What many people don’t seem to realise is that I work full time, and so don’t have vast amounts of time to offer to these sorts of things – so being able to finish two themes in two months is something I am quite proud of!

Exhibitor

The first theme is Exhibitor. Exhibitor is a gallery or portfolio theme. Designed for artists to show off their work Exhibitor offers both a way to display Exhibits, and a way to update people on your latest projects/ thoughts using the blog displayed content.

Exhibitor is my first theme to use WordPress new custom post types feature. Custom post types are used to display the Exhibits allowing the format and management for the different portfolio items to be separate.

A unique feature for Exhibitor is the colour scheme choices. A colour wheel in the theme admin allows you to pick the overall colour scheme, changing font and border colours from a single point with no technical knowhow.

If you need a clean portfolio or gallery design then you could do a lot worse than take a look at Exhibitor.

Byline

Byline is a magazine/ newspaper style theme. Its unique feature is the ability to customise the colours of the individual categories giving your website a modern look and giving each category it’s own distinctive style.

The theme has a flexible homepage design that allows you to create and arrange things in almost any way you see fit. You can arrange your freshly coloured categories in any order, or you can insert widgets underneath the featured content area. In the future there will be plugins released that allow you to customise the layout even more.

Elemental

Both Byline and Exhibitor use Elemental as their parent theme. Elemental is a WordPress theme framework that allows me to create new themes much more quicky – avoiding having to do all the boring repetetive stuff, instead focusing on the interesting innovations. In addition, if I want to add new features to a website, I can add them to Elemental – and all of my themes will update instantly. Bonus!

The goal of Elemental is to create an awesome theme that will work equally well as a theme, or as a WordPress theme framework. Many frameworks look boring and are hard to style without creating child themes, and Elemental is the antidote to this.

Elemental Hub

To show the cool things that Elemental does, and to keep people up to date on the different developments that are happening, I created ElementalHub.

ElementalHub is a blog on which I talk about developments and updates as they happen, keeping people bang up to date, and hoping that I can get some feedback on changes and how they are received.

Elemental Designer

I have also been thinking about the future for Elemental, and have come to the conclusion that the best way to extend it is to use plugins. I want to make the theme more focused on your website, and have the advanced/ niche content come through in child themes and plugins.

As such I have released the first, of many, plugins for Elemental, called Elemental Designer.

Elemental Designer is a plugin created to allow you to change the look of the theme without doing anything technical.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,700 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there was 1 new post, growing the total archive of this blog to 29 posts.

The busiest day of the year was February 9th with 40 views. The most popular post that day was About.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were binarymoon.co.uk, hoiantoday.info, webcache.googleusercontent.com, en.wordpress.com, and stumbleupon.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for binary moon, regulus wordpress theme, regulus by binary moon, wordpress regulus, and site:.wordpress.com theme: regulus by binary moon blog at wordpress.com..

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

About October 2005
1 comment

Amazed this blog is still getting visitors July 2009
2 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Regulus – New WordPress theme released November 2005
1 comment

Regulus update November 2007
2 comments

A sub page for the about page January 2006

Recently I have been quite busy because I am getting married shortly, but I haven’t let that stop me from working with WordPress. In the first half of this year I have:

• Released a new website called WPVote. This is a website that let’s people submit articles about WordPress and then vote on their favorites.
• Released a WordPress theme based upon WPVote, called Nominate.
• Released a feed aggregation theme called Accumulo
• Spent quite a bit of time working on my personal website, Binary Moon

On top of these I am working on a new website with my fiancé called Veggie Advisor. This site will be a web magazine about the health benefits of a vegetarian lifestyle. The website is being built with WordPress and is using my theme framework, Elemental, as the parent theme. The design is constantly ongoing so it still has bits of Elemental in it.

Ok, in the grand scheme of things 30 visits isn’t much, but it’s cool that it get’s anything!

So what am I working on at the moment?

Mostly a brand new WordPress theme framework which will form the backbone of future themes on Pro Theme Design. My plan is to make the “ultimate” theme, but only time will tell if I’m actually capable of such a feat – there’s some pretty strong competition around, with more frameworks being developed all the time.

I am also working on an updated version of TimThumb – my image resize script. TimThumb is a fantastic automated way to resize images without having to create loads of thumbnails manually.

There are only a few games available at the moment but I hope to add more at pretty regular intervals. The design will also be tweaked in the coming weeks, but as a quick and dirty solution I am quite pleased with what I have created.

You can check it out here – bengillbanks.co.uk

The theme is available on the new blog design website – Pro Theme Design

So far the feedback has been really positive and we’re overjoyed at the reception. Hopefully things will continue this way

If anyone is interested in making some money out of our hard work then you can check out the affiliate page for more info.

• New colour scheme
• Various Bug Fixes
• Header link
• Home tab alterations (adjust the text)
• Support for tags

I have been talking to (pestering) the kind folks at wordpress.com to update the theme here, hopefully it will be online in the not too distant future.

You can read the full release post on my main site. If you have a self hosted blog then you can also get the download from the same page.

In brief the points are…

1. Snap.com
2. Excessive Ads above the fold
3. Overlay & Expandable Ads
4. Inline Ads (those double underlined ones)
5. Del.icio.us/ Twitter in feeds with no opt out option
6. Bad/ No navigation
7. No/ Hidden archives
8. Tiny/ Low contrast text
9. Long lines of closely spaced text
10. No individual post information

You can read the my thoughts about each of these points on Binary Moon