Over the last six months, I have been working on a new updated look and feel to the website. It is slowly coming together, and as the saying goes ‘the cobblers children are the last to get shoes’ it is very much the case for designers who do additional work after hours and have children.

As you can see in the sneak peek poster, it is a big departure from the gloomy greys of the current site and although I had hoped to run a May Reboot about it, I was swamped with work and the May Reboot passed me by. It didn’t help matters that I am determined to run the site with some custom plugins, and not having the time to build the plugins has meant that it has gone on the backburner whilst other paid projects have taken the limelight.

My intention is to include an improved look to ease reading, to incorporate social media better, and to have some dynamic elements scattered through the site so as to keep the viewers attention for that much longer.

Of course once the site is chopped and coded, I will have no excuse to not work on the ebook I have been slowly working on for more than a year and a half. I may get another designer in to lay it out and save myself for the final revisions and actually have a weekend without working for once!

Any feedback or initial comments would be appreciated, as this has been my little project for far too long and needs a fresh set of eyes to look over it to see where it could be improved.

If it turns out to be popular, I may even be willing to give away a slightly more basic version to people via this website or through smashingmagazine.com. Check back in future to see if it gets enough response to elevate it to a public release!

Here is another free vector file for download. The plan is to generate a range of them, and I would love to see it in use or tattooed onto someone.

Let me know what you think, and if there is anything specific you might be after.

I am planning on having plenty more free design as well as premium files available for download in future.

Click on the image below to download a PDF of the vector artwork.

I am currently reading a recently launched blog – Sofa Moolah (got to love the name) it caught my attention as I was following one of the guys who has put it together on twitter.

Now it is a blog about making money online, and it is brand new. It is not the wealth of information that you get from a blog like shoemoney as it has only just had the go button pushed, so literally only has one or two posts made to it so far.

For subscribing you can download a free 20 page ebook by Mat Carpenter. It really just covers off some of the insights he had learned from his addtodesign blog when he started it up (he now no longer owns it). There is a few gems in there that anyone into blogging or just starting out can learn from.

It did strike a chord with me, mostly because it is very much akin to what I do with my own online guest posting and article writing. I certainly don’t use the potential of social networks and social bookmarking anywhere near the potential they have, but in regards to guest posts, I am on the same page. I don’t see a guest post as a chance to spruike my site. Rather, I use it as a way of building my reputation and authority as a designer. Mostly just having the link to my site or my twitter account under my name in the article credit is enough to drive some pretty healthy traffic to my website.

And the idea of pre-generating posts to appear at a later date is one that I have to agree with. I started doing that for myself a few years back after looking at comic-press and seeing you could set an appearance date for a post so you were covered whilst you are on holiday or having a few up your sleeve so you are covered in times of sickness so you can push the go button and not have to try and work whilst sick.

I am looking forward to seeing the posts they are planning on putting up on sofa moolah, as I like picking up new tips or ideas to apply to my own website. And if any of them help build up a bit of extra income for me, well, I would not mind one iota.

Hopefully I will catch up with you in the article comments section over there!