andreasviklund.com

…that the first new template pages have finally been added! Four Seven website templates have been updated, re-formatted and refreshed. And there is more coming up! The rest of the updated templates will be added as soon as I can, and then I will release the new Daleri templates that I have been planning to release for months now.

The single template pages were added since I want to have more information about each template, and it would be too messy to have it all on the templates overview page. By adding one page for each design, I can have a longer description, a larger screenshot and a lot of additional material as well. For now, only the basic information has been added to the first pages. But the plan is to add links to alternate versions, older versions, blog/CMS ports and to different websites that use the templates. I am also hoping to add add-on material such as replacement headers, alternate CSS and some other stuff. I have plenty of space to use now, so feel free to let me know what you would like to see on the single template pages. I will also add similar pages for the WordPress themes as well, once the regular template pages are all online.

Template sponsorships and banners

With these new pages, it is now possible to sponsor each template. A template sponsorship means that you get your banner placed on an extremely visible place on the template page, and once a sponsor slot has been paid for - it will last for the lifetime of the template and for this website. In other words, the sponsor will be connected to the template for years ahead - and with tens of thousands of unique visitors checking out the templates page every week, each sponsor should get a whole lot of good promotion in return.

The template sponsorship option is added for two main reasons. First of all, I have got a whole lot of requests from potential advertisers who want to be linked from the templates page. It is the most visited page of this site, and the templates are widely used - currently by hundreds of thousands of websites and blogs all over the world. I used to have text link advertisements, but those turned out to work in a way that the search engines did not like - so I removed them quickly. This will be the replacement. And second, after a series of health problems during the last year (and a few doses of bad luck), I haven't been able to work very well. Returning visitors have seen it in the form of broken promises, long silent periods and a complete lack of template updates until today. Now that I am starting to feel better and I am getting my energy and inspiration back, I will need money to re-build everything that has broken during the last year - and most importantly to finally get our custom template design business running.

I hope and believe that the template sponsorships will be a valuable advertising spot for other template sites, and for anyone who want to reach out to a whole world of site builders, webmasters, bloggers and designers. If so, it will also bring me back to work with templates as a full-time job again - which I would absolutely love to do. Would you want to know more about the sponsorships? Then send me an e-mail from my contact page and tell me about the site or company you would want to promote and I'll send you more information in return!

Now, this is just a small, first step back into action. But it feels good to have taken it after all this time. Perhaps I can actually manage to surprise someone this time… Please let me know if you find some error or bug in the updated templates and their new pages!

I get a surprising amount of questions about publishing versions of my templates for mobile phones and small screens, and I have considered those questions a bit strange since my templates are all-valid XHTML and thereby fully functional in most modern mobile phone browsers. I have tested all my templates with three different mobile phones and five different browsers, and the content in each template is completely readable even though there are a number of not-so-pretty design glitches caused by some browsers rendering of the CSS.

But the mobile internet has always been separated from the real thing, mostly because of the limitations that small screens create - and by bandwidth. I have seen several attempts at handling mobile pages differently by reducing bandwidth use and manipulating the look of the content so that it works well with smaller screens. I would prefer to see all websites use valid XHTML and let the mobile internet just be a scaled-down version of the real thing - but that is not likely to happen so an alternative would be very useful. One such alternative, and a really interesting one is Squace.

Squace is a new application that makes mobile surfing and sharing easier. It’s a freeware mobile browser drastically reducing number of clicks and loading time, and thereby cost of traffic. It has a grid-like interface - a series of tiny squares which you scroll over to discover content or browse your favourite links - and it's a effective effort making a navigation system which suits the mobile screen. You can easily create your blog and make it available to other Squace users. Another cool thing is the use for everday life, like the one where schools or kindergartens put up their own sites and gives parents an easy tool to keep track on schedules and phone numbers to teachers (and to other parents) with only a few clicks, or your local restaurant could post the menu of the week. It looks very promising, much thanks to the simplicity.

A friend of mine is working at Squace and they're planning a new release in a couple of weeks, including an improved website and registration-free software. A wordpress plugin or widget is very likely in the works, which should make it easier than ever to blog from the mobile phone and stay up-to-date with other blogs through the grid. If you are curious about it, check out the website!

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…

As planned, the new year started with a whole lot of webdesign work! But instead of updating my own site according to the original plan, I have spent my time on working on other projects and designs. I was hit by an attack of template design inspiration which you will see the result of soon, and I have also assisted Johanna with a couple of projects that she has been working with. The result is three new launches that are well worth a look!

JokkmokksBHK.se

The first is the website for the local dog club: Jokkmokks BHK. It was built from a modified version of the 1024px theme for WordPress, translated into Swedish. Johanna is the new webmaster of the site and she has made most of the work herself except for the template editing.

Kennel-Anthems.com

The same can be said about the second site, her all-new dog site Kennel Anthems. It is a static website built with the andreas04 template as the starting point. The site is pretty faithful to the original design, but a lot of work has been made to add the content in a pretty way and make sure to keep a good site structure. I got really proud of Johanna's work when I ran a XHTML/CSS validation check on the final site and realized that the only thing that did not validate was a line in the statistics script that I had added. So much for my webstandards skills…

Elven.nu

But most interesting of all is Johanna's own blog, Elven.nu which has got a completely new theme. It is a variation of the design I've made for my own site (which should have been online by now). We may possibly release a public version of the theme, but I will make sure to get my own version online first to make sure it works as it should. Check it out, and feel free to let me know what you think of it. It is not advanced in any way, just a bit traditional in terms of the large image-based design. It looks very similar to my 1999-2000 designs, back in the days when nested tables and browser-specific code was considered cool…

Anyway, the silence here is definitely not a sign of a bad start of the year. The year has started in an amazing way, with very promising news about music production as well. I'll write more about it in the next couple of days for sure.