Loopie World is a website which houses a collection of free children’s stories that are based on the cute and crazy little characters called the Loopies. The free kid’s stories are updated every month and are 100% original. Each story comes along with a great illustration and a downloadable PDF version.

We initially created the Loopie World website three years ago, and yes since it is one of our own initiatives and not one for a client, it has taken that long to evelve into something from the top shelf. I guess it just seems to happen that way in business, you tend to place all of your focus on paying clients and your own projects have to take second place.

So what exactly have we done to improve Loopie World:

Well the site started out as 3 static pages and a mailing list sign-up. That’s it.
Next it transitioned into a website with more pages and a few links to stories, but still nothing special.
We eventually found the time to re-deign the website from scratch and gave it a much more creative look that would be appealing to kids or parents looking for stories for their kids. We added the stories as we published them – when we got time to publish them. The result was that we had a nice looking website with some good content on it but it never got updated because we just got too busy and alas it was kind of forgotten.

Recently we decided that is was a shame that such a gem of a website would be left on a heap and serve very little purpose, so we decided to pump some jet fuel into the project and take it to the next level. We converted the entire website to work with the Wordpress CMS. This allows us to add new kids stories quickly and easily. Next we added a whole lot of useful plugins to make the site work even better and be more customised for our purpose. We added all of our content and decided that we wanted to make it work for us. While we will always offer free children’s stories at Loopie World, we wanted to create something sustainable, so we created the premium kids story club.

We now offer a membership of just $7 per month. Membership gives you four additional children’s stories every month, each one illustrated and exclusive. Members also get access to special content that is not available to anyone else. We will soon be adding audio versions of all of the premium kids stories as well as interactive books.

An additional feature that we will be integrating is an online store where we will sell all of our great Loopie products. Some nice interactive games will also be added so that kids visiting the site can have a bit of fun as well.

The premium stories are in the process of being completed and will be ready for our members by the end of October 2009.

At present these are the free children’s stories available to download:

• The wobbly car
• The Christmas Star
• A Piratey Adventure
• Granny Goes Away
• Pancake’s Pancake
• The Space Adventure
• The Rainbow Maker
• The Baking Contest
• A Present for Tubblie
• A Loopie Christmas
• Wusky’s Undersea Discovery
• Pilot’s Plane
• The Midnight Feast

Please would you visit Loopie World and add it and / or the stories to your social bookmarking links.

Why we use Fresh Books

As a small creative solutions business specializing in web design, website development, hosting and graphic design – bookkeeping is not on top of our priority list. Although we really do like all of our affairs to be in order, we simply don’t have the time to concentrate all of our energy in this area.

When the time came around for our monthly invoicing it was both a happy & frustrating time. Happy in the sense that we were sending out invoices so we could get paid. Frustrating in the sense that it took several hours to generate invoices for clients, most of which were for very small amounts.

As if this waste of time wasn’t bad enough, sometimes we made mistakes. Since everything was done manually – human error was inevitable and common. On a few occasions clients received invoices meant for other clients and sometimes we forgot to add things to invoices. We lost a lot of money this way.

Another frustration for us was that sometimes clients forgot to pay and until we realized we had no cash to flow, we would be oblivious. Once the realization hit, we would have to manually draft emails (which felt awkward) asking our clients for payment. Sometimes we would have to resend these emails – if we remembered. Keeping tabs of who paid was also a chore…

… Until one day a little ad caught my eye, there it was “Fresh Books – online invoicing made simple.”

I signed up for a free account and set up my profile. I uploaded my logo and customized a few settings. Then I forgot about it. And when I did remember Fresh Books, I thought that it was going to be a task moving my whole way of doing things to their system. I guess my paradigm was in the place of knowing that my system kind of worked for me but this new way might not gel too well.

I carried on painfully sending out manually generated Excel & PDF invoices for a few months until I had absolutely had enough. I made a decision to actually shift my old paradigm and to give Fresh Books a proper try.

I was so serious that I purchased a paid plan. I uploaded all of my clients via a bulk import from a csv file. Exporting this from Excel was a breeze – importing to Fresh Books was just as simple. I setup access details for all and customized my invoice template. The last invoice number I used was inserted as my first invoice number on Fresh Books and away it went. The first invoice was a success!

Doing a bit of exploring I realized that I could set up auto recurring invoices – “wow this is cool,” I thought. What a neat feature since most of the small amounts we invoiced out where recurring fees for website hosting. I setup all of our hosting clients on recurring profiles and forgot about invoicing them again – it all happened automatically from then on.

“What about clients who don’t pay?” Well my question was soon answered with an automatic reminder facility. This feature allows me to set up to three email reminders. All of the text is customizable within the email subject and body. I could also space the reminders to go out on any given number of days from the time of invoice. From now on reminders were all automatic – very, very cool.

Once clients received their invoice notification via email and logged into Fresh Books, I was able to see that they had viewed the invoice. As soon as I received payment notification, I simply marked their invoice as paid and again they received an email message thanking them – all automated!

At a glance I am able to see what we have invoiced for the month, what has been paid and what is still outstanding. There are numerous other reports that can be generated. The Fresh Books system is truly a pleasure to use and I can’t imagine ever going back to my old way of doing things. Fresh Books has saved me valuable hours every month, not to mention the effort.

Check out how Fresh Books can help your business now!

A while back I was invited to take part in a design competition at springleap.com. At the time I simply had way too much on my plate but still thought the idea was great.

In turns out that they run a competition every month to get the best designs from the top designers on their T-shirts. They give away some great prizes including cash, vouchers, goodies and a whack of exposure!

I still don’t have too much time on my hands, but today I managed to put together 3 designs. They are relatively simple but effective I think. My designs will be running in the competition from 14 – 28 January 2009.

The titles of the designs are:

• I work out!
• For Sale
• Have you seen this milk carton?

Please be a sport and vote for them.

Branded07 is the online portfolio for Newcastle based designer Rob Palmer. The site is clean and brilliant. If only more sites could be of this quality.

Some of the neat features used on the site include:

• Integration with Wordpress
• Clean accessable CSS
• AJAX feature slider with nice comments balloon

Everything just seems to fit so nicely!

View the site here

The web seems to be filled with a large collection of sites that truly inspire and Logo of the Day does just that.

Jacob Cass has teamed up with Jeff Fisher to judge and provide comments on different logos that are submitted directly from the LOTD website.

Apart from getting your logo’s judged it is also a fantastic place to see what other designers are getting up to. A place to find inspiration and a place to comment on the inspiration of others.

The LOTD website is clean and simple, but it features a really neat rating system which activates at the simple drag of the mouse. Comments are posted instantly and logos link back to the website of their respective owner / creator.

Everything I have received from Jacob Cass has been solid gold and LOTD is just another one of those nuggets.