andreasviklund.com

Over the next two days, this site may look like a complete mess. Most details are ready for the upcoming design switch, but the design is the easy part. I will also re-structure a large part of the content (including old blog entries and pages) to make it easier to use tags rather than categories and to add new sub-pages the different parts of the site. As I have written earlier, each template will get a page of its own where you can see a larger screenshot and download additional material and previous versions if wanted. More information about each template will be available, such as number of included layouts and file sizes. I will also add a FAQ for each template, and have a couple of how-to's available as well.

Since my official target for this site is to add something new to it every day after this update, I want to make sure that the content is structured in a functional and future-proof way. I could have done all of this on a development site or locally on my computer, but I know myself well and I am very aware of the fact that it would take much more time than needed if I did it that way since there would be room for experiments and for taking breaks whenever I wanted. So in order to force myself to do it quickly and in an effective way, I'm going to do something that I would never recommend anyone else to do. I'm going to make several of these changes live directly on the site. It is definitely not a pretty way to do it, but it will force me to work fast and not stop until the job is completely done.

So don't panic if something is broken, it will hopefully result in an improvement in the end!

When I write this, the new year is less than 30 minutes away. I won't make any summary of the year that has passed, but it has definitely been a good year in general. Not a perfect year, since I have gone through a number of crashes and faced a lot of problems. But still a positive year which has created opportunities to give 2008 a great start and hopefully make it a year of adventures and interesting challenges…

There will be a number of changes coming up soon. The new site design is completed, and I'm hoping to launch it tomorrow (January 1st) as planned. I'm back into music again, and not working alone on a hobby level any more but instead being a part of a professional team. An announcement about that will be made some time into the new year! New template content has been created, the WordPress themes are being updated, more related content will be added - and 2008 will also see a new site section for royalty-free digital art that you can use for free in headers, as backgrounds or in any other way you want to.

The future looks interesting, and I'm ready for new adventures. Thank you all who have followed me and supported me during 2007! I hope that you'll be around in 2008 as well, and I sure hope that I'll be able to provide you with useful, free and high-quality material again. I know myself good enough to not make any final promises, but I can give you one guarantee: I'll do my best. At all times.

While playing around with a music project I am working on, I got the idea to try a few things one of the songs I made for Lagoona many years ago, a FastTracker-based song called "Parterial Enfino" (which it is just a made-up nonsense title that doesn't mean anything). I wanted to make the song a little longer and let it start and end with drums so that I could put it in a non-stop music mix. I fired up the music programs and started playing around, but it all went a bit further than I had planned… In the following couple of hours, I basically recorded a new version of the song!

When I was done, I realized that it was a long time since I had that kind of inspiration, and that I should celebrate that in some way. While this song is not really the style I plan to work with, I will let "Parterial Enfino (2008 edit)" represent my return to the world of music. I have uploaded the song as a demo to Swedish online music site Allears.se, and I would like to invite you all to check it out. Feel free to post a comment here, feedback is always appreciated. Don't judge me too hard from this song, it is just the first step in an adventure that will hopefully go far…

On my Allears.se artist page you'll also see the artist name I will use for the upcoming music project. It may be somewhat familiar to frequent visitors and friends, since it represents my creative work with newer templates and themes as well. I will adopt Daleri as my artist name, and the old testing site Daleri.com will soon be re-launched as a separate artist site while this site will continue to focus more on web design and my everyday life.

Edit: I have removed my music from Allears, it was definitely not the right place for my music. I have tried a whole lot of music sites over the last ten years, and it is always interesting to see that the ones that are owned or sponsored by big record labels are the ones that gives the worst member experience… Anyway, my music is now located on PureVolume.com - I hope it will work a bit better!

Today has been a completely hopeless day, full of problems and worries on several levels. Worries are usually the most effective way to kill my inspiration, and since most worries are related to the currently bad economical situation (caused by not being able to work for a long time because of health problems), losing my inspiration is a worst case scenario. I really want to spend my energy on doing good things, but that has been hard to do today.

With that in mind, it feels like an amazing irony to run the "What is your blog worth?" test today and find out that my blow is said to be worth more than 13,6 million dollars. Or according to another estimate 1,9 million dollars. Even the lowest value estimate that I could find feels like a bad joke.

On a day like this, it is tempting to sell my site and use the money on killing all worries, and then build something new from scratch. I know that it would take a lot of hard work and a long time to build a site that could match this site - if it would be possible at all. I also know that selling the site would hurt my reputation and my personal trademark a whole lot since I am so closely connected to this domain name. But any day ruined by worries make me feel that it could be worth taking a chance, since I could probably not do very much good with this site anyway until I can put all worries to rest and focus on my work…

The best possible scenario would of course to get rid of all the worries without selling the site, and that is my #1 priority right now. The plan is to launch a new company and run this site as a full-time job starting next year, as described earlier. But I will only be able to do that if I can afford it, and that possibility feels pretty distant on a day like this. Especially now that I will remove all text link ads from the site because of the "sponsored links" debate. That is why I will keep on writing about the possibility to advertise on this site - atleast until I have found advertisers that can keep the site running. It shouldn't be very hard, the interest has been huge during all the time this site has been online. But today, all advertisement slots are empty - and that just adds to the worries.

In this very moment I am open to all solutions, even selling the site if I would get the right offer from the right person or company. I hope that you all can have some patience with me while I'm standing on this balance line. I've been here before, and being an all-optimistic person I know that it usually turns to the better soon. Until then, don't get too mad if I post confused or emotional rants here, I'll clean those out in the forthcoming reboot as well. That's a promise.

While working on the new site design and the updated content structure, I have spent a lot of time going through my site statistics to learn more about the way this site is used. Out of all the tools I used for this part of the work, Google Analytics proved to be the most useful. Analytics has a "site overlay" feature that made it possible for me to browse my own page while the link popularity was visualized above each single link. Together with lists of navigation trails, landing pages, exit pages and time spent in the different areas of this site, I got enough information to learn how I should build the new site navigation - and which links I should highlight on the new frontpage.

For example, there is no use of having links to monthly blog archives in the sidebar since they are almost never clicked anyway. Instead, I could just highlight the link to the archive section where all the posts can be found anyway. The categories are not used very much either since most visitors click on the category links for the post that they are reading if they would want to read more posts from that category, but they are still useful to quickly find posts about specific topics - especially from non-blog pages.

I have started to make small changes now, so that I can see how it affects the usage of the site. For example, the montly archives are now removed. More changes will be made during the next couple of days, and you will probably see the new layout and content structure take form, piece by piece. Doing this detective work has actually been much more fun that I thought it could be. I've learned a lot from it, and much of it makes sense when I look at my own clicking habits on other websites. It will hopefully help me make this site a little better, but I will also apply the knowledge on my template design work to bring in some new ideas there. It may not make any major difference, but it is good for the inspiration…