Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

Zeldman has written a great post entitled “The vanishing personal site“, in it he expresses his concerns on how we are publishing less and less posts on our personal blogs, and instead outsourcing the publication of our personal content to the money making online services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, who are receiving more and more traffic that should be going to our personal sites.

I’ve recently realised I now check my Twitter profile page more frequently than my Facebook profile, a service I thought I would never get that into. I look at people’s twitter updates before I visit their personal blogs. That’s if I visit their blogs at all. (more…)

Keo.co.za is the most visited South African rugby mad blog with a cosmopolitan readership spanning the globe. Winner of the 2008 SA Sports Blog of the Year award, Keo.co.za grows from strength to strength… with one exception, it’s new design.

Recently Keo.co.za was re-designed, and it obviously cost a fair penny, simply because this is the second re-design in the space of a couple months, completed by two web companies.

The first re-design was completed by Ince. The revamped site went live on a sub-domain and feedback was requested. Ince’s re-design, managed by Adii (a now former employee of Ince), made much better use of the web browser window, with an ajax slideshow in the header space displaying some of the main stories that week, along with some nifty sidebar modules. Many comments were posted, some positive, some negative. I liked the wire frame of the new design, but the styling needed just a little more attention. (more…)

Last year I wrote a detailed post on my thoughts on Future of Web Design 2007, and what a great success I thought it was. On friday last week I attended Future of Web Design 2008.

This year’s conference was just as good, a perfectly organised, well attended, informative web design geek gathering. I’m not going to try and blog about each and every presentation I saw by the distinguished guest speaker list, instead I am going to point you in the direction of Jeremy Keith’s blog where somehow he managed to live blog just about every presentation. My hat goes off to people like Jeremy who have mastered the art of multi-tasking, something I have accepted I will never be very good at. (more…)

Personal letters like this one I received through my Gran really drill home the reality of what is happening in Zimbabwe at the moment. When will somebody step in and do something about this tragedy.

Dear Family and Friends,

Well never thought I would have to do this email do not know if it may be my
last from our farm “Chidza”.

At 3.30pm today a lorry load of so called Mugabe brain washed “war-vets”
arrived at our gate to take over our land, equipment and pedigree cattle.
This crazy action is occurring in a country where there is v little food
being produced !

It is now 6 pm and they have been singing their war songs at our gate for
three hours, the atmosphere is violent and more and more of them have
arrived. (more…)