Almost one year has passed (wow, I have to think about something for the first anniversary!) and now it’s time to have a FaceBook page. Consider it as one more way to keep in touch, communicate, send feedback, promote your website (created with a Rabbit’s design, of course!), chat about the web or just meet other users.

It’s a sort of an experiment now, we’ll see day by day if this page is useful or not. I’ll try to limit my wall posts as much as possible so don’t be afraid to follow it: I’ll not monopolize your news feed…

If you have a FaceBook account and want to join, become a fan now!

Here we are: Lake, a brand new Sandvox Design with a wide layout (it’s time to move to 960px, folks!).

Again, it’s inspired by one of my previous themes, and precisely the one I used for years for one of my own websites (Asterione, in italian, running on WordPress).

During almost three years, I had a lot of time to fine-tune typography and whitespace to reach a good balance between some color and a good readability. Moreover, Asterione contains a lot of text, so readability and a relaxing experience for the visitor were really main goals. All the feedback I received was quite good, so I think that Sandvox users will enjoy it as I do.

I created two color variations (green and pink) but they were too bright and, for now, I’m not including them. Maybe I’ll add some extra later, as a free upgrade.

What else? Banner-ready (960×128), Logo-ready, bordered pagelets, the usual stuff.

The demo site is running again at a temporary address, it will stay there for a while, long enough to find a better solution.

Ok, now let’s go on withe better news: the new design is ready and available (read next post for it).

[Jul 22nd, 2010] – Update: new and definitive link is http://www.behindtherabbit.biz/demo/.

As you probably noticed, all my demo sites are hosted on a different domain (and previously they were at a different address): I was looking for the best solution, with no hurry (and definitely not worrying about SEO…). As a matter of fact, the subscription to my provider has expired and this is entirely my fault ’cause I didn’t pay attention to the expiry date. They say they sent me many e-mails, but they didn’t, or at least they didn’t send them to the right address – and I’m quite sure about this. Moreover they seem to be annoyed by my requests for a renewal (the domain is still mine for one more year!).

So I decided to say hello to TopHost, which is not as Top as it seems to be, and move all the domains parked there somewhere else.

So, for few days, there will be some confusion with demo sites (I have to place them somewhere right now!). Of course this happens just when I have to release a new design…

“Lake”, a new design for Sandvox, is almost ready. I’m working now on the boring part (site update, promo images, demo site and so on… very very boring… I’m definitely not a marketing guy). It should be released probably on next Monday.

Just for my blog readers, here’s a sneak peek.

See you all in few days!

After my looooong sleep and a great lack of inspiration, I know now how my next design will look like and I can work on it. Since most CSS is already done (again, it’s a port from a previous WordPress theme not released to the public), I think that the developement will go pretty fast.

It will be a clean, monocolor theme, with blue as the default main color for background and links (I still have to decide if to offer color variations and, if so, how many). It will be particularly suitable for blogs and/or long text pages because of its good readability.

Not so original, maybe, but I decided to keep it simple: I needed something easy to start over, I was postponing too much. Morevore, simple themes are always the most appreciated.

If everything goes fine, I think it will be tested and available within a week, so stay tuned!

(And after that, there will be some announcement about the Rabbit’s Facebook page)

[photo: Tambako the Jaguar]

Before I start new projects it’s important to keep up-to-date all of my themes. This little update to Orange Rabbit was long awaited and finally I decided to release it.

It’s just a new design for navigation arrows: they were orange but, obviously, if you change the color of your page with Sandvox Pro (instructions here) orange may not fit well. So they are now grey (the shape changed too, in my opinion it’s better now).

Here we are! A new version of Grafite is finally out and it sports a bonus new design: Grafite Mini.

What’s new: first of all, bordered/unbordered pagelets for sidebar too; then, movie pages now have the same look as photo pages; and if you use a sidebar, it’s because you want a page to look like the other ones, so now photo pages with a sidebar are just as the other pages in your website.

Moreover, with Grafite comes now a new design called Grafite Mini: do you like the look of photo pages in Grafite? Grafite Mini has this look in every page. This design is a good choice if your website:

• doesn’t need a blog (you can have it but it’s not so good looking)
• doesn’t need a sidebar (you can have it but it’s ugly)
• doesn’t need a header or a custom logo (you can’t see it)
• in few words: is just a gallery or a collection of galleries (movie or photos) with just some text (but not too much).

If you need a more complex website maybe you will still prefer Grafite, but if you want something really simple and completely focused on images Grafite Mini is better.

Before you upgrade please consider that Grafite 1.0 didn’t support bordered pagelets for the sidebar, so after the upgrade your sidebar pagelets may look different. If you want them to be light gray, you have to change their settings manually.

I want to say thank you to all the customers that sent me feedback, suggestions and requests, helping me in what I think is a good improvement.

Don’t forget to send your website’s URL to Sandvox Sites!

After a long, long pause, I’m back at work. My first goal is to update a few themes, starting with Grafite and Orange Rabbit. The former is ready for some beta testing, so I think it will be released in a couple of days.

Grafite for Sandvox will be updated soon (to version 1.1). If you have feature requests, this is the right time to send them (or add a comment to this post)!

This is what is planned so far:

• Print style sheet
• Bordered sidebar pagelets
• Some fancy styling for “strong” tags
• Code optimization, if possible, to enhance code injection possibilities