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 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…

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!

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:

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

I promised late last year that I’d bung up some photos of our Moo bling, well here they are!

We’ve now got plenty of cards and stickers to keep us going, so you’d better watch out!

Hopefully everyone had a great Christmas and New Year break, everyone on the 449 team certainly did And wow, what a long break it was! But now we’re back to the grindstone and what better way to kick off the new year than with some updates to the portfolio?

First of all we’ve got the Sensational Color blog network, currently consisting of , and . New blogs are being added at a rapid pace, giving you everything you need to know about colour in the home, the workplace and anywhere else you can think of! Working with Kate Smith, a leading colour expert, was a fantastic experience and we wish her a very prosperous new year!

Secondly, we’ve got Nate Ritter. Nate’s tagline for his blog is “community, entrepreneurship and business strategy”, he definitely knows his stuff and is a top bloke to work with! Since the redesign he’s written a fantastic post on using Twitter (via several other social platforms) to help communities in crisis, it’s a fantastic read (especially for geeks) and is reflective of the sort of content you can expect from his blog. All the best for 2008 to Nate too!

There’s heaps more work in the pipelines, aswell as some exciting new posts on the blog and a few tweaks to the 449 site. We’re hoping to release a few self-initiated projects in the first half of 2008 aswell, so stay tuned!