnership with GraphPaperPress, which was already dominating the Photo Blogging market. I just made a simple theme, what would you expect? Photo Blogging? What the h*** is that? But it was pretty easy to understand how WP could be used. Thats what I really love about WordPress. Plain simple.

Things got pretty busy on that road. Lots of things to understand and I had to debug and upgrade themes as well. Debugging wasn’t so much fun but upgrading was. Experimenting on new features and having success on implementing new features was satisfaction. But that set aside, I did have time now and then to try something different.

Up came Cleanr! I had the experience, I knew WordPress better than never before. I liked simplicity and space. I had been looking into lot of inspirational clean sites and there Cleanr is born. Plain, Big Typography and lot of white space. Just so easy to read. And guess what, it was proved another time how much people loved simple, clean designs. Cleanr broke SimpleX record and appeared on the front page of top downloads. I couldn’t be much happier.

Things got busier and better. But I did have chance to work on a new theme called Work-a-holic, a portfolio and blog theme made for Graph Paper Press. It was a great experience. This also proved to be one of the top choices at Graph Paper Press. The best thing about all these themes are it comes for FREE.

Now, its 1 year. And things have come a long way. I will keep on producing themes as soon as I have time. I am working on another theme as I write (posted earlier). WPshoppe has been a very good platform for me and indeed I am going to live to its expectations. Things are going to be great this year. More about that a bit later.

Anyways, I have interesting facts about WPshoppe to share. I had installed the analytics plugin but never had a chance to look into it. And when I looked at it few days ago, it was pretty exciting (at least for me). The site started as 3000 visits a month last year. Its been increasing every month and this October, it crossed 10000 (10200+) visits a month. That was quite inspiring. October also saw maximum visit in a day 600+ a day. Probably this was the day Smashing Magazine linked WPshoppe.

Alrite, its going too long. I will share more information later on. Till then, Happy anniversary to you all. Thank you once again for loving WPshoppe, using the themes, and everyone who have donated. It really means a lot to me.

Photo: Sandra

Well, I have been posting numbers a lot of times and you might have been bored. But I couldn’t resist this time. While SimpleX has been one of the top choices at the WordPress Site (as you can see the consistency of downloads), Cleanr seems to be yet another choice for many. It has been just 2 days and it has already been downloaded 361 times just yesterday leaving behind all the trails of SimpleX. Its just inspiring to me and thought I would mention it. Thanks for listening!