With the growth of the mobile web becoming exponential, it does seem that this is certainly the way to go. You get to publish your content as you always have, through WordPress, but when visitors interact with your site on a mobile phone, they experience it in a much more intuitive and interactive fashion!

Why not head over to Robot Dwarf to check out the Mobile Renaissance for yourself?

If you are thinking of building a website that will have high traffic, is image intensive, distributes products and is built on the WordPress framework, then you should pay attention right about now. All of the above is going to be putting some serious strain on your hosting server, whether it is a dedicated server or a simple shared environment (such as Hostgator or BlueHost , etc). As such, a really neat trick (and one that many of the big players have been using for quite some time) is to make use of of Amazon S3! What’s that you say, ” Don’t they sell books and stuff?”, well yes they do! But they have also got some unbelievable infrastructure that is available for anyone to use at extremely low cost!

All you need to do is sign-up for an Amazon S3 account (its free) and then go ahead and download this brilliant plug-in called WordPress Total Cache which will speed up and optimize your WordPress site’s performance while also turning into into a Content Delivery Network (CDN) all on auto pilot!!! Instead of only having your (more than likely) tiny web server doing all the work in serving your web pages to the world, you will have the might of millions (if no billions) of dollars of investment in IT infrastructure at your disposal. Thus allowing your website to perform well in circumstances where it normally would have crashed!

So what’s the fuss? Why should you go to the effort?

1. It’s actually not such an effort to install a plug-in and type in a couple API keys (the plug-in basically walks you through the setup)
2. It’s will save you money in the long run (especially if you plan on selling online)
3. It adds professionalism to your endeavor by making your site faster
4. It allows you to scale your business at low cost (for more cost information check here)

Well, that just about all I have time for, but please feel free to let me know if anyone needs more information or some help with this as it is well worth the effort, I guarantee it!

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/

Check it out and let me know what you think…seems like a bold move, but I personally would’ve stuck with Twitter for a little longer

Firstly, the design of this blog has been key to my ongoing success. The reason for this is that it has been picked up my numerous showcase websites and other bloggers who enjoyed the design and decided to share it with the world. Thus, creating a lot of links back to this site and helping me big time in the search engine rankings. I’m therefore, extremely tentative to ‘fix something that isn’t broken’.

Secondly, I’m really eager to do something new and creative, as you might easily understand one does get bored of things when you have to see them over and over for extended periods of time and I would like people to stay interested in what they read as well as what the see here.

So, having said all this, what to do? Well, currently I don’t have the answer. I could look at keeping certain elements of the original design while still making some major changes…sound good? If so, what do I keep and what gets the axe?

Let’s make this more interesting…considering I have no idea what to do at the moment…why don’t you help me out? The person who gives me the best idea for this blog will get a completely free redesign of their own blog. In exchange for your help and input I will devote my time to helping you out

Surely that would be worth a quick comment or idea?

Update: Hi guys, looks like no one was interested in a free design? This promotion has now closed

Then, enter FNB through a partnership with PayPal (that is surely going to fuel growth in e-commerce in South Africa along with the advent of low cost uncapped ADSL) and suddenly I can interact with anyone in the world cheaply and easily! What a game changer! I can launch a unique business or idea and become an international success overnight! Isn’t this excellent news? Aren’t you extremely positive about the economic landscape of this country? Well, I AM!!

I’m not sure how everyone else feels about all this, but I’d love to know…why not drop me a mail or post your comments below

This is not surprising as we all know that the mobile web is becoming increasingly ubiquitous as a platform to access social media and other information driven services.  What is surprising with these particular statistics is that women, teens and seniors are leading the way, in terms of growth (year on year percentages). Amazingly, seniors are seeing a 67% percent growth in mobile web usage in the last year.

To read more about these stats check out the Nielson blog.

SA Internet vs Mobile

Source

These stats make for some pretty interesting reading as they show the growth of mobile over the last couple years or so. I’m not going to analyze these stats, I merely wanted to point them out to you and hopefully generate some conversation about them. Feel free to post a comment or thought below

Firstly, I have been quite busy lately. I started my second degree at the beginning of this year and it has been going quite well actually (thanks for asking). I also decided to take a job offer from a really awesome IT company based in Johannesburg (as their General Manager). I started working for Intdev Internet Technologies in June, and have been absolutely loving it! We’re an ISP with a lot of potential and a great culture, and we’re looking to grow quite rapidly over the next couple of years, so keep a look out for us!

So, what happened to my own ventures? Well, for now I am simply loving what I am doing, and this I believe is the most important thing…it doesn’t really matter to me at this stage whether or not I work for myself or for someone else, aslong as I am learning something and enjoying it. This view may change at some point in the future but it seems to be working for now . I will also still be available for questions and advice regarding your design and business problems (it’s usually free advice) and would love to hear from you.

Right, so now that we have gotten that out of the way, we can deal with an interesting question…what I am going to blog about? This blog has been positioned as a design blog and I have been relatively successful in terms of attracting attention to it through the really cool header that I designed, thus I think I will still try to keep up with web design theme here, but to a lesser extent. I will, however, be using this particular platform to build my personal brand and share my day-to-day experiences of running a dynamic IT business as well as managing people in a fast paced and rather energetic environment, and who knows…. I might even entertain and excite you in the process

Stay tuned for more soon….

What I would like to know is whether or not anyone would mind if there were one or two ads on this blog that were relevant and useful to those who are reading. The reason for my question is that I have been contemplating whether or not I should test the response I get from a couple ads on this site.

So, before I do anything…I would like to know what you think? As usual, let me know in the comments

Basically what I’m looking to do is to build my blog into something that is cool to look at, functional and informative.  Plus, I have always believed that learning from others is key, and that two heads are better than one . So with that having been said I would realy like to hear what everyone thinks, why not drop me a quick commment with a couple suggestions?