Thankyou

First of all thank you so much for reading the blog, obviously you are the force that makes the whole thing work and in a sense it really is your blog. We love to hear what you have to say so please don’t be a stranger and join in the community.

After being inspired by Little Box of Ideas and their recent 1 year update  I decided to post the recent changes here at Digital Art Empire ( hopefully soon simple writing DAE will be ok but until people know what the hell I mean it’ll have to be the long version.) So my intention is to make the blog more personal and grow a community with some healthy design discussions.

Posts & Progress

As part of being an active,open and transparent community I would like to share the progress of Digital Art Empire.

For the regular readers you will have noticed as of January this year I have been posting every day, except weekends. Firstly this has increased the readership and exposure for the blog, which always makes me happy.

Secondly this has given me a structure and made the discipline of blogging easier. I also like to think of this Jan 2010 as the actual start date of my blog, even though my first post was in August 09. Back then I hadn’t really planned what I would post and had expected a much easier growth.

You may well have noticed that over the weekend the side bar disappeared briefly then repapered completely transformed. This was because I upgraded the site and the side bar nav was gone, I had been planning to change it anyway so knuckled down and spent the wkend editing it.

The design changes

First of all the for side bar I used a plugin to add clickable images to the sidebar. As you can see on the right of this post, I made them nice and large – from RSS to Flickr.

I took away the old logo (modified it a bit) and made it shorter. Then added the subscribe to RSS / email and social media buttons. Of course if you haven’t already please do subscribe via RSS or email to get the latest direct to your reader or inbox.

Then I added a much improved top navigation with more focused categories. We now have a freebies, articles, interview and inspiration category.

The archives are also completely expandable with all the posts from the very start listed.

To improve SEO I included pagination, you can click through all the pages now. A back to top button on the footer for easier navigation, I use this one myself a lot.

Last but not least the main change, for me at least and the one that was trickiest is the sliding gallery on the font page. After customising it to match the themes colours I added the code and got it running. Let me know what you think.

Having taken inspiration from Creativeoverflow’s Redesign I’m planning on widening the site and having posts at around 680 pixels wide instead of 500.

What the future holds

Im going to continue to publish every week day with some high quality posts like  7 Proven Ways to Boost Your Creativity.

I will also be posting a tutorial every week on friday as I have done this month – please feel free to ask what you would like to see more of either in comments or directly.

I know that most of you who read this blog would like some exposure for your own blog, folio or name. Guest posts are the best way to give your career a boost. If you would like to write for Digital Art Empire please get in contact.

I’ve done quite a few guest posts at My Ink Blog and another at PSD Fan and it really is the absolute No1. way to gain exposure and make some connections. Andrew Houle over at My Ink Blog is an exanple of the kind of client/blogger that makes design enjoyable. Of course you will get a Bio, a link to your site and twitter profile.

Behind the scenes

The running of Digital Art Empire is all done by Ben Rama (me) -they guy writing all this stuff : )

This is me in my profile image:

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Ben Rama

Ben Rama is a Graphic Designer, CG artist & Cinematographer from London. He is the founder & creative director at Digital Art Empire Find Ben on Twitter