Thanks to the design community

The new design here at Digital Art Empire has already helped to increase the community interaction and general positive energy around the blog.

I’ve been able to make many online friends and acquaintances who have design blogs too ; they have all been refreshingly open and friendly .

I’m really grateful to the community of designers and bloggers who read my blog and help to make this site work . These are the people who I talk with regularly and help to make the community.

In no particular order thanks : )

Creative Fan

My Ink Blog

Rich Works

Smashing Share

Web Expedition18

aext.net

Web Design Fan

Design Informer

Web Design Mash

Creative Overflow

Circle Box

AcrisDesign

Little Box of Ideas

Fudge Graphics

Pixel Cloud

If I missed you out sorry , please leave a comment and we can connect : )

At the start of my journey I set out to see what would happen, having had some great successes making video tutorials for my You Tube channel I had high hopes, which happily I can say have been met.

After blogging part time since September last year and more seriously devoted since the start of this year I have seen a steady and faster than expected growth in the community here.

The growth after the start of 2010 has been doubling every month, and I put this down to publishing every day and writing good quality articles and tuts that get stumbled and tweeted. So, points to note if you own a blog are, consistently publishing and writing attractive content is a formula for success.

Over the weekend we had a massive traffic increase with 20 thousand visits over Saturday and Sunday , our monthy total was 62 thousand – this isn’t our usual stats as you can see , but they say you should celebrate all you victories. Most of this traffic came from stumble upon

The plan is to continue to write original tutorials articles and inspiring showcases whilst broadening the topics to include more 3D,code and web programs.

The new design –

I’d like to thank Kailoon for his amazing support whilst getting this site together and ironing out any little glitches

There will be a User link feed setup in the very near future so I’ll send out an email to all those who blog.

Header

The header is simple gorgeous , and reflects the quality of posts you can expect at DAE.

Sidebar

Nice large Rss & Twitter buttons with FB and email subs too. If you haven’t already please take this time to sign up – its absolutely free .

Footer

I really love the footer area and may well enhance it some more – it has our Flickr group and pulls posts from categories. Theres also a scroll to top button and link to our freebies.

Under the hood theres a php script called timthumb that auto resizes images making my life a lot easier.

The new logo

I wanted to say ‘Empire’ with the new logo , that was my overriding objective because it’s the unique selling point that no one else in the design/blog sphere has.

I originally had in mind a triangle and pillars like a Roman temple or forum , I took this idea to concept feedback and was reminded  to keep it simple. So after much drawing and redrawing I chose the wreath, which I think simply and subtly says ‘Empire’

Have your say – thoughts and feedback.

I look forward to hearing what you have to say , please feel free to point out any glitches – There are known issues in IE 7 and below – and some database errors that are being ironed out as I type . Overall I’m very happy with the design and will build up on the  success I have seen humbly and steadily : )Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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