Able Net Design Blog

7th out of Australia

2009-06-03T00:00:00Z

On the 1st of June we had a public holiday in Perth. Although I usually check our email throughout the day, due to our eastern state clients I must have missed an announcement that was sent through.

For June 2009 we have been ranked 7th out of Australia as the best web design companies available. Personally I think this is quite an achievement for us.

This small accolade has motivated our selves even more to push the limits of the internet and what we can provide for our customers.

Moozel which had a soft launch last month is about to get into full swing with fresh themes and a fresh layout. We have had success with the model so now it is time to put some of the special Able Net Design touch to the whole idea.

ClubPond is flying along we made it to our 100th member over the weekend. This was probably a major milestone in it's growth now we are aiming for another 100 members.

I'll sign off now and get back to work as we want to improve on our ranking of 7th best.

An update on our projects

2009-05-26T00:00:00Z

There have been some major developments with our Moozel Project which we blogged about last time.

This all came about probably two hours after I posted that last post. I had a change of heart. Instead of creating multiple themes and selling the themes one by one, we are now creating the ultimate WordPress theme called Moozel. The theme will have it's own set of skins and for a yearly fee you will be able to download more skins or you can purchase theme one by one.

The features we are implementing will allow you to customise the Moozel Theme right down to individual colour schemes if it so suites.

Each skin will have 5 pre-styled colour schemes which you can then customise further so you have a completely unique wordpress website.

The custom options panel is designed so it's easy to use, easy to navigate and most of all allows you complete control over how your content is displayed.

Where are we up to with the Moozel development?

We are working on the options panel at the moment, in a wire frame environment. The options page layout has been designed and will be developed early next week.

Our original skins start development tomorrow (which is very exciting).

I expect to see the Moozel Theme online with it's fresh new website by the end of next week.

Thats all for now.

A new sideline venture

2009-05-21T00:00:00Z

Over a week ago now we launched something (quietly) that we hope to be able to develop on down the track. For those that watch the web design and development industry, I am sure you would have heard of WordPress. If you haven't thats quite alright. It turns out Australia seems to be a bit slow picking up on the WordPress evolution.

Our latest online venture is Moozel. It is basically a site where we sell our Premium WordPress Themes.

First of all what is WordPress?

Well WordPress is an open source blogging platform that has evolved into quite a feature rich and easy to use Content Management System. Although not specifically built for general website it can be tweaked in such away that it will function quite well.

So what is a Premium WordPress Theme?

WordPress uses "themes" which determine what the publicly viewed part of your website will look like. Although there are hundreds if not thousands of free wordpress themes out there, Premium Themes are just that one step better. Not to mention that they also offer support.

WordPress themes are cheap. I'm not going to beat around the bush here. Basically our themes sell from $59.00 USD for a single user license.

The have an options page where you can customise some of the display settings of your website quite easily.

What if I want wordpress but no one of your themes?

We can always custom build a theme specifically for your requirements. Or of course you can get an traditionally designed and developed website by us with a custom content management system and you don't even have to worry about it.

If you in the market for a low cost web solution, maybe a personal blog or something you can showcase your work on head over to Moozel. We have some very exciting new themes coming your way, very soon.

New Future Wealth Planners Website

2009-04-07T00:00:00Z

We were asked to redesign the Future Wealth Planners website. Due to the amount of content and what they wanted to achieve we had to go with quite a few content features on the main page. Not Something that we would normally do but the client was happy with the result so that is all that matters.

We still have quite a few projects to place back into our portfolio but due to the amount of client work along with a few of our own web projects we have been time poor. I promise I will get on to it asap.

Visit the website.

Something is coming

2009-04-03T00:00:00Z

Today marks another step forward in our quest to expand and promote ourselves to a larger market. Don't get us wrong we are still taking on what I call regular client work, which is web design and development for companies along with startegising and putting in place their online marketing and overall web site success.

However we are in a unique position that we can work from anywhere in the world so it is time that we try to build on this advantage, which will in tern help us grow our profile as a web design and development firm.

Last week we saw the launch of ClubPond a social network with the idea that local community groups and clubs needed a web presence, something they could easily update their members and other interested parties. We took it one step further by letting these groups network with each other. We also opened up the network to the general public taking on the giants of social networking sites facebook and myspace.

Although we can't talk about this too much our new design venture will extend our reach to those with a smaller budget, but still wanting a quality well designed website.

If you want to be the first to know when we launch I suggest you subscribe to our RSS, get on ClubPond and follow us on twitter. That should about do it.

PS don't forget to bookmark the actual site that is coming.

A new front page and some exposure

2009-03-30T00:00:00Z

Well you all know that 5 days ago we launched ClubPond our first public web app ever! Thats right we have developed many web applications over our 6 or so years in the web design and development game but never have we released one for public use. Usually our web applications which come in the form of Content Management Systems are kept private.

So far we have had quite a bit of interest including a decent review on KillerStartups. The site membership is growing slowly but steadily so all in all I am quite pleased with our first 5 days.

In the first 5 days we have seen some design changes. Probably the largest change would have to be the home page.

This is the old home page.

This is our new de-cluttered home page

There will be a full 7 day review of ClubPond on the official blog so i'll leave the rest for there.

Head on over to Clubpond and sign up. I look forward to seeing you there.

In the spotlight

2009-03-27T00:00:00Z

It has been a hectic week for me as I launched ClubPond which was also featured on Feedmyapp.com which I was quite pleased about.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by a UK freelance web designer for his blog and the interview went up yesterday.

All in all it has been a very busy week. Not to mention the new client website we set live earlier on. More on this early next week.

ClubPond Launched

2009-03-25T00:00:00Z

ClubPond is a social network which I have been toying with for the past year and a half. I suppose my main goal out of it was to create something presentable that community groups and clubs could use to have an online presence. My way of giving back to the community.

Anyway that was my main focus for developing ClubPond and while developing the functionality for these groups I realised that the groups/clubs members might want to connect with each other in one simple site. That is when the real work started and I started to work out certain things that I could put in place that member would find useful. I suppose it is important to mention that this is not a MySpace or FaceBook clone, as my main goal was always to provide for the groups and clubs of the worlds communities. Member social networking was just a set of sideline functions.

Time for some screenshots:

The Login Screen

The Latest Site Activity which was set to "Public" by users.

Display of my twitter feed on my profile page.

Message board where people can leave messages. And have discussions in group profiles.

My main information section of my profile.

If you are interested in networking with me through ClubPond then please sign up.

COME AND JOIN THE FUN!

Another quick change

2009-03-12T00:00:00Z

Well as you can see the website has been through another layout change. This is the third in as many weeks. You know what they say, Third time lucky.

THe reason for these changes is, although a website may look fine with test data or even earlier in it's mockup stage, by the time it is set live and the real content is placed in there are all sorts of slight changes and tweaks required to the style sheet that it often moves away from the original design.

So what inspired this latest design. Well if you had been following the previous two design you would have noticed that at each update they were simplified. I am a great believer in a simple website, but i'll talk more on this in a minute. Anyway the latest layout is in it's simplest form. As you can see I have opted for large text, and a more left aligned text format for easy reading.

What I was talking about when I mentioned "a simple website" was that I personally along with quite a few other great designers that websites have become cluttered. This has happened over time as clients demand realise the power of having a website, thus demanding more content on the site.

This is finalising our brand relaunch so we opted to remove all the content and start fresh. As you can see the front page is very simple, it states a clear message and allows site visitors quick access to information they might be interested in. ON the internal pages we still have a side bar to house various bits of information but the main content space is very simple.

For those that don't know actually building and designing a simple website is often harder then one with lots of information. With a simple layout you still require all the content but you need to space it in such a way that is calming and clean.

If you site is quite cluttered drop me an email and we can have a look at it.

Slowly getting there

2009-02-24T00:00:00Z

As you may have noticed we are putting the final touches to our websites content. At the same time this is happening we are installing SnowFlake CMS version 2.0 on two other websites which will be launching this week.

The SnowFlake CMS is built for search engine optimisation. We have done everything possible to give users the opportunity to further develop search engine rankings and really take hold of their market. The best thing about it is we are always adding new functionality to the application. Since we launched our site we have already added a few new features to the SnowFlake CMS application to help with our own search engine marketing methods.

This was just a quick post to keep you up to speed. We will get back to normal posting very soon.