Affordable blog Design fresh from Bristol, UK

I’ve just managed to rope my good friend David Peralty into recording a 449 podcast, which we’re hoping will become the leading audio solution to all your blogging problems.

What we need from you is questions… Questions about Wordpress, blog design, code, promotion, marketing, SEO and anything else blogging or small business related.

So here’s the exchange: leave a comment or email me with your questions and we’ll answer it in the podcast. You can then download it to your portable media device and consume at your leisure.

We want to solve you problems! Just let us know what they are…

We’ve just released SpringLoaded, a fantastic free Wordpress theme.

My friends, it gives me great pleasure to announce SpringLoaded, the 449’s very first free theme! With support for Widgets, Gravatars and a handful of other nifty plugins, SpringLoaded is one sexy little number designed and built by the 449!

Chris (Rowe, visually gifted) worked his magic on the design and Indranil brought code excellence to the table once more (despite a very challenging layout) to ensure a fantastic and highly functional theme.

Check out the full demo or download it and give your blog a spring kick!

We’ve got many more themes in the pipeline, including some awesome premium ones which will be both amazingly good and highly affordable, so stay tuned!

We’ve been realigning the 449 site today, check out this cheeky little Wordpress hack we came up with in the process.

So I’ve been working on restructing the 449 site a little this morning, we originally put it together in about a day, so I’ve been working on giving it a better “flow” and generally tidying up the code. The only thing that’s been causing me an irritation is that, for some obscure reason, the wordpress conditional tag is_home() doesn’t appear to return TRUE on the homepage :S So in the sidebar where I want to serve up the “Great content needs a great design” call-to-action when you’re on the homepage, but no other pages, I’ve had to invent a little hack:

<?php if(empty($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) || $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == '/'){ echo 'code here'; } ?>

What this is doing is checking the “REQUEST_URI”, the appended part of the URL (eg/ “/about/” or “/contact/”), and making sure it’s not empty or “/” (which would point to the homepage). It’s a filthy dirty hack, but for now it gets the job done