Just a quick post to let you all know the new purpose for this blog and the tag cloud on the right hand side of the site. I originally set up this website for part of a final year multimedia blogging project whilst studying for my  degree in 2008. However, now that my student days are behind me, rather than letting all of my hard work go to waste, I am now using this space as a virtual portfolio on which to show my Photography, Advertising and Graphic Design work, along with my academic writing and blogging capabilities. Just click on the links above the banner to browse through my my site, where you will find a selection of visual and written work, including examples of photography, advertising, graphic design and two first class graded academic essays, both of which tackle Marketing and Advertising related subjects.You will notice that the ‘blog’ diary is more of a step by step guide which details exactly how I put this site together: a web design guide for beginners, from an absoulte 100% beginner. This was again produced for multimdia to meet the marking criteria, but I have included this on my online portfolio as not only does it hopefully display some of my less formal blogging abilities, some of you budding web designers may find it useful. To search for a particular subject in my blog, simply click on the required word in the rotating tag cloud on the right hand margin. Feel free to have a look around and I hope you find some of what I wrote in my blog helpful…

I went into theme editor on dashboard and changed the footer text from “Craigs blog, come and get yourself involved…” to “Website, blog, all visual content and text produced by Craig Teakle”, which i believe sounds far more professional and is more in keeping with the rest of my site.

Haraaahh!! I just thought I’d have another sneaky look at my blog, just to see if there was the minutest change that my favicon would display. I wasn’t expecting anything, but low and behold my beautiful shiney favicon is now displaying in all its glory. Proof that miracles do happen.

Here is a screen shot of the favicon. I thought I had better include this as proof that it works, just in case it decides to disappear for some reason:

In order to personalise my blog a little more, I have removed the “This blog is proudly powered by Wordpress and themed by Mukka Mu” and replaced it with “Craig’s blog, get yourself involved”. I want this site to be totally my own, without and sneeky wordpress advertising or accreditation, which is why I changed it.

Here is a screen print of my favourite chosen theme in its original state. This is so that whoever is marking this can see the changes I have made to the original theme i.e. I have already changed banner, width between banner and rest of the blog using CSS, added widgets etc. More changes will be added soon:

Now that we all seem to be getting to grips with all this social networking, blogging  stuff, my Final Project Group (Chris, Tom and myself) are going to create another blog to run alongside the website and print advert campaign we are working on for our final project - the Pocket Wellies product launch. I can’t tell you too much about our project at the moment but here is a sneeky preview our our logo, designed by yours truely:

I have learned through this module, and also from a work placement at a marketing and pr agency last year that social networking such as creating a blog for a business is an excellent marketing and pr opportunity as it allows the company to tap into Google searches for free publicity, simply through daily commenting on all things news and sport, company plans and events, youtube videos etc, and then tagging the blog entries.

I will add our final project blog to my De.Licio.Us widget or blogroll when it is up and running…

I have finally managed to get my flickr widget to display my photos. All it took was a bit of configuration of my flickr safety settings and some patience as it took nearly an hour to display my photos on my blog. Well chuffed with that though. Going to try and add a few more widgets and things before fridays lecture.