photo credit: Drew and Didi

After I created the cartoon image of myself I edited it in Photoshop to create the desired effects and also split the image into 2 pieces one for my header and one for my hand clasping over my nav bar.

What I've done is by no means brilliant but with a bit more work on Photoshop I'm sure you could come up with something very good. I did follow some youtube tutorials on creating a caricature image of myself but none of the outcomes looked anywhere near what I was able to produce using BeFunky.com in a couple of minutes.

It's great to get someone asking about something relating to something on my blog or indeed get any kind of feedback, as at least I know someone is having a look about on here

Updated: See a more in depth post on using be funky here.

One of the things on the agenda was to make a list of things that I wanted to change on the appearance of this blog, here goes:
1. There's a colour mismatch in the div at the top of my page, I need to changed the page background image to match this or vice versa.

2. New Logo: I want to restyle the logo so that it's more readable, my domain name is pretty long but I like it and I'm sticking with it. Based on feedback, I might run it over two lines and may do something with the colours also.
3. Give myself a bit of a makeover. I look like Al Pacino in Scarface and want to just fix up the dark line running down the side of my cheek bone. Yes, I agree this is vain.
4. I'm still using the post title and text styles that come with the custom wordpress theme,. I'd like to have a look at some other styles to put my own spin on the look of my posts. This isn't that important, but I just want to move towards a completely customised look and feel for my site.
5. Need to rework the current ad for RudeVid.com. I threw this together in 2 minutes and I want to update it and create a uniform style for all future ads for site I'm involved with from now on. RudeVid.com was another thing on the agenda and I've been making some solid progress on this too!
6. I generally want to restyle the entire sidebar and give it a look that integrates better with the design of the rest of the site. In addition to this, I'd like to add a few more plugins to increase the functionality of the site. I could just go ahead and install every plugin available but it's important for me to do a bit of research into this area and make sure I select plugins that fit in with this site and increase the usability.

7. Restyle the bullet points used for listed items. I've started using lists on my posts recently as I feel it makes things easier to read for certain topics. Again I want to add my own look and feel to this area and will design my own images for this.
8. I added the SocioFluid Plugin a while back and I may look at other options for this. I want to cut down the number of social bookmarking links I'm using on this site and will either reduce the ones currently listed with the SocioFluid plugin or may look at another plugin altogether.
9. Again, more restyling on the links back to previous/next posts, what I have is ok but again I just want to customise the look and feel my own taste.
10. Last but not least, I 'might' rework the graphics styling on the footer or left align the footer text.
11. - Update: Move this blog across to a linux server, I purchased a linux hosting package a while back to eliminate the index php from my permalink structure. I also think linux is better for open source software such as WordPress.

As you can see, these are mainly all cosmetic css or design fixes, but they are important for me as for each one that I style myself it's me putting my own personal touch on my site. The great thing about WordPress and indeed css is the adaptability. The stuff on my site doesn't look the way I want it to right now but when I make these changes in the right places the whole site gets an overhaul and everything looks the way I want it to and not just the stuff I add after making the changes. I'm hoping to roll out these changes before the end of the Summer. I've taken the first step now anyway and I'm a lot better organised for getting this done with minimal effort. It's only a matter of pulling up this post as a reference and getting stuck into Photoshop and the backend of this site for a few hours to make these changes happen.

I haven't rejected the other stuff on the list, I'll be following up later in the week with another post on my progress

This is also the first image I uploaded to my iliveontheweb flickr account so i'll be using that store my images from now on just to save storage space on my server. It might not seem like a big deal now but when I add more and more sites at a later date it all counts.

I've also been making some progress with updating the default wordpress theme and hope to have something concrete up on this site in the next week. Again, I've been looking at minimising server space and the time it takes for my pages to load and may go with using as little images as possible and try to use background colours only. I haven't made a definite decision on this yet but I'll probably keep the look and feel of the design pretty minimalistic anyway so this is an option.