Ok, so it has been quite a while since my last blog post… There are several reasons for this, so I thought I’d quickly explain what’s been going on in my life and what’s happening with Push Standards. Bear with me as I’m not sure how long this post will turn out to be.

My Life:

So first of all, what’s been happening in my life? Well I arrived back at University exactly a week ago, and had all 4 of my final deadlines in within the space of 5 days. To put this in perspective one deadline per week gets pretty hectic, and all of my friends have their deadlines spaced over months. It’s not even like I could have worked on these for ages, I got the same preparation time as everyone else, but it just worked out that my deadline timetable was a lot more stressful. Anyway, I won’t go on about it but just say that I made it through (just about) and have had a chance to relax for a couple of days at last.

The good news is that now I’m the only person who doesn’t have any deadlines, and can concentrate on the blog at least until my final exams (about 4 weeks time). I’ll still have lectures as per normal, but it will be no where near as stressful. This is why I haven’t been updating, I’ve just not had a spare minute. For most of this week I was working every hour that I wasn’t sleeping (so about 18 hours per day!).

Designing:

Despite these important deadlines I couldn’t drop design work for my clients and so have some new works to show for it. Luckily I managed to keep to deadlines, and can now pour myself into my designing more fully. I’ll be uploading new designs to my portfolio over the next few weeks, but here is a design I did a couple of weeks ago for CarArticles.co.uk:

You can see the launched website here.

Online Projects:

Despite being so busy I can never seem to turn off when it comes to my online projects. I still have a couple that are in the process of being developed, although these may have to wait until after my exams to be launched. One that will be coming before that is a project that I’m doing with a good friend of mine. He’s studying at music college and for one of his modules chose the coursework option to create a music-related website. He came to me to see if I might be interested and after a little brainstorming we came up with an idea for a music blog. He has a knack for discovering amazing bands that nobody has ever heard of (it’s how I discovered some of my favorites) and so we thought that we would simply run a blog that publicized these bands. It will be a useful resource for music lovers and also give unsigned bands a little promotion. Obviously it’s not anything revolutionary but we feel like their definitely a gap in the market for this kind of thing. If we can consistently update with great artists and use his offline marketing potential (at his college) then we think we could get things rolling nicely.

Another project of mine that you may remember me announcing on the blog is CssGalleryList.com. I just wanted to post an update about how the site is doing. After spending just $30 getting the site online it’s now pulling $1-$2 per day. Not very impressive sounding, but when you consider that this already values the site at over 1500% of it’s startup costs it’s not too bad. Also the great thing about this site is that it’s very static, I’ve not touched it since launch. I’ve also not promoted it or anything of that sort, so that’s $1-2 per day via word of mouth - people who like the site’s concept. When I have a spare couple of days I’m planning on maybe putting 10-20 hours into promoting the site heavily and then sit back and see it grow to the next level. I would like to see the site pulling $100 per month and then perhaps sell it for $1000 in a few months.

What about this blog?

The good news is that I most definitely will NOT be giving up on Push Standards. With all these upcoming projects, and some spare time on my hands I will be updating far more regularly. As always I appreciate your continued readership and thank you for sticking by the blog. I hope that you will check back shortly for new articles and info about my coming-soon websites.

Oh and if I’ve been bad about getting back to your email this post should explain why. My priority for my inbox this week was my design clients, but now I’ve got the time to respond to absolutely everybody.

Cheers,

- Tom.