Michael Morgan

Well, today was the date of Apples WWDC and it was great! If you don’t already know Apple have announced their upcoming release of their latest smartphone, iPhone 4. Agreed, the name doesn’t exactly send tingles down your spine but the device itself is looking to be fantastic. It hasn’t been that long since the launch of the iPad and yet they’ve still managed to pack the iPhone 4 with some great new features – over 100 of them apparently.

On another related note, with the iPhone 4 announcement I’ve also started up a new project dedicated to iPhone bumper cases. That’s the name mentioned at the Apple conference today and is set to the one of several iPhone 4 accessories soon to be available. I intend for the site to be informative and a helpful resource when it comes to people choosing just which case to buy for their shiny new iPhone.

Quite recently I moved a new project of mine live. Over the past few years I’ve created, managed and then sold several webmaster tutorial sites and have found them to be a fantastic topic for building AdSense revenue streams. Since tutorial sites make use of a lot of text based content as well as the occasional image to demonstrate what the tutorial covers, AdSense units can be quite easily integrated right into the content.

So, after some thought and a little time away from being involved in any heavy content sites I decided to create another. The new site is called WM Tutorials (or, Webmaster Tutorials in case you didn’t catch that) and features tutorials covering a variety of topics all within the web design and development niche.

Unlike many of my previous tutorial sites where I had developed a specific tutorial CMS I have for this latest site used WordPress. This meant creating a custom WordPress theme along with one or two plugins and backend tweaks to get it how I wanted it.

So, the site is up and running right now with some great content. Some of the tutorials are written by me and some by other web developers. It’s a fantastic resource if you’re interested in learning a thing or two about some of the areas of web design.

I’ve put this site through quite a few different revisions and I thought it was just about time for the next one. This one comes with a complete new design as well as a complete reorganise of all of the content.

For the design I’ve kept it nice and simple using only a few colours for the majority of it then adding colour with the occasional graphic. On the front page I’ve added a smooth scrolling box to show off some of my previous and current work which when clicked takes you through to my portfolio. I’ve also got rid of a couple of pages and simplified the site as much as possible. The site is navigated using just the top navigation menu from which you can access almost every page of the site.

As for content I’ve revamped the blog section quite a bit. In fact, this entire site is now powered by WordPress which makes it much easier to manage. For clarity on exactly what it is I do and to streamline the purpose of this site I’ve removed a few of my previous blog posts. Don’t worry though, I’ll be adding more, much improved content over the coming weeks.

Finally I’ve included a nice contact form which you can use if you’d like to get in touch with me. I’m really interested in hearing what you have to say so if there’s anything on your mind don’t hesitate to contact me.

I hope you like it

Twitoric, one of my latest web apps to go live is a Twitter post scheduler which does just that. It lets you schedule your tweets in an easy to use interface which will then get posted to Twitter at whatever time you specify. The management area lets you easily and quickly schedule new tweets by setting the text and the exact time which you’d like the tweet to go live. It also lets you drag and drop your scheduled tweets to reorder them however you like.

The service is unlimited meaning you can schedule as many tweets as you like. It also has a built in URL shortener using Shrten – So all of your long URLs will automatically be shortened to make the most of the Twitter character limit.

It might be worth taking a look at – It can be quite a useful little tool. It is of course completely free and always will be!

One thing I like to do with my sites every so often is to give them a brand new look. Usually this means just creating a new design and getting it to work with the existing back end set-up but with this site I decided to do a complete rebuild from scratch. The management system I was using prior to this rebuild was pretty awful and had quite a few major flaws. This new and improved version is much more efficient and overall does a much better job at managing the sites content.

So yes, today I relaunched one of my sites, The Theme Song. Go check it out!

Yet another small & simple web app created by my, this time… a free image host. Take a look at Pixady.com

Hello,
I would like to give away one of my WordPress themes. It is compatible with the latest version and features everything you would expect from a theme.

Live demo: http://www.michaelgarethmorgan.com/wordpress/index.php?wptheme=MGM_WP_1
Download: http://files.michaelgarethmorgan.com/MGM_WP_1.rar

Conditions of use: You must keep the link back to my site in the footer! You cannot sell this theme! You can however distribute it as you like providing it is distributed as is with no changes.

As always, comments & suggestions welcome.

UPDATE: I’ve also created a slightly darker version as requested by a lot of people… Demo + download: http://www.michaelgarethmorgan.com/wordpress/index.php?wptheme=MGM_WP_1_b