Well I really have gone round the houses with this blog over the last few months.  We have changed domain name, changed designs a few times and now we are back here on the original domain name that we started with, but with a new design.  Let me explain all about it!

First of all I have had a blogging conflict for the last few months.  I have started writing more and more blog articles about WordPress and the Web design and development work that I have been doing.  That in itself is not a problem, but penny4them.com was followed by a lot of friends and family that were not in the slightest interested in WordPress or web development.  Therefore I have decided that I am going to use this a more of a personal blog about me rather than things that are too WordPressy or web developmentish (not sure whether they are words but hey ho!).  I am going to develop the Equal Design blog in order to publish any techy posts that I write.

So why this design?  You are a web designer for goodness sake?  Well that is true, a web designer that doesn’t design their own website?  The thing is, is that I just haven’t got time to design my own site as I am too busy with other projects – teaching and Equal Design.  So I stumbled across this theme from youare.com the other day and really liked it.  Nice and simple with good design features and enables me to do all the things that I want to on my blog.  So after a dummy local install to test the features I have decided to go live with it.

After weeks and weeks of ideas, discussion, designing and also debate we have finally launched the new Equal Design website which went live today.  The site is very innovative and off course uses WordPress as its back end in order to power everything.

We wanted to freshen up the look of our site.  It is amazing just how quick websites can become a little dated in their look as the last Equal Design site only went live at the end of July in 2008.  We wanted a site that also would enable us to manage all of our projects, invoices and themes online rather than having to constantly email things backward and forward between me and Matt all the time.

This called for an admin only area that is hidden from the outside world through the if user is logged in function.  This allows us to post in certain categories for admin use and they are not displayed unless you are logged in.  I am sure that this will prove very beneficial in the long term when working on different projects.

So there it is then, the New Equal Design website.  Please feel free to leave your comments on what you think, I just hope that you all like it.

Last week Equal Design got the opportunity to work with a new website – alldubbedup.co.uk.  In fact we are designing and coding the site including the logo and the look.  This project sounds really exiting and therefore I though that I would tell you all about it.

First of all I suppose that I need to introduce the reason behind the site, which would be a rather old but fantastic VW Beetle named Levi.  Levi is the yellow car below having some running repairs:

It seems as though there are may passionate owners of Beetles and other VW cars out there and therefore the idea is to create a Fan Site which people can join for a small fee.  All the benefits to this are still in negotiations however here are some of the benefits that we already know about:

• Discounts on classic car insurance
• Discounts from local companies in partnership with All Dubbed Up
• View archive of technical ‘how to’ videos on anything and everything VW
• Start pack
• Attend meets with other VW owners
• Sell you VW to other VW owners at no extra cost in the market place

As the site grows these benefits are sure to grow and grow and these are just the beginning.  At the moment the site is in the design stage but the domain name is bought and you can visit it at alldubbedup.co.uk in order to see the holding page!

Look forward to seeing this site grow and grow as I am sure that you will agree it has massive potential.  Lets hope that it is a success.

For a long while I have heard an awful lot about Twitter.  It has been all over the news and also I have heard peopel talking about it as well as seeing lots of “Follow me on Twitter” links on peoples websites.  Therefore I thought it high time that I worked out what it was, and perhaps started using it as maybe I was missing out on something really good.

So what is Twitter then?   Well essentially it is sort of a condensed version of Facebook I guess.  The idea being that you can share with friends and other on the Internet what you are doing at any given time, by twittering and answering the question ” What are you doing”.  You can also share photographs and links with other people and have many conversations with your contact, friends and followers on Twitter.

Having a iPod touch means that I can also Twitter on the move when connected to a WiFi hub.  I have already downloaded the free Twittering application for the iPhone to uyse when on the move.

So what is my overall verdict then?  Well I like it, however I can see it taking up rather a lot of time in order to update.  Also when you read back your Twitters, sometimes you just think why on earth am I telling the world this?  Look out for my Twittering on this site in the sidebar in the near future.