SIMON NORTH

Today I’m proud to announce an addition to Design Delight, a new site that will bring to you the best design each day. The fundamental idea of the site is to allow people to be inspired by just the best designs in any given month.

Design Delight has become a great resource for design inspiration and is used by thousands of people every month, this “spin-off” is designed for those people who just want the real crème de la crème of web design.

Designs are categorized into months so it’s easy to navigate, and Design Delight will continue on with it’s current strategy where it will showcase between 6 – 8 designs a day and pick the best design as it’s Design of the Day.

You can find CSS Month at cssmonth.com and you can follow updates on Twitter @cssmonth.

A few years ago I ran a design and development blog called Help Developer, I used to love writing articles every day but in the end I didn’t have enough time to update it and then it kept getting hacked so I took it down.

However, now that I have started a 3 day client work week I have more time to dedicate to my side projects (2 whole days in fact). One of the big side projects I’m concentrating on is Design Delight, so I’ve just set up an articles section on the site (you could call it a blog I suppose).

The plan is to release 2 – 3 articles a week, most of which will be roundups designed to inspire you with the best designs in certain niches, but I will also write more in-depth articles providing tips and techniques from what I’ve learnt from my 5 years in the industry.

You can access the articles section here, and at the time of writing this post I have two articles up: 10 Free Serif Fonts to Make Your Designs Look Great and Choosing the Right Menu for Your Site and 3 others written and ready to be released in the coming week. To get notified of these article releases, make sure you’re following Design Delight on Twitter (other social networks links on the Design Delight site).

Design Delight has been rather successful in 2011, so 2012 is the year I’m going to push it and make it even more of a success. Over 200,000 impressions were achieved in 2011, let’s get to a million in 2012 shall we.

So over the holidays I’ve been doing some updates on the site:

• User Accounts, from the 9th January you’ll be able to sign up for an account, the reason I added this was because visitors were “liking” designs on the site but they couldn’t keep track of those liked designs. With the account it will allow them to have a profile page on the site where they can add their name, website, bio etc. but more importantly it will show all the designs they have liked. My intention for Design Delight wasn’t just to be a CSS gallery, I want it to be the place where designers can come for inspiration, so been able to keep track of their likes means that they’ll be able to do just that.
• Explore Section, when I did the previous update to the site, I removed the categories access because the analytics on the site said that hardly anyone was using it, however it seems that some people liked it considering the few emails I got about it. So, rather than just adding a list of categories on the site, I’ve gone one step further. By going to the Explore page, you can now access the “type” and “colour” categories, as well as the monthly archives and the top designs for each month as voted for by users of the site (the most liked designs). This section will be expanded in the future with “collections” which will feature the top designs of certain topics, eg “The top 10 church site designs”.
• Prefer Page, so if you’re ever bored this page will help that boredom. Basically by going to the Prefer page, you will be shown two websites, just choose the design you like best and it will show you another two, trust me it gets addictive.
• Email Monthly Roundups, ok so the last roundup we sent out was in summer 2011 so not really “monthly”, however this year they will be. So make sure you sign up to it here if you haven’t already.
• Google Plus, probably about time we added Google Plus, so you can “circle” us here.

And I have a lot more planned, more updates soon. So head on over to the best CSS gallery, updated every weekday.

Evergreen PA, (details of my involvement) sponsors a great community choir called the Huddersfield Community Gospel Choir, and on 16th October 2011, the choir put on a great concert at St Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield.

It was a fantastic event with a sold out audience enjoying the fantastic music from the choir and friends. For full details on the concert you can go here for a write up, and for more details on our involvement with the choir, you can go here.

So here are the videos of the choir singing, enjoy.

God Has Not Forgot

Jesus, You Are My Everything

Cant Give Up Now

Oh Lord, How Excellent

Melodies From Heaven

Hold On

Today, a few members of the Evergreen PA team went down to the Yorkshire Lions training ground to provide the players of Yorkshire Lions with their brand new kits.

The Yorkshire Lions are two football clubs (under 11′s and under 12′s) based in Huddersfield. Both teams play in the junior league but neither have full football kits. As sponsors of the Yorkshire Lions, our first task was to change that. Both teams were provided with brand new football kits the day before they played a game in their league. This is just the start of this project, there is a lot of equipment the Yorkshire Lions need and we hope to continue to find funds to help them with this.

Kaizer took the opportunity to talk to a few of the players, they talked about how they’d like to grow up to be professional footballers and keep out of trouble, get a good education and listen to their coaches. In a world where the youth get a bad name associated with them, we at Evergreen PA feel it is important to remember that the youth aren’t all bad, these children really prove our point.

For full details on our work with the Yorkshire Lions, check out their project page on the Evergreen PA website.

Influential Interviews is a website I have launched which will feature the most inspirational and influential videos related to business and entrepreneurship.

The reason I decided to start this site is simply the fact that I couldn’t find one out there, there are thousands of great interviews and presentations but no central place where you can access them, so I decided to start it. I’m always eager to learn so I watch a lot of these kind of videos so will aim to update the site as often as possible and if you come across any videos you think should be added then please do submit them here.

So if you are looking for great presentations and interviews from people like Gary Vaynerchuk and Kevin Rose then check it out here.

And here’s a few videos to check out:

• Probably one of the most inspirational videos out there if you want to start a startup: Presentation from David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals.
• If you like WordPress then maybe check out: Alexia Tsotsis interviews Founder and CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider.
• If you like passionate swearing then Gary Vaynerchuk is your guy: Q & A Session with Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV at LeWeb 2010