Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

Cheers guys I’m outta here. It’s time to experience some proper summer, not this half baked attempt at one on mud island. I’m off to the south coast of Spain to fry my pommy skin, drink summer cocktails and eat paella for a week. Mmmm… paella.

Apologies for not replying to you if you have requested my services in the last couple weeks, I’ve been frantically busy. I haven’t even had enough time to tell you about my weekend trip to Reims in France this last weekend. See some pictures instead on my Flickr page.

I will make a proper attempt at getting back to you potential clients as soon as I’m back in the office. I’ve been averaging at least one web design request a day through my blog, something I’m quite excited about as obviously my blog is reaching far more people these days.

My latest project that has gone live since Tertia’s site is Oxford based “Timber Windows“. Read a little more about it on my portfolio page.

Hasta la vista.

Justin and Stii have been busy at it again and released two new features for Afrigator.

Blog Trends

This cool new feature allows you to view detailed reports on the blog trends across all of our blog sites registered with Afrigator in two and a half months we’ve already sent a total of 891,379 clicks to African Blog websites. There are loads of interesting statistics to view here.

Afrigator Twitter Channel

If you’re a twitter user simply visit the Afrigator page at http://twitter.com/Afrigator and you can subscribe to receive one story per hour to either your cellphone, website or instant messenger.

Neat huh?

Stay tuned for some fantastic new features that will be launched in the coming weeks :)

I was recently asked by Tertia Albertyn to re-design her Typepad weblog.Tertia’s blog, So Close, was this year’s winner of the South African Blog Awards. Her blog focuses on life after infertility and has a huge amount of readers, it has even featured in a lot of South African press. It was therefore not a hard decision to take up the responsibility of the job. Tertia was a great client to deal with and gave me very few guidelines to follow, I could therefore play around with what ever creative ideas I had. It had to have an African feel though, and include her lovely children in some way.

This was my first Typepad theme design and I must say it was much easier than I thought it might be. Typepad is a very powerful system, and with a professional license it allows for heavy customization of the stylesheet files giving you complete control of the blog layout.

I hope you like the end result.

This post is an update on the one I wrote a month ago on the subject of tele lenses for my Canon 350d.

I would like to say a huge thank you to the people who left comments and helped me to make an eventual easy decision on what to buy. Although the lens I opted for was out of my initial lens budget, I took the good advice left by Tristan Owen, The Pete and Peter and invested a bit more for a nifty feature, Image Stabiliser. (more…)