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.