andreasviklund.com

The step-by-step approach mentioned in the previous post seems to work a little better for me, even though I haven't made any major changes on the site yet. Instead, I started with turning my home office into a major mess - emptying every box and making giant piles of CD:s and DVD:s on the floor. I spent two days going through all the stuff, throwing away everything that I didn't consider to be valuable and sorting the rest into clever archives that will be very useful for me. In some way, the ideas of having a good structure and a high level of accessibility works well in real life too! I re-arranged the electronic gear as well, moved cables and set up my old Novation K-station so that I can use it when I produce music. And not just through MIDI, I'm bringing the K-station vocoder back to life so I can actually sing with it!

What's up with the music?

I am pretty sure that the music production will take up a whole lot of my time this spring, and I have felt a constant flow of melodic ideas and inspiration since I joined the Leeloo Project in the beginning of the year. The Leeloo Project has been a one-person artist name for several years, belonging to Joakim Persson who is a long-time internet friend of mine. I have co-operated with him on a couple of songs in the past ("A different reality" and "ALW", for example) and back in year 2000 he did a nice remix of the classic Lagoona track "The promised land" (click to download his remix). Joakim has pretty much the same musical background that I have, but when I took a break from music a couple of years ago, he kept on working and studying music production in detail. Today, he has developed a fantastic sound - lightyears better than I could possibly do myself. He tried to get in touch with me for quite some time, and when I finally wrote back things happened quickly. He needed original material, melodies, inspiration and figured that I could perhaps help him. And I knew that I could never get anything done by myself so I needed someone to work with, someone who could finish what I started and bring in new ideas and quality productions to my basic concepts. It seemed like the two of us would be a perfect match, so I asked if I could join his Leeloo Project - and the project is now a duo.

We have already recorded our first official remix, a house edit of Ellen Lindblads "Nu är det fest i byn". You can hear it on Ellen's website (click "Musik" and then the "Leeloo cut" at the bottom of the page under "Remixer"). I will write a lot more about Leeloo Project in future posts and in a few days we will open our own website on LeelooProject.com. Stay tuned!

And the templates, themes and everything else on the site?

After the big refreshment of my work area, I feel confident that the website needs to be given the same treatment. The blog is full of old posts that are way out of date, incorrect and pretty much useless. Links are broken, numbers are no longer correct. And I do not need this logo anymore. Yes, I still get e-mails because of that post, almost every month someone offers me a great logo - usually after finding me through a Google search like "logotype wanted". The old posts are a good source of visitors, but I don't feel good about having outdated content on my site so I will probably remove a whole lot of posts. And maybe also re-organize the categories, and add tags…

I am still not sure if I will keep writing a blog here at all, I don't really know what to write and I don't want to be too personal since most people are here for the templates - and not for me and my opinions. I may possibly make andreasviklund.com into a pure web design website (with focus on free website templates) and keep blogging about templates related topics. Template reviews would be interesting to do, as well as template site reviews. But I am still undecided, we'll see about that. I know for sure that I will need to add more advertisements, or I will not be able to keep the site online at all. But thanks to the great feedback and high interest for the template sponsorships mentioned in the previous post, that will not be any problem.

Now, the main priority is to add these template pages. And the new templates. That will be what happens next, starting tonight and tomorrow. As soon as the templates are all up-to-date, I will clean out the blog and update all the other site content. That includes the WordPress themes which are slightly outdated as well since I haven't been able to upload new versions to the official WordPress theme viewer. Until the Theme Viewer is updated, i will host the themes myself and do it in a similar way like the templates - with separate theme pages for each theme, and related material and a sponsorship spot for each theme as well. Anyone who is interested in sponsoring the themes and have their banner or link(s) on the theme pages is very welcome to contact me. In a day or two, the pages will go online and I would love to have the banners on place by then!

Swedish versions of the templates and themes

Another project with a somewhat lower priority at this time is to release Swedish versions of all my templates and WordPress themes - and a couple of unique and original templates and themes in Swedish. There are not that many original WordPress themes in Swedish and almost no well-coded website templates in Swedish, so this will be an interesting project to do. I may possibly launch a Swedish website for this material and for a personal blog in Swedish (I own andreasviklund.se already), but I have put that a bit down in the to-do-list in order to get this site in good shape first. I still wanted to mention it here, för mina svenska läsare. Alla fyra. :)

Final words for today

Now I'm off to run quality tests on the updated and the new templates. And once that is done, you'll find them on the templates page - along with their new template pages. Check back tomorrow and the first ones will be there! If it is not, I promise to call it a day, close down the site and declare my future template design career hopeless. I have considered giving my job up more than once, but even though I am often a terribly slow worker and a master at not keeping deadlines or even my own word, I am still proud of the things I have managed to do through my templates. And if there is a chance that I can continue helping more people through my work, it may be worth fighting for. Especially when I get so much encouragement through friendly and caring comments from so many template users and site visitors. That means a lot, seriously.

After several months of silence, I have started to get e-mails from worried friends and colleagues asking me if I am OK. Thanks everyone! I appreciate that, you are all a great support!

I am actually feeling better than in a long time, so the silence is not a sign of problems. But yes, the blog got a terrible break again. After making a big effort to prepare for the design and content update, I just lost all inspiration to work with the site. Completely… I can't explain why that happened, because I don't really know. I just didn't get that next post written, and that is definitely a sign that something needs to change. And that may not just be the site design. More about that later…

However, my regular template design work and e-mail support has worked very well during the last two months. I have done a lot of successful work on other sites I run, and I have answered more than 1.400 free support requests in February and March. I have built several new templates, both custom designs and future free releases. I have also created a couple of new WordPress themes in my native language, Swedish, just because there are very few (if any) Swedish themes out there. Those of you who have checked the facebook group for my templates may have seen the updated andreas00-07 templates and the new Daleri designs (Daleri Template and Daleri Structure - both new templates ready for release). The feedback has been great for the new designs. But on the heart of all my work, this website, nothing has happened in a long time. It is time to do something about that now, and once again I will have do think different to find the inspiration to get it done.

I have put the site re-design work aside for now to focus on the two things I consider to be the most important for now: content and strucure quality. This means that the new templates will be uploaded today, even though I didn't want to do that until I had a new design in place. I will also add the new template pages that i have been planning to add for so long. It will be sub-pages to the templates page where every single template will get a lot of additional information and material. Add-ons, replacement images, new header graphics, old versions, alternate versions and variations - and a larger screenshot along with a live demo of the template.

New advertising option

Another change is that I will add a completely new advertisement option called "template sponsorship", that allows advertisers to place a banner on one single template page and being mentioned inside the template as well. The template sponsorship is a one-time cost, and the sponsorship lasts forever! In reality, that means as long as the template is available and this site is online which is hopefully for several years ahead. It will very likely be an attractive spot for many advertisers, since the ad will be seen by thousands of people every day for a long time. The templates page has had 630.000 visitors during the last 12 months and more than 2 million templates have been downloaded, so it

So far, each template is available so there is currently 11 slots available with several more being added with the release of the new templates. Everytime I release a new template, there will be a sponsorship slot available for it as well. This will make it possible for me to continue giving away my designs and support for free - without having to place too many advertisements on the rest of the site. If you are interested in sponsoring one or several of the templates, please contact me as quickly as possible since I will start a large campaign to sell these slots soon.

New music project

Another thing that has happened recently is the forming of a new electronic dancefloor music co-operation called the Leeloo Project. I will write a whole lot more about that later, but it is good news for anyone who has followed my musical adventures and hoped for new music. There are actually new songs waiting for release already, but again, I'll wait with revealing anything more about that until I have managed to get the current content and structure in order.

So what happens now?

I got to get things done, and instead of trying to do it all at once I will do every little step - one after the other. Here is the status update. The next step will be to add pages and update templates. Then I will release new templates, atleast three of them in the first round. Then I will need to update the WordPress themes to make them work with WP versions 2.3 and 2.5 (which includes adding tag support). While doing that, I will offer advertising options on this site and thereby trying to secure the future for the site. I can't afford keeping the site online and giving away my work for free unless I find advertisers - so it is a priority. Feel free to contact me if you'd like to support my work through advertising. Then, if I can get through these details (which I know I can), I will start looking at the site design again. I like the current design, but it is still a bit boring. And change is never bad - unless it steals my focus like it has done now.

I'm back again, with the intention of doing good this time. It may not always look pretty, but if it works out then I'll be happy. Thanks everyone for hanging on. Now I'm off to get some work done.

About a year ago, I went to Stockholm to attend the release party for the first Tjuvlyssnat.se book. It was an interesting trip where I met a lot of interesting people and had lots of fun. The trip provided me with a good amount of inspiration for my work with the Tjuvlyssnat network of sites and it gave year 2007 a flying start. Now it is time for another trip, once again with a blogger meeting as the main event although this time the host is the Swedish telecommunications company Telia and the topic is music and entertainment!

Like last year, I will bring my laptop and write a post from the event, but the trip will add a few more days of delays to the site update. I wasn't brave enough to make all the changes on the live site as I wrote in the previous post, so I ended up working on a private development site after all. As expected and as I mentioned in my previous post, I spend a lot more time on experimenting and testing different things when I work against a development site. Getting the job done takes much longer. However, it should also makes the end result a bit better. I am really happy with the new structure as it looks so far. With the trip coming up with very short notice I will lose two work days, but in return I will hopefully find a lot of fresh inspiration and a number of new ideas for the blog and for my designs…

Updated templates

If you want to see a preview of my updated website templates (XHTML/CSS only, no CMS-specific versions) you are very welcome to download this preview package. It contains seven updated templates: andreas00-05 and 1024px. It is not the final releases, I still need to run my regular quality checks on each template (validation, speed, browser compability, accessibility, spelling, links etc.) and re-format the CSS since it is currently written in the compact way that I like it rather than having each value on its own line which is makes the stylesheet easier to read and edit. The rest of the templates will be added to the file as the templates are updated. The final release will be made once all templates are updated and found to be OK. As promised, I will also release a number of new templates, including a universal Daleri template with the design from my own site and from the Daleri Selection theme for WordPress. Expect a preview of the Daleri template soon, I'm working on the last layout variation for it now and I may possibly be able to finish it in Stockholm.

Takeoff is five hours away now. I'm going to catch a few hours of sleep, hopefully waking up to a will become a short but interesting trip…

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.