As I mentioned on the RapidWeaver forums on 25th December, 2011 has been a tremendously successful year for me, with many thanks to the RapidWeaver community worldwide for their ongoing support. New RapidWeaver themes like Flood, Torrent, Haze and Photogenic were released this past year and have sold hundreds of copies (far beyond any of my wildest expectations). It really confused the accountant! On 1st December 2011, Stacks 2 got its first public airing and again many hundreds of Stacks have been sold. Throughout 2011, the ThemeFlood and newly launched Stacks4Stacks website combined received 47,588 unique visitors who viewed a combined total of 297,369 webpages. Javabean Hosting (who I switched to in August) have done a fantastic job of dealing with this increase in traffic. So things are going really well at the moment, and I do hope the momentum continues into 2012.

Truth be known, at the start of 2011, I was considering diversifying into supplying themes for other publishing platforms, such as Wordpress or Sandvox. However I've decided to remain strictly focused on developing solely for RapidWeaver, for the foreseeable future. I've tried some of the competing publishing systems (trying to commit about 24 hours to each), and nothing comes close to ease or power of RapidWeaver. I suppose RapidWeaver's lack of CMS support is about the only hole below the waterline, but I suspect that will get plugged with time. I tested some publishing platforms like Joomla and Drupal, but was astonished at how difficult it is to create even basic things like subpages, which RapidWeaver users take for granted. I don't want to run down these other publishing platforms, because I only scratched the surface. However I think it is worth emphasising that the grass is not always greener on the other side! RapidWeaver users have a lot to be grateful for.

Unfortunately I think the doom and gloom of the economy is going to persist well into 2012. The fundamental problems remain and I fear things may get worse before they get better. No doubt the hardship on individuals and businesses is going to continue. I do believe that RapidWeaver still offers brilliant value for money, and any Mac users seeking to build or maintain their own websites should seriously consider it. It's not my intention to drive all web designers out of business, but I think many would be surprised at just how easy it is to build and maintain websites independently using software like RapidWeaver. If you are a web designer yourself, using RapidWeaver could be a big time and money saver. There does seem to be an increase in new people joining the RapidWeaver community. I do hope these new users are 'wowed' by the friendliness of forum members and get access to some fantastic resources.

RapidWeaver themes are getting to be pretty complex pieces of kit now - there is an expectation that they need to do more but remain robust and infinitely customisable. I've already been in the labs testing a few ideas over the quieter Christmas period, seeking to split the existing styles.css file into a new layout.css and pages.css file, the latter which could be shared between multiple themes. I really like the Bootstrap Toolkit by Twitter, and this is an opensource CSS framework I think the experts would have benefit of having access to, via themes. I'm also looking at ways to provide more control over layout in themes, in particular the ability to switch things on or off much easier.

There are a couple of new stacks planned for release in early 2012. I'm exploring some stack ideas and looking at some stacks to compliment the image and grid stacks that already come supplied with the Stacks plugin. Themes for iOS devices are another area of development I'm giving serious consideration to - either in the form of separate standalone themes or mobile versions built into existing themes. Not to mention ongoing collaboration with other RapidWeaver theme and plugin developers like Greg Barchard.

Looking into the crystal ball at general web development trends, 2012 is already looking incredibly exciting. Social media is still very much king, but individuals and companies are now finding many more innovative ways of harnessing cloud-power and doing 'more with less'. I've recently seen some pretty nifty ways of combining multiple channels into a single lifestream. Websites like YouTube and Delicious have also rolled out some pretty ambitious site redesigns, with greater emphasis on pooling content into personal 'bubbles'. Services like Google+ seem to be following the same methodology as well.

From a designer perspective, minimalism seems to be the buzzword at the moment. We are seeing many more examples of bold typography, vivid graphics, whitespace, embedded fonts, animations and better ways of doing things like website footers. Again RapidWeaver and its many associated addons are already right on the ball, actively utilising many of these modern web design concepts.

Feel free to leave any comments below about what you want to see in 2012 or upcoming trends you've detected. Happy New Year!