Since October 2007 I have been working almost exclusively with Namemedia Inc. A rather nice company from “across the pond”.

I have been wanting to post here about what we have been doing for some time as some of it is pretty exciting, however due to the huge amount of work and effort the various projects they have thrown our way have required, finding the time to blog has not been easy.

I am being allowed a rest however, in the form of a two week vacation and so now is the perfect time to take stock and post some info on what it is we have been up to.

Going for the Niche

As mentioned briefly on the site news blog, Namemedia have been and are in the process of building and launching niche social networks built on Wordpress and Bbpress, it is this that we have been assisting them with.

A niche social network is simply a social network aimed squarely at a niche interest, be it wine or geeks. You take the classic social network components: user profiles, friends lists, user messaging, forums and groups; and then you tailor the experience towards your intended niche. Throw in expert articles, regularly updated content and a strong multimedia element and there you have it.

Fast and Furious

We began working with them in October, offering Wordpress consultancy and development for the first site Mommy.com. When this launched we moved onto the next two sites, Biking.com & Cycling.com. We moved into the role of lead developer for these and worked within a multi-continent, multi-disciplinary team to bring these sites to launch. Boating.com & Yachting.com were also developed alongside Biking.com and Cycling.com by another team. These all launched quietly just after Christmas. Since then we have been working as project lead on Hotcars.com and Dreamwheels.com as well as pushing, 3 new minor versions (1.1, 1.2 & 1.3) of Biking and Cycling. We managed a small team of developers (There were more, its just they don’t have websites to link to).

More to come…

I intend to write more about the things we have been doing, mostly about some of the things i have learned from working remotely with people on large projects but I also want to talk about some of the things we have been doing with Wordpress, after all, how many social networks do you know that are built on it?

I have decided to start serving AdSense on this site in an attempt to help my hosting bills. I have gone with the wide skyscraper text only advert on the single post pages, hopefully these will provide useful related content and not just annoying adds.

This is the first time I have used AdSense and so I will be playing around with it for a while to try to find the optimal placing both in terms of aesthetics and click through rates.

I am more and more realising that really my blog should be earning me some cash and so I am going to be exploring was of doing this, what I don’t want to do though is clutter my site with ads that put people off of coming, I want anything that creates me a revenue to be useful to me readers (customers) and make them want to come back.

If the ads annoy you completely and think they should be moved to a different placing then please say so, I am happy to discuss.

I was adding this site to my business portfolio today and looking through the short list it struck me how similar all the sites are, they are all 2 column blog style sites. I really need to expand my portfolio and include some different designs.

Hello all you people that don’t read this, just a quick post to day that I have acquired both willmot.org and edgedesigns.org the former being my personal site and the latter being my business site. For all of you people who don’t care I will keep posting updates on progress.

Current status:

personal - still in concept, waiting on MySQL

business - up and working still being refined

please check them out and comment on what you think

cheers, Tom

I have finally brought version 3 of Edge Designs out of alpha stage and into the live arena.
Please check it out at www.edgedesigns.org

There are some browser bugs mainly with old versions of opera but they shouldn’t be too hard to iron out

as always please comment on what you see.

I have finally got round to re-designing my business site. The previous design really wasn’t doing anything for me and had been designed at a time when I was still experimenting with design ideas.
So I have re-designed, re-worded, and re-thought the whole concept, and so far I am happy with the result I think it represents my design philosophy well. I haven’t changed absolutely everything some of the elements simply needed re thinking.

• I only slightly changed the logo by lessening the amount of shadow.
• I also made the “accessible, Bright, compliant Design” my company motto/statement as this really reflects what I aim to do.
• I recreated my “seal of quality” which is shown on websites I have created.



• Re-thought my use of fonts.

I also took rather a large step (for me anyway) and stopped trying to do everything with CSS, instead turning to Dom Scripting and JavaScript for any dynamic elements. I think that this was a natural progression for me as I have slowly been coming to the conclusion that trying to achieve everything with CSS really undermines the reasons for using it in the first place. I have come to the simple conclusion

XHTML = structure.
CSS = presentation.
JavaScript/Dom = dynamics.

I think we should be using things as they are intended instead of trying to hack together awkward un-semantic CSS to create image rollovers and image replacement.

Anyway back to the re-design you can check out my progress at http://www.edgedesigns.org/

Please leave your comments as I would love some feedback

I sat down yesterday to come up with a suitable logo for my business Edge Designs and well this is the result.
I used Fireworks to create it and the font is “Script MT Bold” please comment on what you think.