andreasviklund.com

Swedish news site DN.se runs a story about my website templates and the way that the template popularity has affected my website. You can find the article here. Feel free to post a comment if you have any question(s) or just general feedback!

Everyone who happened to see the live test of the updated site a day ago could see that the new design structure didn't work at all. There were error messages and broken styles everywhere! Lesson learned: Don't try to rebuild a site live when having fever…

I switched back to this design again, and will stick to it while I start over from scratch to get it done in a good way this time. The keywords for the new site will be simplicity, freshness and new content. The extra days of waiting will hopefully be worth it, as the new site will be built as I should have built it from day one.

But I can reveal one of the new features: I will open up my blog for guest writers. Do you have something exciting to tell the world about? Is it related to the topic of this site in some way? Then please let me know about it. I'm hoping to get a couple of guest posts every month, by people who have interesting things to write about. I have a few ideas already, there are a lot of amazing stories in the world of free website templates. Feel free to come up with suggestions and requests.

Are you a US citizen and currently attending a full time post-secondary education? Do you build WordPress themes? Then you should read this entry carefully for a chance to win a $5.000 scholarship from CollegeScholarships.org!

College Scholarships are launching a new WordPress-based site called New Scholarships and the site needs a new and fresh design. In order to get that, a web design contest is launched where participants can create and submit entries - which need to be in the form of complete WordPress themes. A number of well-known web design profiles (including Paul Stamatiou, Steve Smith, Darius A Monsef IV, Bryan Veloso, Darren Rowse, Jonathan Snook and me!) will review the entries and find the best entry. The winner will recieve a $5.000 scholarship from The Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation!

The deadline for submissions is very close: August 13th (midnight PST), and there is currently not many entries so this is really a good challenge for those of you who can take it on! Besides the chance of winning a scholarship, you will get your work reviewed by people who truly know the art of web design…

Entries are submitted via the form on the the scholarship site . If you have any questions, there is more information and contact information on that site as well. Since I am one of the judges, I can't answer any questions or give any recommendations. But the directions are clear: Make a good theme for the new scholarship site, and hope for the best. Good luck!

Please spread the word!

One of the most common questions I get is "Why is template (x) not working with CMS (y)?". The answer is simple: The website templates templates contain no CMS-specific code, so they will not work with any CMS by default. You need to add the proper CMS functions to get the template to work with your choice of CMS, or find ported templates or themes that have already been customized to work with the CMS you want to use. Like the WordPress themes, which I have customized to work with WordPress.

Porting is done in different ways for different systems, and it is nothing I can do for you since I don't know how all the different systems work. To learn more about it, look for documentation on the website of your CMS (like the Codex for WordPress), or learn from templates and themes that are already available.

If you want to start with a simple and easy-to-learn CMS, then you should check out sNews. It usually only takes a few minutes to turn a website template into a dynamic CMS-based site. Here is a quick guide on how to use a website template with sNews. There is also good documentation to read on the sNews website, and a forum where you can find many tips and tricks. And not to forget, the beautiful free templates by Luka, which I recommend everyone to check out.

Tjuvlyssnat.se, the Swedish humor blog that I have written about a couple of times before, was yesterday presented in a new format: on paper! The Tjuvlyssnat magazine is published by Egmont, and it contains both classic posts from the site and new material, along with a cartoons, interviews and other illustrated material. I haven't seen it myself yet, but I'm hoping to get a copy of it tomorrow.

Tjuvlyssnat.se started out as a Swedish version of Overheard in New York, and it has been one of the most popular blogs in Sweden for more than a year now. I joined the Tjuvlyssnat team as webdesigner and webmaster in January this year, starting out with editing CSS on the then TypePad-based blog - but ending up moving the entire site out of TypePad and rebuilding it with WordPress and an own custom WP-theme. It has been a great project to work with, and now when the blog is growing into an own network of blogs (on several different topics) and new ideas like the magazine, I'm preparing for even more adventures. More about that later, for now I'll celebrate the magazine and hope that it will be well recieved!