I’ve been working as freelance web developer for the last couple years working almost primarily with WordPress. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, but I was recently offered the opportunity to work full time with Demand Media.

Demand Media runs eHow.com, Trails.com, Livestrong.com (among others) and social widgets that are viewed on millions of pages per day. It’s a really exciting company and position. Couldn’t pass it up. I start today, which also just happens to be my 29th Birthday.

With Demand Media I’ll be using the skills I honed on WordPress themes. Clean HTML, optimized css, jquery, and subversion. I also think my involvement with the WordPress community was one of the main reasons I was hired- it shows that working with the web is much more than a job, it’s also a passion.

WP Theming was launched just over a year ago in its current form and I’ve been continually amazed at how much I’ve learned by simply by sharing my code snippets and ideas. Here’s my stats when I started in September 2009, and where it’s at now (about 100,000 total):

I plan to continue publishing to this site, but will change the focus from my freelance work to emphasize the content, tutorials and themes. It’s also been a year since the original launch, which means I need refresh the design and weed out some posts that are no longer relevant.

Portfolio Press has been my favorite project this year. I think everyone who does freelance theming for a living should release a free theme if they can. I love seeing how people are using it, especially when it’s been severely modded. A raft of updates are coming to it in the near future- including translations that people have sent over.

I stopped accepting new freelance work since I’ll be working a 40 hour week, but I’ve met a number of excellent developers at WordCamps over the years who I’ve been referring new work to. If you’re a WordPress developer who’s available, go ahead and post your website and skills in a comment here. It’s always nice to have more.

Also, a big thanks to everyone who has left comments on the site over the past year. That’s what makes it all worth writing about and sharing. It’s also a bit addictive- so I’m sure there will be many more articles to follow.