A Look Back at 2024 and Looking Forward to 2025

Welcome to 2025!

It’s that time of the year when people reflect on what happened in the past year and plan out what they hope to accomplish in the next year.

And I’m not going to lie, this is one of the things that I love to do. I love to take a look to see what I’ve done in the past, where I would like to be in the future and figure out how to get to that point.

So, as I’ve done for the past several years, I’m kicking off the new year by taking a look back at how 2024 went for me (spoiler alert: not great) and what I’m hoping to accomplish in the next 365 days.

Let’s dive in!

What are Yearly Themes?

So before we begin, I need to take a brief detour to explain what yearly themes are.

Everyone sets New Year’s resolutions every year. But how often do you actually follow through on those resolutions? They probably don’t even last into February.

The solution to that problem is to set a yearly theme instead.

I was introduced to this idea through a CGP Grey video in 2019, and it’s been a big help for me ever since.

The idea is to not focus on specific goals, but instead focus on a theme for the year to help guide you through the year so that you actually accomplish your goals.

So for example, with a New Year’s resolution you might say, “I want to read 30 books this year.” But what happens if you only get through 25 books when the previous year you read less than 10 and you faced a number of challenges throughout the year? Technically you failed your resolution, even though you read way more books than you did last year.

But if you instead went with a yearly theme of “Reading”, it’s open-ended enough to make you feel like you succeeded.

A year is too long of a period to set goals, especially since so many things can happen in that timeframe to throw off that goal.

So instead I like to use yearly themes to help guide me through the year. And, as you’ll see later, I’m experimenting with even using seasonal themes for better guidance throughout the year.

What Happened Last Year?

So before I discuss what I hope happens in the next 365 days, let’s first look back to see what happened last year. After all, you can’t get better in the future if you don’t learn lessons from the past.

Year of Next Steps

So my theme for last year was “Year of Next Steps”. The idea was that I had built a foundation for my freelancing and the Crosswinds Framework WordPress product I spent the year creating, and I was going to take the next step.

Yeah … that didn’t happen.

A lot went on that made that really hard to achieve anyways. My sleep issues roared to a head in the first seven months of the year, peaking when I got only seven hours of sleep across three days combined.

The good news is that it was the moment I finally managed to get it — and my mental health — under control. I’m taking medication that has helped me sleep so much better and really helped me get control of my depression as well. I’ve felt so much better these last few months and feel ready to tackle the new year because of it.

Also, the WordPress community is coming apart at the seams. You can get the latest recap of everything that’s happened since late September, but the reality is that I don’t think WordPress is viable for me full time anymore.

So yeah, the year of next steps didn’t really go well.

Crosswinds Framework

I thought this past year would be the year I strike gold with the Crosswinds Framework, but it decidedly did not turn out that way.

There are a lot of factors that went into the struggle — I’m not quite that good of a web designer yet, other better products are already on the market, WordPress is a mess, full site editing is struggling with regular users, etc.

And to be honest, between the struggles with sleep and mental health and not being able to get any traction with it, my interest in it faded.

I’ll talk about this in the look ahead later, but I am hoping with sleep and mental health in a much better place now, I can at least make something out of the Crosswinds Framework, even if it’s not my main focus going forward.

Photography

While my interest in WordPress dwindled this year, I picked up a hobby in landscape photography.

I got interested in photography in college when I had to take a photojournalism course in 2014. And I’ve had a DSLR camera for about 10 years now. But it never really became a hobby.

Until now that is.

On our family road trip to Denver and the Grand Canyon this summer, I had my camera with me at all times. Wherever we were, I would look for the best photo to take, and the results were amazing. You can see them in the gallery below.

And then in October I took my first ever solo road trip to the Smoky Mountains and Gatlinburg, Tenn., specifically for photography. It was first and foremost a learning experience, but I think I got a number of cool photos out of it.

Finally, I took my website-building knowledge and built a specific website to sell my landscape photos. I’m still working on a few things on the backend to be able to sell both physical and digital copies of photos, but I’m happy with how it looks at least.

Learning

If there’s one good thing about the WordPress drama this past fall, it’s that it was the kick in the rear I needed to learn new languages and technology.

While I’m extremely confident in my WordPress skills, I’ve stagnated when it comes to becoming a better PHP and JavaScript developer. In all honesty, I’ve gotten complacent.

But with WordPress not looking viable for the future, I’ve started learning different languages and tech stacks. I started out by finishing a couple of learning paths on LinkedIn Learning about React. And since about mid-November I’ve been learning Laravel and have started building a personal dashboard app on it.

So, while things didn’t go quite as planned, it’s at least finishing on a high-ish note.

What I’m Focused on for This Year

Now, let’s discuss what I hope happens here in 2025.

Year of Taking a Leap

My theme for this year is Year of Taking a Leap.

I kind of mentioned this before, but I feel like I’ve stagnated a lot in recent years, especially professionally. I’ve gotten too comfortable with where I’m at and with my skills, and, to be honest, I want to do more.

I want to be comfortable with being uncomfortable and take calculated risks and be adventurous and see where that leads me to this time next year.

So what does that look like?

Well, I hope it means more freelancing business for my web design stuff. It will include stepping out of the WordPress bubble and learning new languages and tech stacks deeply. It might even mean creating a custom content management system.

I hope it includes getting better at taking and editing landscape photos and increased photography sales. And I hope it includes an expanded portfolio, more consistent workouts and better eating.

Will it happen this year?

I hope so!

Season of Learning and Building

This year I’m trying to do seasonal themes that help guide me through the yearly theme. Three months feel like a great timeframe that’s long enough to make some goals achievable but short enough that it doesn’t feel like forever.

So with that in mind, my seasonal goal for the first three months of the year is. Season of Learning and Building.

As part of taking a leap, I need to learn a lot — from programming languages to frameworks, like Laravel, React, Vue, Tailwind and the like. And there’s a ton for me to learn.

I’ve already started to get pretty comfortable with basic Laravel and have even started to come around on Tailwind CSS. I hope to be an expert in Laravel, object-oriented programming and maybe even learn a little Swift or Java to shake things up.

And then I also want to build things. I can watch all of the videos on LinkedIn Learning or Laracasts, but it takes actually building things and working through the code to truly learn a language or framework.

So as I’m learning things, I want to be building things using that knowledge gained to solidify that knowledge.

Most of the things I build probably won’t see the light of day in public, unless I talk about it here or on my YouTube channel. But as long as they help my goal of learning things to help me take that leap, that’s fine with me.

It should be a fun three months.

Jacob Martella Web Design

As part of the Year of Taking a Leap, I really want to focus on building my freelancing brand.

I’m going through a rebranding process to change from “Jacob Martella Web Development” to “Jacob Martella Web Design” and changing out the logo and website.

I want to devote more time to seeking out freelancing opportunities as well as helping small businesses create their own websites to grow in today’s digital age.

This will definitely require me getting out of my comfort zone (I am 100 percent an introvert). And it also might not work. But I’ll never know if I don’t try.

Building a Custom CMS

As part of that as well as the WordPress mess, I want to try my hand at creating a custom content management system that’s built specifically for small businesses.

This is definitely not going to be an easy process by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s likely something that’s going to take the entire year to build out.

But it’s going to be a fun challenge. While I like WordPress, at the end of the day it’s still a blogging platform. And trying to turn it into an online store or a membership website or lead generation website can be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

I’m still in the planning stage for it as I continue to learn more about Laravel (the framework it’ll be built on), but I will definitely be talking about it here and on my YouTube channel if you want to follow me on that journey.

What’s Next for Crosswinds Framework

While the Crosswinds Framework isn’t going to be my main focus this year, I still want to work on it to make a high quality product for those creating WordPress websites.

Early on in the marketing phase, I thought I wanted this to be a product for agencies and developers. But I’m wondering if making it better for a site owner/do it yourself small business owner is a better way forward.

Either way, I’m going to be focused on making it easier for someone to create their entire website in WordPress with a high-quality onboarding flow and outstanding designs.

This ought to be fun.

More Photography

Finally, I want to continue with my photography.

On the technical side of things, I want to create a website that makes it easier for me to sell both digital copies as well as print on demand physical products of my photos. And from what I can tell with my research, that’s going to have to be a custom solution.

On the photos side, I want to take more one-day trips locally to find great places for photos that don’t require a long road trip. While I’ve lived in the DFW Metroplex my entire life, maybe looking at it through the lens of a camera will give me a different perspective on it — and amazing photos.

But importantly, I want to get outside and taking photos and away from the computer. It’s a fun hobby that I really love. Can’t wait for more of it here in 2025.