ElectroTalk is a mobile phone sales and repair centre based in the North of Sheffield. The design for this business needed to be awesome and edgy, but very easy to maintain. So I decided to experiment with my most familiar (and ultimately, a great all round) platform, Blogger, in order to feature a great overall HTML based design which can be updated by even a complete novice to web design using the rich text interface.

I have to admit that the design turned out even better than I had expected! What's more, the dynamic nature of a blog compared to a static website ensured ElectroTalk.co.uk began to show up in search engines almost immediately.

Although this business is only a few weeks old, several customers have comented that they were referred through the website. It seems that using Blogger to build a website for small businesses includes the best of both worlds: great design and a simple interface plus great SEO and frequent updating to boot!

Visit Electrotalk.co.uk

When my children introduced me to Animal Crossing on the Nintendo DS, it didn't take me long to become truly addicted to this game. After endlessly searching for tips and advice for this game online, we decided to create a blog to write about our own experiences: a family venture which we named AC Wild World Tips.

Being the blog/web designer of the family, the task fell on my shoulders to create the overall design scheme for ACWW Tips and set everything up. The result is this: a modified version of my premium Planet Play template:


We used Google Calendar to create a table of events so readers can easily find out what could be happening in their world on any given day.

At the moment, only Andrei (my son) and I are writing posts, which I feel is a great way of encouraging him to write as well as an outlet for his passion of video games! If you're a fan of ACWW, please pop over and let us know what you think.

Since i have been designing original Blogger templates for some time, it seems only natural for me to progress from creating free themes to high quality premium ones.

While I had deeply considered taking the plunge to create my own site and payment processing procedures, the prospect seemed way to big to accomplish alone.

S0 when I discovered Theme Forest, I was thrilled and joined up straight away. Created by Envato (the company which also manages FlashDen and Freelance Switch), this site offers high quality templates for all platforms at great prices, while theme authors receive a decent cut of the commission plus bonuses for referring new customers.

I have a few themes in progress and envision my author status at Theme Forest will become a good investment for my time and skills.

Take a look at my ready made templates by visiting my Theme Forest portfolio here.

Just as I think I've developed a new and gorgeous design which I think will work in all browsers, I load it in IE6 to discover something goes wrong, messing up all my hard work and sending me back to the drawing board again :(

Take this design, for example. In Firefox/IE7, it loads beautifully. The semi-transparent backgrounds are rendered just fine and the scripts all seem to load perfectly. Just to be on the safe side, I check in IE6 (that awful, clumsy browser!) and discover that my bgsleight script refuses to work with the background images because they're overlaid against the main body background.

AARGH!

So if you happen to be viewing my blog in IE6, I do apologize for the lack of perfection and beg you to upgrade to a better browser!

Yes I am in the process of making IE only statements, but I truly wish I didn't have to. Cross-browser incompatibility is the bane of web designers. I think we spend far more time ensuring compatibility than we do actually designing!

Over the next few days, I'm going to develop a whole new layout for this blog. Yes, I know it's been temperamental already, but this time the design will be for keeps.

I've had a wonderful idea for a clean and stylish layout which I think will work perfectly to enhance my posts and portfolio pages. So if you're visiting here, please be aware that things may change suddenly as you navigate from one page to the next!

Thanks for bearing with me through this redesign. I look forward to announcing the end-result!

I found this great resource over at Noupe which lists seven extremely useful CSS hacks.

This will make coding templates and such so much easier for me now! I hope you like this resource too, and will be sure to post more as I find them.

I've just posted the widget installer on Blogger Buster for people to use the "Top Commenters" widget in their blogs.

Phew, I have to say it's something of a relief to finally have this up and running! I was experimenting and coding for eight hours straight last night until I'd got the installation down to a tee. Then as I (finally) went to bed, I remembered some other tweaks I could make, and other things which I really ought to include.

Back to the drawing board again this morning! I finally completed this about 1 minute after I'd originally meant to post! But I'm so glad that I did this: now I have the knowledge and tools available to me so I can create customizable widget installers for so many other Blogger widgets too.

Like a Flickr photostream for instance...

Generally speaking, I'm not too bad at JavaScripting, but I'd never truly mastered inserting variables from a form into another JavaScript element. Had to learn all about that, plus how to parse XML to properly display as items in an ordered list!

Eventually I may post a full write up of the process (wonder how many A4 pages that would take up..?).

For now, if you want to show a list of your blog's top commentators, go install the widget now and see for yourself how this works :)