It is not uncommon to make some changes when the calendar changes from one year to another. We’ve been in the process of making some changes at Unleashed in the last few weeks and more changes will be made in the next few weeks. Today I’m going to detail as much as I can, though I may need to be a bit vague on some of the upcoming changes because I simply don’t have the details right now.

Probably the biggest change made at Unleashed was almost a decade ago. I wrote One Door Is Closing, Another to Be Opened on March 17, 2013. The main message was that I was cutting back on creating content related to CorelDRAW. For some of you, that was the primary reason you follow me. If it is not already obvious, I have no plans to write anything about CorelDRAW in the future. At most, I might mention what a new version brings. But given that I am not using the latest version now, even that probably won’t happen. In 2022, we retired the CorelDRAW Unleashed Web site and moved some of its legacy products to Foster’s Favorites.

Just last week I had a conversion with Mark Schaefer of {grow}. I first started following his blog soon after reading his books Return on Influence and Tao of Twitter. What he wrote about that interested me most was social media and how to get the most from it. He has made his own changes and he writes less about social media and therefore I don’t read as many of his blogs these days. Therefore I truly understand those of you who are frustrated that I won’t be providing CorelDRAW content and I fully understand if you choose to unsubscribe.

That said, I’m hoping that you’ll still find the content I am creating to be useful and you will continue to subscribe for many years to come!

Graphics Unleashed Blog

Google introduced AdSense around 2003 and soon afterwards we hosted ads on our sites using the technology. There were some months when it brought a very healthy return. For a variety of reasons, those returns have dwindled drastically. One reason is due to ad blockers and privacy concerns stopping the ads from being seen. I’m sure many of you weren’t thrilled to have them on the site. Good news, we’ve removed them all from all of our sites.

That said, we have not removed all ads. There are still some ads that link to very specific third-party products. For example, we have links to CorelDRAW. We also have ads that link to our own products on other Unleashed sites. I think you’ll find the remaining ads less intrusive and I hope you’ll still interact with the ads when appropriate.

The blog was first started in 2005 and in the summer of 2008 I started writing a post every single day. There were also some other authors, such as Jeff Harrison, who contributed a number of posts. I’ve started to remove older posts I’ve written that are no longer relevant. This does not mean every old post. Some refer to products, hardware or software, that no longer exist. In some cases there were links to sites that no longer exist. When writing about technology products, even a decade old is ancient.

So far I’ve removed probably 200 posts. I’m sure there are a few hundred more that will be removed. I doubt any loyal readers will notice as these posts truly are no longer relevant. I’ve also talked with Jeff Harrison. For now, none of his posts have been removed. He will review them at some point and make the decision whether to update the contents or to remove the post.

As part of my decision to write a post every day, I had themes for each day of the week. I’m stopped writing for all of those themes except one, Hump Day Hardware. I don’t plan to stop writing about hardware, but I will no longer write something every week. In the past I was always researching hardware for myself and it was easy to write a post each week. Now I research far less and I simply don’t have something to cover each week. In addition, I often include links to hardware reviews in my Tech News posts each Friday.

While it may seem like I’m writing a lot less, it is simply that the posts are spread out over multiple sites targeted to various niches. I encourage you to visit our Subscribe page where you’ll see a list of each of the blogs with a rough idea of how often something new is posted.

Twitter Transition To Post News

Rather than repeat what I’ve already written, I encourage you all to read Twitter Flames Out – Post.News Best Alternative For Me that I recently wrote on our sister Web Design Solutions Unleashed blog. In short, I don’t feel Twitter will be a relevant channel much longer and I strongly believe that Post.news will be a better alternative for my needs. I encourage you to all join Post and follow me on Post.

Vehicle Templates Unleashed

Our Vehicle Templates Unleashed site is a close collaboration with the folks at MR-Clipart in Germany. They’ve been working on some changes of their own for quite some time. I can’t reveal those changes now, but we are expecting the results of the change to happen within the next month. Don’t worry, it is a very positive change though there may be a day or two of hustling on my part to adapt to their change. We also expect them to release a new product line in addition to the existing vehicle templates. Once we have more to announce, we’ll do so in the Vehicle Templates Unleashed blog.

WordPress Web Design and Divi

For those who follow me closely, you’ll know that the majority of my work the last few years has involved building WordPress Web sites for clients. In 2015 I found the Divi theme from Elegant Themes and it truly unleashed my design process. Not only does it provide me a powerful tool for building sites, it has an amazing community of users of all levels.

Once I put CorelDRAW in the rear view window, I wasn’t doing a lot of teaching. Mainly because I needed to find a topic that drew my passion. Divi has done that and I feel there is an area where my teaching can provide a valuable service to the community. Therefore I’ll be launching the Divi Unleashed site in the near future. For those paying close attention, links to it were added to some of our sites already. If you visit the site today, you’ll likely see a “Coming Soon” page as we still haven’t launched the full site. You do have the ability to get a free child theme for Divi right now. I don’t have an exact launch date yet but I’ll be really surprised if it isn’t in the first half of January 2023.

I also love to give advice to folks on easy ways they can improve their existing Web sites. It is something I do often with my Web design clients. I wanted to find a way to offer these quick tips to a larger audience and we’ll be launching a new product in the near future on Web Design Solutions Unleashed offering analysis and advice for a very reasonable cost to anyone with a Web site. Once again, I don’t have an exact date when it will be launched, but it should be in the next week or so. We’ll announce details in the Web Design Solutions Unleashed blog as soon as it is launched.

Photo by Håkon Grimstad on Unsplash