With a newsletter, podcasts, a charismatic president and a cutting edge blog, Net-five.com is now open for business. This bespoke wordpress theme carries a number of features we’re particularly pleased with, not least a newsletter subscription icon that is the business!

We have implemented (and altered) several plugins to tie them nicely into the N5 aesthetic, including for the first time Survey Fly, a really excellent elaboration of Survey Creator. With the newer plugin there are a whole host of interesting options which are both easily accessible and user-friendly (radio buttons, pop-ups, large text boxes etc.).

We were also able to spend significant time with ShiftThis’s Newsletter (v1.68). This is a commercial plugin, and perhaps the most well-known of a small band of plugins purporting to allow the publication of newsletters from WP blogs. ST’s Newsletter works well and is definitely worth the licence, but be warned, if you have a bespoke theme, like we did, it is not simply a question of porting the CSS over – oh no! ST uses tables and while this is a little old skool, for email clients it certainly works.

This revised three column layout was a tricky balancing act using an unconventional CSS schema, but in the end it rewarded us with a really strong bespoke theme which we are very pleased with.

We had a lot of fun with this redesign of another developer’s bespoke theme, not least because it involved choosing the grumpy folk. Some happy minutes spent browsing fotolia.com later, we came up with these “not-so-grumpy-but-definitely-on-message” four. If you visit net-five.com you’ll see how the masthead is aligned right to allow “bored-lady-with-chin-in-hand” to have a cropped shoulder and also bookend with “thoughtful-gentleman-with-glasses”. We also made changes to sidebar and horizontal navigation which were interesting bits of CSS. All-in-all, another good elance.com project.

A lovely divertissement pointed out to us by Dan Wilson – Hate a Tory. We love this for reasons which are mainly apolitical. Where’s the Hate a Tony? or Hate a LibDem?

The site is good too, with all sorts of interesting internet moments which we have had a little time to adsorb given that we have just moved Dan’s site over to new servers and added some nice widgets and filters to the sidebar. Dan’s site goes into the RSS links at the top of Firefox.

A second book by Charles Dixon-Spain for arbu.biz via elance. This one leverages the extensive experience the author has had of deck building in the UK and abroad into a format suitable for the North American market. The joy of it was that Charles, who is used to working in metric measurements in the UK could revert to the old imperial style (which he actually thinks in). With sketches and a very straight-forward, easily legible design, this book is sure to be a bestselling ebook.

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No, we didn’t design thezencoach.com, but we did consult, ensuring the eponymous Zen Coach created a website which does everything it should and looks pretty good too. Inspirational site Earl! In the meantime, we developed a full set of icons for Earl’s main site, lngvw.com which take in the Zen Coach, Nautical Options and Safeguard. Here they are displayed together – which was the intention:

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We have just completed writing (with Dara Ward), editing, designing and packaging a Books About Blogging title “Blogging for Beginners: Wordpress and SEO“. We’re really thrilled with it. The book retails at $29.99 and offers beginners all the tools they’ll ever need to make their blog successful. With step-by-step illustrations and a plethora of tips and tricks to make your new blog rock, this is the essential short manual to get you up and running.

Here are some screengrabs of the book to get your mouth watering!

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The ebook can be bought via clickbank, here

After a week of intense work Dr. Earl R. Smith II’s revamped website is published today. Called LNGVW.com the site offers regularly updated articles on Venture Funding, Mergers & Acquisitions, Leadership and a panoply of other business-oriented subjects as well as information on Dr. Smith’s business Longview, his Advisory role as Mentor and Coach and investment opportunities like SafeGuard. The end result is simplicity itself, with all sorts of nice touches, including the collapsible menu, a fixed homepage with latest article function and best of all, a dynamic graphical masthead. Here’s the opening page ~

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