I am very surprised at myself.

And I don’t mean in a bad way. I mean as in – wow, I can’t believe it’s a redesign!

As you can see, the comment form is back to where it was before. Provided it’s not abused by spammers again, it should hopefully stay as it is. If spammers do choose to abuse it as much as they possibly can, expect a much stricter captcha to be put into it. Oh, and yes, I’m aware that it disappears after you submit it; that’s to prevent you from re-submitting it. No, really, it is!

There are a lot more small tweaks to this theme than meets the eye. The older one was a bit more static; it worked pretty well, but I mostly wanted to do a few things with this design that I hadn’t done before. Read more »

I’ve decided as of today that I will be creating several new changes to the layout scheme here on BeLink’d. I’ve got a new design pending, but essentially what I’m looking at is an almost complete rebranding.

I’m going to retain the logo; it’s the logo I’ve used ever since I created the design. It was inspired by the old Firefox loading, and the position it occasionally paused in when a page loaded quickly. However, I’m going to try some other very different things in the next scheme, and we’ll see how well they play out.

For now, though, this weekend I’ll be in California, spending some time with family and friends to see the fireworks and to celebrate Independence Day. It should be fun, even if it does put me back a notch on the redesign (workaholic? I don’t know what you’re talking about!)

Finally!

I’m finally happy to announce that I was able to send live the code I’ve been hashing and dreaming up for the site is now live. You can see a footer now on every page, in addition to a few other minor changes to the site. Also, this past weekend we upgraded to WordPress 2.8, and activated Akismet in order to control the spam comments we receive.

It feels very good to update the code for the site. As it stands, it was getting pretty stale, and I’m one who always tries to keep things up-to-date. Granted, we weren’t necessarily out-of-date, so much as there were many changes that I felt needed to be done, namely tweaking the comments page and adding in the footer. This site will always be an on-going project for me; as should all designer’s sites. Read more »

I will begin by stating that jQuery has certainly made everyone’s life much, much easier. Specifically, I find that I enjoy the toggle function.

You see the little RSS icon on my bar over there? You know, the orange square. Click it – I dare you. See how nice and easy that text appears? Well, you can add a nice, easy, and cute RSS feed to your own site as well.

All it takes is a little bit of imagination, a few snippets of code, and an even smaller amount of jQuery. Read more »

I am the sole owner of BeLink’d, a graphics and web design studio or site, whichever you wish to call it. As I stated while making the About page, I’m generally the one who runs things around here.

BeLink’d is not an agency. It is a single freelance artist.

I program. I design. I draw. Dre helps out and I usually make Sam into my content slave, but this is generally a one-person show, as are most freelance sites.

Dre and I do work as a team on some projects, but for the most part, I do as much of the heavy-lifting as I can. It has helped me develop and grow at a remarkably fast rate as a designer; one of the things I have always emphasized is continuous growth, and BeLink’d is the outcome of my own continuous growth.

And frankly, through design and programming, I found a passion, something that I could really grab onto and hold. To be completely honest with you, I love what I do and I hope to always do what I love.

I’m a student, I’m a designer, I’m a bird mom, I’m an equestrian, I’m a writer, and I’m quite a lot of other things. But I hope that through my efforts, I will always be able to make this site grow and flourish, and use it to create what contribution I might to the design community as a whole.

What are your passions? Leave a blurp – I find it interesting to hear what other people identify themselves as.