andreasviklund.com

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.

Fellow template designer Jason Cole noticed a request for wider (1024px-friendly) website templates, expressed in a comment to an earlier post here, and he took on the challenge and modified each and every one of my 800px-friendly templates into wide versions. You can preview and download them directly through the links below! Don't forget to check out Jason's own templates on his site. Thanks a lot, Jason!

andreasXX templates - wide versions:

Preview andreas00-wide template / Download andreas00-wide template
Preview andreas01-wide template / Download andreas01-wide template
Preview andreas02-wide template / Download andreas02-wide template
Preview andreas03-wide template / Download andreas03-wide template
Preview andreas05-wide template / Download andreas05-wide template
Preview andreas06-wide template / Download andreas06-wide template
Preview andreas07-wide template / Download andreas07-wide template
Preview andreas08-wide template / Download andreas08-wide template

Download them all in one .ZIP file

Yesterday I got a lot of e-mail with comments, questions and general feedback. I will do my best to respond to them all, but I will also use the blog to explain more about what I do and how my work can be used. Later today I will post a list of links to websites that are built using my templates, in order to give you an idea of what the final result can look like. Some people believe that template-based sites always look like the template that they are based on, but I have seen way too many creative uses of my designs to agree with that. I will also start writing that FAQ that I've been planning on writing for a long time now, and translate my templates into Swedish. More about that later…

Now, if you know about a website that is using one of my templates in a creative or interesting way, feel free to send me the link so I can include it in the list. If you send the link to your own site, feel free to write a few lines about why you chose to use a template as a starting point. And if you want to help others get started, feel free to share your tips and tricks for template use. I'll pass it on to everybody who is interested in the topic.

But first, a couple of hours of sleep. The clock shows 4:00 am now and tomorrow will be a long day…

Akismet, my comment spam plugin, has worked hard the last couple of weeks. Lots of seemingly correct comments have been filtered out as spam. But I have also got a lot of completely useless comments that has passed through Akismet just to be deleted manually by me. Comments is incredibly important for me and also for many of you. The feedback I get from your comments is a huge help in my work, and often also a great source of inspiration. But there are also people who abuse the comment feature in different ways, and that takes away much of the value in the comments. It is time to do something about that now.

I read all comments and care for all feedback I get. But for various reasons which I will explain below, not all comments will be approved and published on this site. I reserve the right to choose which comments to publish and which to not publish, and also to edit comments if needed. This is not as harsh as it sounds, as I have even approved comments that appear to be obvious cases of comment abuse just to make sure that all opinions get through. I have been mostly friendly and accepted this for a long time, but in order to improve the quality of my site I will now apply a couple of guidelines to the comments.

Most of you will not notice the difference, but those of you who will be affected by it should of course know what I will not accept - and why.

Please keep this in mind before posting a comment:

• Feedback is always welcome, no matter what the topic is. But public comments should be relevant to the post topic and of interest to other visitors, so if your message is all about something else then please send an e-mail rather than posting a comment.
• The language of this blog is English, so please write your comments in English. Bad or machine-translated english is still better than Spanish, Russian, Japanese, French or Italian. Comments in Swedish (my native language) are OK, but since only a small part of the visitors of this site understands Swedish I reserve the right to translate the comment before I approve it.
• Please write your name in the "Name:" field of the comment form. Site names or keywords that matches your site content have been accepted until today, but since more and more comments appear to be posted just to get free keyword links to various sites I need to change this. If the comment is perfectly OK (written in english, on topic and in some way interesting to other visitors) but the comment author name is replaced by a keyword or site name, I will simply delete the URL from the comment. If this would become a larger problem, I would need to move the URL away from the comment author name - and I'd prefer to not do that. Names followed by site names, such as "Andreas / Tjuvlyssnat.se" or "Luka of Solucija.com") are still OK in most cases.
• Stick to your information. It is very common to see several valid comments with different names with different website addresses - but still coming from the same person. This obviously looks like abuse, even if the actual comment appears to be perfectly OK. Comments that are posted in this way will not be published on the site. If the abuse is very obvious, all the involved comments (and other comments from the same person) will be marked as spam through Akismet.
• The openness will remain. Visitors who get one comment approved will get their future comments approved automatically. I will stick to that arrangement as long as possible, and it will only work if you all use the feature in a good way. I trust that all of you who visit this site on regular basis want to keep it this way, right?

I will wait for some feedback on this list and then add it to a separate page so that it will be easy to find for new site visitors in the future. Feel free to let me know what you think, and please tell me if there is something I have got wrong or something more I should add.

And finally a related question: I have got many requests to add a discussion forum here, but would it be worth the effort? There are several good forums out there where you can discuss web design and website templates, but the request I have got has been to have a place for free discussions and to get support for my templates and themes. In short: A place where users of my templates could help each other - and get free help directly from me. I have no own opinion about this yet, but I would be happy to hear about yours. I can not possibly answer all questions I get over e-mail, so it is definitely worth asking all of you what you think.

(note: There are lots of links to Swedish blogs here, so don't get mad if you find them hard to read!)

We (I, Johanna, the dogs and my friend Micke) have left Jokkmokk for a while. Yesterday we drove down to Umeå, and we will stay here for the rest of the week to hang around with Petter (that is "DJ Isecore" to some of you) and Ann-Sofie. I am right now writing from the guest room in their apartment in Ersboda, our home for this week…

The trip has been planned for months, and I have looked forward to it for even longer since I haven't had a chance to visit Umeå since 2003. We are planning for a number of things while we are here. Having a pizza at Queens, visiting Nydalasjön, having a party to bring old memories back to life and going to the national dog show in Vännäs are some of those things. I've brought my laptop in order to get some work finished, but I will probably not be very much online until monday next week. I will make sure to post a few photos during our visit here, but I will not be able to spend my regular 3-4 hours per day on answering e-mails for the next couple of days…

More on sponsorships

However, two things I would want to do this week is to get the first template sponsoring slots filled, and to find advertisers for the "Sponsored links" in the sidebar of all pages except the frontpage. The sidebar links will look exactly the same as the Text-Link-Ads.com links you see on my frontpage, but they will be cheaper and signed for periods of 6 months rather than 30 days. Let me know if you are interested in it, but hurry up since the number of link slots are limited! I expect to have them all filled before the weekend, so don't wait if you are interested in it.

Regarding the template sponsorships I'm starting with andreas00, 01, 02, 03 and 1024px for now. Template sponsorship means that the advertiser gets a text link on the templates page and a graphic banner (or another text link if preferred) on the subpage for the sponsored template. As I have described before, each template will get its own subpage under the templates section, and each and every template will have a lifetime sponsoring slot. When someone decides to sponsor a template, that template is taken and the sponsorship lasts for as long as the template is available on this site. Probably for years ahead. I have no fixed price yet, so I welcome offers and suggestions. Feel free to e-mail me about your opinions, it would be a great help!

I prefer to not add sponsored links inside the template itself as I think it reduces the quality of my work, so the sponsored links will only be placed on the template pages of this site. Sponsored links in templates are very common and generally accepted today, and I have had it myself in my templates and themes before. By adding this sponsorship option, I'm hoping to keep the sponsored links outside the templates - but still keep the possibility to work as a professional template designer even though my work is free for everyone to download.

And as I have also explained earlier: There will never be any sponsored links in my WordPress themes either. But may possibly add the same kind of sponsorship option for the upcoming theme pages, if there is enough interest for it. If you would want to sponsor a WordPress theme page on this site, please let me know.

Vacation?

Yes, hopefully! And if not, then atleast it will be a great week away from home, with good friends and hopefully lots of sunshine. That is a really good start!