As you may well know (if not, now you do), I am an insane Star Wars fan. As soon as I saw details of a new animated series coming out, I couldn’t help but get excited. The new animation looks just as action packed as the films (possibly even more so) and looks to have a promising story which will expand the Star Wars universe to us even further by further revealing gaps in the story that we have yet to see.

There’s a couple of things that confuse me about the advertising for “The Clone Wars, however. The first is that one of the main Sith characters in it looks just like Ventress from the Clone Wars cartoon series. Now this makes me wonder, because I honestly doubt Lucas would make two different plots along the same timeline. So does this mean that it may be a relative of Ventress? It certainly explain why she/he/it looks like Ventress but differs in facial markings and clothing. Also, if it were a relative, It would make sense that they would take up Ventress’ lightsabers and lightsaber style. That being said, we will have to wait for it to come out to know.

The second thing is that it’s being advertised as “coming to theatres” which hugely confuses me. I had thought that this was going to be another TV series like the Clone Wars cartoon was. I’d actually prefer if it was because it’d last longer, although the cinema experience of watching Star Wars is always awesome.

Here’s some pretty pictures from one of the trailers for you to look at.

This past week I’ve been scouring the internet looking for personal websites and what designers themselves have been talking a lot about. I found that many of the designers on the Web Designer Forum as well as some others that are using WordPress to design their main sites as well as using it as a CMS for clients to use. I never actually thought of WordPress as a CMS until I saw the websites of these designers and I instantly took inspiration from this. That said, this weeks Web Inspiration is WordPress.

You may be surprised that I’ve given a website a full five stars so early into my series of inspirational websites, but WordPress has really surprised me in a lot of ways.

WordPress is a fantastic blogging tool that anyone can use. It’s simple and very easy to use and edit. Plugins or mods can be added if you need something a bit extra which most users shouldn’t ever need anyway, but it’s nice to have that option if it’s needed. People from all across the world now have blogs and this is by far the best one to use in my opinion.

The blog system on WordPress alone would be enough to give it a good rating on my Web Inspirations series, but there is so much more to it than just that. As I said above, many designers are now using it as a way to make static websites more dynamic and interesting. They can do this by converting their websites to WordPress and adding funcionality like short clippings from blog posts on their homepage or even things like twitter entried and even archiving information. This sort of system is specifically amazing for web designers, making our life a whole lot easier, allowing for us to make better designs or concentrate on other areas that need more attention such as testing and conforming to web standards.

As if that wasn’t enough, WordPress is a great CMS. The ease of use as a blogging tool comes across when it comes to clients updating information, uploading images and other such things. It’s as simple as blogging which I’m sure any client will be appreciative of as no doubt they don’t want to be hassling you all the time to fix their site in some way that can’t be handled simply by themselves by a CMS.

I was checking out my friends website today and noticed that he had done the very same thing I intend on doing myself, that is, converting my entire site to WordPress for ease of use.

WordPress gets 5 our of 5 stars for the amount it is used for and the wide range of people that can use it. Also, the fact it’s open source gives it many bonus points. Keep up the good work WordPress!

Tune in next week for more Web Inspirations.

I seem to have let myself get caught up by the holidays and I’m afraid that it’s going to affect my website design knowledge. As a way of getting myself back into website design, I’ve decided to make blog posts on a weekly basis about websites that inspire me in some way, and what the good (and in some cases bad) points about them are.

Because this is a new thing, I’m not going to start off by showing unknown websites, so I’ll review some of the bigger sites out there that inspire me in one way or another as a way to start this little web crusade off for me.

I’ll start doing this on Saturdays since today is indeed a Saturday. If I fail to post up on time, I may be still looking for worthy websites to review.

As a web designer, I love nothing more than to have user interaction in my websites. It makes the website more interesting and keeps people coming back if the interaction is good enough. This is exactly what Facebook has mastered. I’m not sure if Facebook itself (Its creators) have any applications built into the site from the start, but the great thing about it is that users can make their own applications for others to enjoy, and even companies get involved to make some money from it.

Personally, I play a lot of poker on Facebook, which I find to be the best version of poker online that I’ve played before which is astonishing as it’s free! But there’s not just that, things like Jetman and other games are incredibly popular on there. Sometimes I think it’s easy to forget that it’s a social networking website, and even then, the games on the site are all linked with the social networking aspect with leaderboards and even playing against eachother such as in poker that just make the experience of the website incredibly addictive.

There are only a few downsides that I can think of with a site like Facebook. It would be nice if each user were able to customise their pages a little more than the applications they have installed on it. At the moment, each users page looks pretty much identical which a lot of people miss from Myspace. I’m sure that is something they will work on in the future, but for now I think that people are happy with how it is regardless. The other thing is that sometimes people can install far too many applications on their profiles which make them look too tacky and clogged up, but I suppose that is the freedom they are allowed and it is upto them how they organise their own space.

Overall, the site’s an incredible breakthrough in social netoworking and the way in which users on a website can interact with eachother. I’m keen to see how this kind of technology will advance in the future.

Facebook gets 4 stars out of 5. If it wasn’t for the lack of customisation, the score would be perfect. I believe that Facebook is a truly inspirational site but it still has room for improvement.

After seeing pictures of this box thing, I decided that it’d be cheap and easy to make, so why not cosplay it!? As far as I know, the box is known as Danboard and has figurines made of it. I’m not sure if it’s a promotion by amazon.co.uk itself or if it’s related to anything else. In anycase, it’s awesome! There’s also a transformed version where it gets a hand and a couple of fingers (maybe guns, I’m not so sure).

If anyone out there actually knows where this guy is from or any extra info, I’d love to know!

So, here we have it. A wordpress blog up and running on my site! I’ll be working some on the design tonight to get it looking pretty, ready for much bloggage yet to come. I’ll mostly be blogging about anime, but I’m so fickle minded that I could be blogging about space by the end! I’ll also be blogging about web design stuff as well as projects I’m working on as a means of keeping myself focused and to be able to give myself a place to reflect upon what I’ve done and what I’ve learned. Anyway, enough of the boring stuff, this place needs a facelift!

Just finished the design for now. I think it’s not too bad, but I’ll change it to something better when I have more time.