Here are some of my personal achievements for 2008 (and late 2007 to tie the knots):

November 2007

Made a couple of free WordPress themes after checking out WordPress for the first time. Thought it would be a good exercise since I wasn’t exactly pulling web design work. Saw that the free themes became very popular and were downloaded a lot. Decided to try and make a “premium” theme (or commercial/paid), after seeing that there was a market for this.

Sent an e-mail to Adii, who had a very popular commercial theme called “Premium News Theme”, about a possible collaboration on a theme. This would turn out to be quite a important e-mail that would change my path in life. NewsPress was released as the second theme in the PNT series.

January

Started my second collab with Adii, and came up with a smoother looking concept called Flash News, which was released soon thereafter on PNT website.

April

Learning from my first two collaborations with Adii, I stepped up my game and created what turned out to be our most popular WordPress theme by far, maybe even THE single most popular theme ever: FRESH NEWS

May

After working as a programmer at EM Software for just over 7 years, and after much thinking and soul searching, I finally took the plunge and handed in my letter of resignation. This was a step I was able to make because of my increased involvement with Adii and increased work flow from custom design projects.

July

After months of planning, coding and designing, we rebranded Premium News Theme to WooThemes. Me, Adii and Mark Forrester became equal partners, when the initial 4th partner, start designer Elliot Jay Stocks, decided to focus on his own work.

August

15th of August was my last day at work, and the first day of my freelancing career.

September

Released my first theme to the WooThemes gallery called Fresh Folio. This was meant as a personal portfolio redesign, but decided it would make a good addition to our only other portfolio theme on Woo.

October

Quickly followed up with another very popular theme on WooThemes, my first business theme called Over Easy.

November

Finally redesigned my old portfolio by using Over Easy as the foundation.

December

Released my 6th theme named Busy Bee (code named Fresh-News-Killer) on WooThemes, and after posting a few previews on my blog and Flickr, it smashed our previous first day record for amount of downloads, and is already heading towards becoming one of our most popular themes.

So that is me blowing my own trumpet on the important happenings in 2008. I’d like to thank Adii and Mark Forrester for getting me where I am today (gotta love freelancing), everyone who has backed me on my decisions (girlfriend, family and friends), and last but not least, all of those who follow and appreciate my work; Your emails and comments have really been heart warming to say the least.

I wish everybody a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!