2012 Year in Review

I thought of writing a year in review for looking back what I did this year.  Starting 2013, I’ll be doing this every year, it will help me track my progress, but I hope you can learn something as well. 

2012, was year when I was working with a company as an intern, joined in October’11.  Things went well in starting I had bunch of things to learn.  In October 2012 I left it and started working on myself.  As a front end developer and WordPress tinkerer I started taking freelance projects later October’12 via oDesk and other places. 

Income Report

Till October’12 I was earnings anything at all since I was an intern, when I started working on myself below are a few things I did for myself.  Since I only had three months working for myself it wasn’t so great. 

Freelance Projects: I started taking freelance projects back in October 2012 and made around $2200 which was lower than expected.  I needed to have more contracts but since I was new to the freelance world it was little tough to get new project, thanks to places like oDesk which provides you a platform to get yourself in the field quickly. 

WordPress Themes: While I was free last three months I thought to create and sell WordPress themes.  So I moved ahead and created Miniature, my first WordPress theme, it’s available for purchase on Mojo-Themes.  I earned $135.5 from Miniature and hope it will be consistent in sales, thought I’ll be updating the theme periodically. 

Besides, I have had a few articles on some friend’s blogs, they shared the ad revenue directly through Google AdSense, so I made around $250 with ads from Google. 

So my rough total income for 2012 is $2585.5, again I actually started working in October 2012 so you can divider this figure with three.  I’ll be grateful to my family for the support they did during my internship, I hope to do a lot of things for my family in 2013. 

So these were all about numbers, let’s move ahead and talk a few things interesting. 

What went well

Travel

I have been travelling in 2012 quite frequently, including Delhi, Chandigarh, Solan and Shimla.  Actually I went to these cities due to my internship.  But I had a really good time as I like travelling too much. 

New Friends

While travelling to other location I made a some quite cool friends who mean a lot to me.  They have helped me grow, guide and live a good lifestyle. 

Codestag

I started my own blog Codestag based on web design and development to help those who are new in this fields and trying to learn new things.  I’ll be putting some new and useful techniques that will reduce the work of designers and developers. 

Stag Framework

I also made a WordPress framework ‘Stag Framework’ for developing themes and working on client projects.  Framework is clean, neat, simple yet advanced in terms of use.  My customers are very happy with the outcome, so I thought of giving free updated to all customers using Stag Framework. 

Income

I could have started working as freelancer back when I started internship, but I wasn’t so confident if I should start that side by side so I just sticked to the internship and started taking projects in late 2012.  So naturally income was low. 

Other things

I am happy with the design and branding of Codestag, I received a lot of great inputs from my gurus.  Back in November, I got drafted to dribbble to show off my work.  I also did the redesign of my site today only right before writing this article.  I bought one MacBook Pro Retina in December to keep my the latest work and travelling easy.  Experience was good, I am enjoying both my MacBook Pro Retina and iMac.  I also did my review on MacBook Pro Retina display on Codestag. 

Apart from that I worked hard with Stag Framework and was really happy with the outcome.  Looking forward to 2013 I’ll be releasing many theme this year on Codestag Shop. 

Hoping to see great things ahead in 2013, I love surprises and hope my life keeps surprising me.  Thanks for reading, I also wrote about my plans for going ahead in 2013. 

You better tell somebody! 

About

Hi, I'm Ram Ratan Maurya, founder of Codestag, a Professional WordPress theme shop making meaning themes.  I make my living with WordPress and love to contribute to open source.  I'm also a WordPress core contributor.