Simon-North.com, my personal blog

Hi there, I’ve decided to set up a personal blog as I am intending on making Help Developer a multi-author blog. Simon-North.com is where you will be able to keep up to date with me, my site and theme releases and get my personal opinions on things and Help Developer will become more of a [...]

Introducing simnorWP

A couple of posts ago I was talking about how the template market is decreasing in value and I hinted that I was going to be getting back into the premium wordpress business.
Well, I think its now time to introduce my plans. simnorWP is the highly original name I have given to my collection of [...]

Create an Archives page in Wordpress

Have you ever seen Archives pages in Wordpress and thought ah I could do with one of them on my blog, no, oh well stick around you might learn something else

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to produce an archives page to show the latest 20 posts, the blog’s [...]

Are templates dying out?

Last year I was a student and I made quite a nice side income in doing theme development, I’d design and code a HTML/CSS or Wordpress template and put it up for sale on sites like Sitepoint and I’d make some nice money from it, not enough to buy a house or anything but a [...]

Redesigns galore!

Long time readers of Help Developer will have noticed that I like to redesign a lot, Help Developer gets redesigned very often. As a web designer in my first couple of years of professional designing I am constantly improving my skills and I try to update my portfolio design at least once every 3 months, [...]

A week in focus - November Week 2

I feel that I need to get back into blogging and now that I have more or less caught up with my freelance work backlog I think I can get back to it regularly again. I think I owe it to all of you that have subscribed over the past few months, over 600 in [...]

Moving to an office

Hi all, again apologies for the lack of posting lately, I promise that I will get back into the swing of things soon. I want to talk to you about a recent step I made in my career/business. As of tomorrow I would have been in my new office for a week and I wanted [...]

Top 10 ThemeForest Templates

Sorry about the lack of posts lately regular readers, it’s a very busy time for me at the moment, I have a lot of work on and am just about to move into my first proper office so I haven’t found much time for blogging. If you would like to be a guest writer for Help Developer please do leave a comment or send over an email to me at simnor@gmail.com, it’s a great way to get some promotion for your blog.

In this post I am going to show you my personal favourite 10 templates on ThemeForest, I am addicted to the site and it brings me a nice passive income, I wont feature any of my items in this list but if you would like to check them out then my portfolio is here.

So on with the countdown:

ThemeForest 1 month on

OK it is nearly 1 month since ThemeForest went live to the public, it has stirred up some mixed feelings amongst the design community and either people hate it or love it, if you hate it then you may not like this post because personally I love it.

I have talked to a lot of designers about ThemeForest and I have had a number of responses, some good but most bad, quite a few people I have spoken to are not happy with the low 25% share that designers receive whilst Envato takes 75% but what we need to remember can be summed up like this:

The new forum

I know what you’re wondering, what is it with this Simon and changing things every couple of months. I felt that the forum had sort of died out before it had even lived a good life so I wanted to make some changes.

The old forum was based on phpBB, its a great forum system if you have a lot of topics available and people using it all the time. However, it lacked the community feel that is starting to appear on Help Developer. I only really use one forum now (apart from this one of course) and that’s the FreelanceSwitch forum, it’s based on Vanilla which is great for small forums. It’s default view is the latest discussions and is a much better way to use the forums. So I have implemented it into Help Developer.

If you used the old forum then you will need to resign up and start posting again, I haven’t carried over the posts from the old forum, I want to start fresh. The old forum can still be accessed here.

So please go over and sign up to the new forum and lets start chatting, I’ve added a few topics to get started with. You can access the new forum here. Thank you and welcome (or welcome back) to the Help Developer community.