andreasviklund.com

Stewart McCallister has ported two of my templates (1024px and andreas09) into Movable Type format. Check them out on his Movable Type templates page!

Now is a good time if you want to get a port link included into the andreas00 template. I have links for all promised ports, except for the Drupal link which will be added in the next update. The first final version of the template (called v1.0) will be released tonight, and my WordPress theme version will be added to my new WP-themes section tomorrow along with wp-andreas01!

By the way, today is a great day for a release as I want to make some kind of celebration. According to my statistics, my templates have been downloaded in more than 350.000 copies from the three main download locations (OSWD.org, OWD and my own template gallery). In fact, I could find a lot of numbers to celebrate (like andreas01 has passed 100.000 downloads), but I'm not hunting numbers. I'm just amazed - and of course inspired to keep on working.

In other news, I have got a couple of other links sent to me. 1024px and 800px has been ported to MODx and andreas02 has been ported to Blogger (note: Greek text) based on Ainslies port of the same template for Thingamablog. I will hopefully be able to re-structure the themes page soon, because it is already a pain to keep it updated. Expect a significant makeover in the upcoming May 1st CSS Reboot.

I'm working on my very own links page, but until it is done, here are two great sites to check out:

Matt Deasy and Peter MacDonald have launched a new link site, a basic directory for web designers and topics related to web design. The site is called Bulletproof Links and it has got a good start with lots of useful links already. Visitors can add links by filling in a simple form. Simple, but very useful.

Andrew "dez" Fernandez has a great categorized web design link archive, which I have found useful many times. In fact, I like the site so much that I wrote to dez and asked him to add a link to my templates page - which he has agreed to do. That made me like the page even more! This is a must-have bookmark for anyone interested in web design.

I am always curious to know more about how my templates are used, since I learn a lot from real-life examples. I got really happy when I found this interview with developer Tim O'Brien, who used one of my templates together with DotNetNuke to build his new website. While I don't know DotNetNuke at all, it is still interesting to see ports and adoptions like this one and find out more about the idea behind the port. It is also really nice to see a professional developer promote the idea of open source web design: O'Brien mentions both OSWD.org and OpenWebDesign.org in the interview. Good work Tim, and good luck with your new site!

I am really, really happy to announce that WP-Andreas01 will be released tonight. Finally! Despite the fact that my site has not been available to me (DNS problems, I guess), I have still been able to do the final testing today. All that is left to do now is to tidy up the code. Look back here again later today to grab the theme!

Until then, I would like to present a site that you can check out if you are interested in my work. I usually don't write about my professional projects on this site, but I have got a lot of questions about it lately. One very common question I often get is "how do your professional projects look?", and the answer is simple: Pretty much like my open source templates - but with some more graphics and a clear visual connection to the company or organization that the design is made for. I'd like to show one example, one of the most recent projects: Jokkmokks Korv (note: Swedish language only)

Jokkmokks Korv is a local manufacturer of sausage and ham products, and their products keep an extremely high quality. They have been awarded with gold medals and even the title "Swedish Champions" in a national food contests, and the interest for their products is big all over Sweden. But their website didn't work very well for them. It was difficult to update (manual HTML editing and FTP transfers were required) and it was built using a traditional layout with a lot of frames, nested tables and inline styling. The company felt that their site didn't keep the high quality they wanted to be associated with, so they hired ITUS (the company I work for) to build a new site for them.

What you see there is WordPress, running a custom-designed theme which has been built in a way that gives pages a more important role than the blog functionality. The blog has been turned into an articles area, which will be frequently updated with news, features and other articles. I am using code from a few plugins to add some of the features, including the List Subpages plugin by Rob Miller and Fuzzy Recent Posts by Denis de Bernardy. In most cases, the plugins (or the part I use of them) that I use are merged into a separate functions.php where they are heavily modified to work with the rest of the theme. For example, in the case of List Subpages, I modified the plugin to allow the name of the parent page to appear in the subpages menu header. There is no need to modify any of Denis' brilliant plugins though, they are just perfect already…

Once the theme is built and the content is added, it is time for The Check. For all websites, templates and themes that I create, I run a detailed quality check before launch to make sure that there are no strange errors. The design is double-checked for WCAG/508 compliancy, and the code is of course validated. I run a speed test to make sure that the site works for dial-up modem users, and I check for browser compability and possible browser-based font resizing errors. I also let a number of friends and volunteers check the design for any other errors or mistakes I may have made. I also check it with Silktide SiteScore, and finally I view it using two different mobile phone browsers to make sure that the design works on small screens as well.

When the quality check completed, the site is launched (or the template or theme released), and that is where the Jokkmokks Korv website is right now. I'm still adding more content to it, but it has passed all the tests so it should be a good site to show as an example of how my professional work looks. It is really nothing fancy, just a simple design with good code. It matches the company profile, and it is a major improvement to the previous website. It loads faster, is indexed better by the search engines and there are no strange frames or nested tables that can cause confusion and slow load times…

Go check it out, and feel free to let me know if you like it or not. The site owners are totally happy with it and that is what really matters to me. But feedback is always a good thing, and if you would find any error or bug anywhere, I would of course like to know about it!