As well as WordPress themes, Artisteer can produce themes for Joomla and Drupal, but of course it can’t do everything, if you have any specific creative imagery in mind then you need to start with a decent header layout, and import that into Artisteer. There’s also a need to crop and edit your own png files with varying degress of transparency if you want to use custom icons. Once imported though the ‘suggestion’ buttons work across the whole theme or against individual components (headers, footers, menus, columns) to revolve multiple colour scheme and format suggestions.  This makes the decision making process of WordPress theme design so much faster than hand coding style sheet amends of hexidecimals and processing hundreds of FTP uploads and browser refreshes.

Having now successfully completed a theme, exported and imported it without any issues and populated it with content on a WordPress installation, I can safely say that it is well worth the cost of the Artisteer ctivation code (approximately £85 I think for the Standard edition). I will certainly be making more use of this great application in future and spending less time tinkering with the templates at woothemes.com (although those really are first rate theme designs – it’s where I got the Firetop theme from).

It seems like such a cool product that, having been reading the subscriptions website so much over the Christmas period, I’ve had to subscribe myself to appease my inner child! Now I’m hoping I don’t become addicted to collecting the Pokemon style trading cards. Take a look at the Top Gear Turbo Challenge TV advert on Youtube to see the James Hammond narrated promotion and get a glance at the free Stig gifts:

Despite saying that he was a little tired (understandably having sung with Sir Paul McCartney less than 24 hours before), Jamie seemed very friendly to all and gave us an acoustic rendition of songs ranging from REM and Cold Play (Yellow) to his X Factor trademark audition song ‘Kings of Leon – Sex is on Fire‘. I managed to grab some footage of him singing the Killers – Mr Brightside (with numerous hysterical teenagers) which I’ve whacked on YouTube as below… pretty good for an artist who wasn’t even meant to be playing a guitar when he arrived and just picked it up for fun (which I managed to find out from organisers TMB Marketing and Communications). Funniest moment was being asked if I was Jamie Archer’s manager (I was suited and booted)!

Jamie Archer: Killers – Mr Brightside

Jamie Archer: Cold Play – Yellow

This new email marketing tool is Open Source (as usual) built using PHP and MYSQL. We have employed some fairly simple yet effective Ajax and Javascript functionality to generate the informational overlay pop-ups and generate the dynamic email builder preview. Now we just hope that it helps all those RacingPost.com customers get the gift they want for Christmas… instead of one they don’t!

We first began working with Penwizard (who like us are Dorking based) back in May 2008. Since then we have worked on the search engine marketing of their personalised calendars and personalised childrens’ books (right). As well as publishing their own kids books, Penwizard enter into joint ventures with leading publishers such as HarperCollins and Ladybird.

We very much enjoyed working with HarperCollins on the search engine marketing of the mymagicalbook.com site – featuring personalised stories involving Noddy, Roary the Racing Car and Fifi and the Flowertots (when you have a two year old it gives you some added interest!). For Peppa Pig enthusiasts the Penwizard/Ladybird site peppapigandme.com is a must too.

PPR came to us back in 2004 and we built them a site and Content Management System (CMS) to enable them to post jobs and manage candidate applications / CV uploads. This time round they had a new template designed by a chap called Jason Shoffman and Firetop were tasked with cutting Jason’s PSD  files into SEO friendly HTML and populating the content via the existing recruitment CMS (see right).

The Firetop recruitment CMS is a fairly basic Open Source offering but does the job for a recruiter requiring an online presence:

• Editing of in-page text and image content.
• New job postings, edits and deletions (multi-category options + RSS feeds).
• Candidate detail review and Word doc downloads.
• Employer vacancy postings and submission management.
• Automated email message text editing.

When combined with the revamped search engine advertising campaign (also managed by Firetop) we hope to see business flourish for PPR at a time when the economy isn’t in the best of health!

Over a decade ago, in an effort to break into marketing (whilst studying a part-time HNC in business and marketing) I applied for the role of Marketing Assistant at Spearhead Training Group. I had a little relevant experience under my belt; a year’s HNC, two years in life and pensions admin, two years in retail merchandising and some freelance promotional efforts in a nightclub. However, on 6th May 1998 Jim Tappenden offered me the position of Marketing Assistant at Spearhead Training Group. It was just the break I needed!

Some months later I asked Jim about my appointment and he confessed that on paper I didn’t have the CIM diplomas or work experience that other candidates had done, but that I had common sense: “Common sense is a commodity in short supply” Jim told me. The older I become and the more candidates I interview myself the more I agree with him! I am grateful that Jim considered me to have it, and was willing to gamble on an ambitious 21 year old.

Some time later Jim agreed to fund the final year of my marketing qualification at a time when I was going through some financial hardships, this was very much appreciated. Furthermore, after a year of working with Jim’s wife Val on the company’s marketing, I was myself promoted to Marketing Manager and given the wonderful opportunity to manage (with Jim’s approval and guidance) an annual marketing budget approaching £1 million. It was a fantastic way to learn about managing Direct Marketing campaigns, Display Advertising and the evolving Internet – which I became fascinated with at that time. I built my first website at Jim’s request, something that I found thoroughly enjoyable, especially the analytical side of understanding audience behaviour.

I left Spearhead in March 2000 to move into an online marketing role at a publishing company.  After my departure Jim arranged for me to maintain the Spearhead website on a contractual basis in my spare time. This gave me the funding to get started with my own company and expand a little into other areas – leading to the founding of Firetop Ltd in 2003. Today, although I no longer maintain the UK website of Spearhead Training I am proud to maintain the Spearhead Gulf website and have even had the pleasure of a trip to the Middle East as a result.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have worked with Jim and to have had the opportunities that he and his wife gave me, the knowledge of how to run a business, the in-house courses that he let me attend in sales, marketing and management and the financial assistance with Firetop have all been invaluable. Without Jim I would not be where I am today and outside of work I certainly wouldn’t have my wonderful family (having met my wife via Yahoo chat ten years ago this weekend)!

I would like to end on a final piece of wisdom that I have always remembered from Jim (in addition to the scarceness of common sense) – “With a business idea you can spend too long planning for perfection and never get started“. I’m not sure I necessarily understood how true that was at the time Jim told me but now as I approach my 15th year in the working world I know exactly what he means.

Goodbye Jim you will be sadly missed yet remaining frequently in my thoughts.

The site sits on a PHP/MYSQL based Content Management System (CMS) powered by Hungarian web development company Pressflex. The folks at Pressflex have been super efficient and managed to tweak our HTML to fit their needs for all browsers (including the dreaded IE6). We like their CMS, it works very nicely indeed for publishers and enables traditional print-based publishers to upload XML files for each printed issue whilst also editing and tagging the content themselves.

Now it won’t have passed you by that my company is called Firetop Ltd, a name which enabled me to take a childhood addiction to choosing your own destiny, and apply that tenuously to search engine optimisation (‘Fire’ ‘top’). Indeed in the office here there is an autographed copy of the Warlock of Firetop Mountain signed by authors Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (as well as many other original books). I’m pleased that with the help of Canadian developers Big Blue Bubble, Ian and Steve have decided to take their brand into the Nintendo DS era for a new generation. I’m also pleased to report that the original books still cut it with the modern generation anyway (having recently converted a 10 year old relative to the books as a gift).

From what I’ve read online the DS game doesn’t have a UK release date yet but does come out in the US and Canada around the 26th / 27th October and some time later as an iPhone game. Here’s the game trailer (embedded from YouTube); quite different to the books that inspired me but given my Firetop obsession I couldn’t resist a posting of this modern version.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: Nintendo DS Game