Despite being somewhat slack with blog posts lately I’ve been really feeling the link love from other blogs! Today I’ve decided to give back a little and show you where ChiGarden has been popping up lately.

Smashing Magazine - A Short Story About “Back to Top” Links
Second from the top in the links showcase you might see a familiar brown lump which is in fact the ChiGarden footer! Not the most inspiring thing to click on perhaps, but I love reading Smashing Magazine so am quite honoured to have my site appear in it.

We Love WP
ChiGarden was featured in the ‘Best of October 2008‘ as well as a place in the ‘We Love…’ category. I love browsing through site galleries and since I work with Wordpress driven sites a lot I’ve always found this site a great source of inspiration.

Princess Portal
I seem to be getting a lot of link love from the Princess Portal, run by the lovely Princess Skye. She even visited the Candy Cult exhibition and wrote a nice post about it and my work. Don’t be fooled by the title and all the pink - being a princess isn’t just about wearing pretty clothes and being waited on and this site has plenty of relevant articles for the modern woman (and lots of pretty clothes too!).

Core77 Gift Guide for 2007
I guess since it’s that time of year again, a lot of people seem to be coming through Core77’s gift guide from last year for my Internet Explorer Voodoo Doll Tutorial. It’s incredible to see people still liking my silly little creation over a year after creating it! I really need to write another post about where the tutorial has been appearing and what people have been doing with it. Speaking as a web designer/developer, I still agree that any geek would love this gift, especially if it was lovingly (or hatingly?) created just for them by you.

If you’re linking to ChiGarden please let me know so I can check out your site and link back!

Abstract Gourmet

Today ends Web Week here in Perth, and among the many events (sadly only some of which I was able to attend) were the West Australian Web Awards. Although I didn’t enter any of the sites I worked on myself Matt of Abstract Gourmet entered his site and won in the Blog category. The blog category is one where ‘content is king’ so I can’t take much of the credit for doing the design work, but Matt was kind enough to thank me in his acceptance speech and it’s exciting regardless!

Congratulations to Matt and all the other winners at the awards; I hope to submit my own blog someday!

Finally, my new portfolio is complete! I’ve gone with a very simplified, to-the-point portfolio that showcases all my work and essential information in a single page. I’ve stuck with the wood background and tree motif to complement this blog, but made them less cutesy and more professional. I’ve also decided to really focus on what I do best - web design and front-end development - rather than clutter it with work that I can do but aren’t really my focus or area of expertise. Major thanks to Paul of Monk Media for letting me use all the work I’ve been doing lately in my portfolio!

Although it doesn’t look like it, it’s actually made with Wordpress. While Wordpress might not seem like an ideal choice for a brochure-style website, based on the facts that I wanted something easy to update, that listed thumbnails on the main page and had room to link to a more detailed description (if I ever get around to writing them), and I’ve been doing a lot of Wordpress templates lately. The result is a streamlined update process that I should hopefully be able to keep on top of. Would anyone be interested in reading about how to modify a Wordpress template to suit a portfolio like this? I’m thinking of putting up a quick tutorial and template download.

Also, big news - I’m moving to Canberra at the end of the year with my boyfriend who has a graduate position there. Currently I’m looking for some work there, so if you know of any web design positions available please let me know or chuck in a good word for me :)