Wetwired is not a finalist in the 2008 Blog Awards. Which means… we’ll have to work double hard in 2009 to improve the site.   Part of that I think will come with getting some help on the coding side to make sure that the site actually does work on every browser correctly.

In retrospect I think I need to go back to the drawing board on the site and come up with something truly unique and graphically pleasing. But As I have discussed with others, what good is a great design if you don’t have great content so we’ll also have to double our efforts in the content side of Wetwired.   The design of the site has been with a central theme for the past couple of years and we all agree that the theme is pretty unique.   I think its most likely usability.

2008 Wetwired in Review

This year has been an interesting year.  Considering the previous year was a do-nothing year.  Meaning we really didn’t do a damn thing.  I didn’t update the site, we hardly posted, we kind of took the year off.  2008 on the other hand had major changes.

We switched from Movable Type to Wordpress.

We switched hosts to go-daddy (saving a ton of money at the sacrifice of speed).

We contracted a new artist to re-do the artwork that had previously got us into the finals of best blog design of 2005.

We finalized the new design(mostly).  Aside from the footer part taking until November to get complete…

We started, for the fist time in the 8 year history of Wetwired, to put up advertisements.  Google Adsense, and a few products that we’ve tested ourselves.  While stylistically it goes against everything  I hate; it made sense.  Believe it or not Wetwired is just about paying for itself (cost of domain and monthly hosting).   That in itself is something I really didn’t expect.

Wetwired has seen the most traffic it has ever seen this year.  And we’ve doubled our daily traffic from last year.

We have had a semi-regular podcast for the first time ever and it has been fairly successful.  Including being on itunes.

We’ve had the re-appearance of Beerslinger from his 2 year hiatus.  And we’ve had a couple new writers come on board (prax and larkynm) who unfortunately post infrequently, but are a welcome addition none the less.

We have been interviewed by the Daily Texan (UT paper) and we recorded the interview and offered it up as a podcast.

And lastly I think I’ve updated wordpress versions 6 times this year with some major changes on the back end.  It’s been a pretty good year for them as they (wordpress) have added some great functionality and some great user options in an overhaul of the administration side.

Wetwired in 2009

I think 2009 will be a continued rebuilding year as we look for more local Austin writers who are interested in contributing (for free).   When I look at the amount of money pumped into the site it will be a while before we regain it through advertisement etc but I do see the site fully paying for itself, the operating costs so to speak, and I think we can look forward to having some surprises for our few loyal readers with anything we have left over.

When it comes to traffic, we’ll be working hard to continue to optimize wetwired and post more original content and/or commentary that is of interest and that continues to add readership.  I suspect that if we actually get on the ball this year we could potentially finally break out of the small blog arena.  You would think that after 8 years of being a website/blog that we’d have more traffic.. but Finley, Beerslinger and I all atribute the slowness to 3 potential things.  1. Laziness.  2. Alcohol.  3. Waking up in the morning in the front yard and realizing that those are not our flamingos…

Lastly, Austin has a booming local blogging scene.  With freaking monthly meet-ups!  I’ve personally been in Austin since late 2000 and never been to one, yet we’ve been posting here for quite some time.  I have met (albeit briefly) one other local austin blogger.  She was doing an imprav with Cold-Towne Theatre.   So at some point I suspect that we’ll come out of our holes and make an appearance at one of the local Austin meetings.

As the 2009 looks fairly bleak when it comes to the economy, I think Wetwired will do just fine.

Postscript

If you are interested in contributing articles to wetwired or interested in just getting involved in a project let us know by commenting.  We’ll be on the lookout for new talent, and/or we wouldn’t mind showing someone the administration side if you just want to learn.

I just ran the Wordpress 2.7 Update through the automatic update tool. Two words: Fast and Seamless.

Wetwired is gunning for the Best Blog Design of 2008.

We were a finalist in 2005 for the Best Blog design.. unfortunatly we didn’t win.  But…we’re back again with a new design this year we hope to do well again.

Go here to look at what the site looked like back then.

So the rules are – we’ve already been nominated so if you’d like to 2nd or 3rd it please go click on the (+) icon next to wetwired. Go here to check it out.

This is a two-for-wednesday.  It would have been Tuesday but yeah… coding problems.

Number one:  As you can see wetwired has the new look that we promised.  I’ve been working on coding this for a while and given that I hate coding for wordpress, I think its turned out reasonably well.  There are slight issues with the sidebar and different browsers.  I’ll be continually working on it to try to address the issues that crop up.   Incedently if anyone is good with wordpres and divs and this stupid widgetized sidebar and can figure out why the twitter stuff loads 5 different ways from sunday on every browser, please let me know.

Number two: Wordpress 2.6 has been released.  This means new features for us, and maybe for you.  I tested slightly on our sandbox to verify all hell didn’t break loose and I’ve now updated wetwired to this latest version.  Let me know if you see something broken I might fix it, or I might laugh in your face.

Many of you know that what is up on this site now is a temporary holding pattern for a fresh design.  Our artist has finnally finished up the new logo.  So without further ado:

Just updated to Wordpress 2.5.1 which contains 70 or so fixes and some security bugs etc.  Additionally they add a hash to the cookies which is specific to the site that makes it harder to hack.  Anyway, you guys won’t notice much, that changes are mostly all back end.

I’ve grabbed the K2 theme and threw up an older custom drawn header I had made some 2 years ago but never posted.  If you’ve followed any of the wetwired news posts about the site itself you’ll remember that several times I have begun to re-design the site and have not moved forward with it.  This time I have a new theme that I’ve got an artist working on and once its done I’ll be working hard on creating the wetwired theme for the site and then uploading it.

So needless to say here is the site in all its temporary template glory, but fully converted to wordpress including all the old posts and comments no less.  The forums will not be going back up, feel free to comment and notice that the comments actually work again!

You know wetwired has been around since 2000, in reality wetwired existed in 1999 prior to blog software or CMS type software was even close to mainstream. The first iterations of the site, conetent was added in a wysiwyg front page and notepad! And then I had to delete what was there and put new information in its place. The sad part is that wetwired is less known than many other blogs that have only been around a year. I blame myself I guess because I just don’t have the time to devote to writing or drawing in an audience. Between Fnliii and myself lately we only shoot out a nugget of greatness every once in a blue moon.

The site does get awards for being a great designed site, but great design is only part of the whole presense. Anyway as the political season starts to ramp up more and more, expect some new things here, new design, new items, and hopefully some new readers.

Stay tuned for a face lift for wetwired very shortly.

Wetwired is nominated for the Best Blog Design on the 2005 Weblog Awards. Please go out and vote for us! Remeber you can vote once EVERY 24 hours. This post will remain at the top of wetwired until the polls are closed on December 15th.

About this Design:

Wetiwired is designed by Magnified Designs (pylorns etc) a custom web design company.

Graphic Design is done by Tyler Sticka. Almost all the cartoons are concept by pylorns and drawn and colored by Tyler.

The CSS and backend coding is designed and tested for the current most used browser , Internet Explorer 6.0 and then for Firefox. While I would like to code complely for Firefox, I feel it would be a bad idea to alienate the many users who do not know the ins and outs of other browsers.

The CSS is broken up into 2 separate style sheets and seems to work for the most part…

The concept is based on 1930’s and 40’s film noir The top logo is broken up into several smaller images and each author has his, her own posting image.

The Publishing Software is Movable Type Version 3.2

The Forum Software is XMB Forums v 1.9.1 Nexus. Color Schema by Magnified Designs

Thanks to Tyler, Wetwired has some buttons that you can link to and place on your site; just copy the code below. There are two separate buttons depending on your webpage style light and dark. Paste the exact code on your website navigation bar. If you have any questions or problems shoot an email to pylorns (at) gmail [dot] org

For Dark Backgrounds

For light backgrounds:

And remeber the competition is determined.

http://weblogawards.org/ hosted by wizbang.
Ok so we’re up for best blog design here:
Best Blog Design

So what I’ve done is gone through and looked at all the current sites that are designed well. Of course we think we have the best because well, its had many many redesigns and we have an artist that is the best.

1. Wetwired #1 yeah! But look, Using Movable type, Clean looking with great cartoons, and post icons that match. You can tell a lot of time and effort goes into wetwired.

2. Dizzy Girl always has multiple designs ranging from really cool to kinda blah.. right now the current skin she is using doesn’t stand out. I do hand it to her, she puts some serious effort into her friday posts!

3. The shape of days I have to hand it to them, they got a professional designer like moi, to design it. Its very good, the CSS layout is the way to go. I view this is real competition. – Update the professional designer/coder/”they” is just Jeff the owner of the blog. – Thanks Jeff for clarifying.

4. My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Also not done by the author of the blog, professionally designed.. mostly. But listen, if its a right wing conspiracy, why are all the graphics on the left?!

5. Sharp as a Marble Using a notbook style layout, which has been done before, but it still looks like they put in effort. What would have been cooler is that if the posts would have been on the lines of the notebook instead of a white box on top of it.

6. Gentlemen Prefer Blogs Decent graphics, the professionally designed look – and in fact it is, nice little graphics for the posts too.

7. Lord Boom Boom These guys are bringing up the rear, the image is kinda cool, but nothing really stands out as being clean and consise. I guess the color scheme just bugs me.

8. Just a girl in the world Its clean, all the graphics mesh together.

9. Scrubbles They are so so, its better than some of the others on blogger still.

10. LJC FYI Themed for fall colors, interesting little cartoons, kinda similar to wetwired, not bad.

So there you have it, the ones that currently stand out against the crowd, the rest are using default templates of blogger or movable type, or really haven’t put any effort into designing. Or maybe you have, but it doesn’t show. Having a good design on your blog takes a lot of though out work and some artistic talent, form follows function.

Yet another test for tags.. it’d be nice if they made this just a tad bit easier..

quote! test test