One of my goals for 2009 was to become more proficient at web design on the whole. And I have made strides in the last few months, but I’m not in a position yet to be happy with my work. A few of you may have noticed that for the last couple of weeks, the design of the site did change.

In that case, it was my own design. However, I wasn’t satisfied with final version, so I pulled it. I learnt a lot about the design process and have taken a lot away from it. But the end result just wasn’t good enough. It was a mistake to put it up there, it didn’t make me feel proud of my content and nor did it really inspire me to create something new.

So for now, I’m going to be using a WordPress theme that I purchased off Theme Forest – a great resouce for various website templates. Derek Herman has created a beautiful theme that makes great use of large text. You may find it a little overwhelming and first. But trust me, you’ll soon warm up to it.

One thing to bear in mind, is that I’ve decided to step back from link list entries for now. I’d really like this place to be somewhere where people come to read articles rather than links specifically. And due to this, posts that were originally asides before the new design, will look just like regular posts.

Any anyways, it seems all the cool kids are using Tumblr, so maybe I’ll jump on the bandwagon at some point.

Furthermore, there are still comments. Although, I think it’s great that if you have something to say in response to something I’ve written, it’s most of the time a great idea to publish your thoughts on your own terms. I understand that the convenience of a comment is what a lot of people are looking for.

So, if you’re reading with an RSS reader, come on round, and take a look. I’ve rewritten my very uninteresting Colophon and just tidied up a few elements of the site. If you see a bug or two, please drop me a line.

I’m a little slow on the uptake, but Veronica Belmont and Ryan Block have started a new Tumblog called, The Vintage Web, which makes any tech savvy person – let alone web developer – cringe.

The most harrowing aspect of these sites are, often, they’re still being actively updated.

I can’t say I use Gmail a lot. However one of the latest ‘features’ of Gmail 2 caught my eye. The new favicon displays how many unread emails emails you’ve got in your inbox, in a very similar fashion to Apple’s Mail.

Pretty nifty, eh?

It took a while for me to realise that this course of action was probably the best for both me and my blog. So what is this “action” that I have taken? Well basically to start over. I didn’t feel satisfied with my blog in it’s past form – even ashamed.

I decided that if I were to keep my blog as it was it would have hurt both my personal brand and further progression of the blog. There were too many articles there that did not reflect what I wanted to be as a blogger. To many rushed articles, to many rubbish posts. Every time I visited my blog I just felt disappointment.

So what changes are you going to see? Well, you have probably noticed that I have a new design which has a couple of cool features that I hinted at wanting previously. First of all… a link list. So I can now share interesting stuff I find with you a lot easier. They don’t have comments, so don’t look for them; but don’t worry, the regular entries still have comments.

When coming up with the design for the blog I decided I wanted something very content centric, after all – that’s why (I hope!) you’re here. You’ll find no fancy formatting. A very simple and to the point design – except for one very small thing. On a single post, if you’re nice enough to “share it” a fancy ajaxy menu will pop down giving you lots of social bookmarking options.

There are a couple other cool easter eggs, but I’ll leave you to find those out. As for the regular content, I pledge for nothing but my best. It will be everything or nothing.

I’ve tried to sum up everything I want out of this blog and this is what I came up with:

I write this blog for myself primarily, but also for others in the hope that just one thing I say might change the way people think about the world.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt so excited about this blog and it’s future. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can get out of it.