Where to start! What a year 2008 was (to recap this was 2007’s review).

So 2008 was all about collaboration, online, with local colleagues and forging new projects and relationships with clients and friends alike, here’s what happened at Callender Creates:

• 2008, the year my girlfriend started to use the mobile web!
• Recovered from a big theft at home during a new year trip to India
• Moved office from the North Laine to The Werks in Hove
• Proposed to my lovely girlfriend in Sussex, married her in the Peak district and honeymooned in Cornwall – magic!
• Networked and partied at SxSw 2008, and photos here
• Attended The Future of Web Design in London
• Moved house within Brighton
• Designed and developed a variety of ecommerce, content managed and social networking sites for a variety of UK based clients, startups, agencies, local government and councils
• Saw Neil Young play a live open air gig in Kent
• Sponsorship for local conferences – BarcampBrighton and the Head conference
• Pitched on large projects in collaboration with a number of development companies. From startup to local government tenders
• Attended part of the UX Week run by Norman Nielsen Group in Amsterdam
• Judge in partnership with the Brighton Farm for the Brighton DIMAS awards

Our biggest achievement in 2008
To take on large projects and successfully work collaboratively with local colleagues and achieve results at much higher quality than a individual would be able to produce.

Sites I visited on a daily basis in 2008

• Twitter
• BBC
• Google Reader (RSS subscriptions)
• Popurls
• Google Analytics
• ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb have done a big list of the top 100 products of 2008

Looking ahead into 2009 – Guardian online have picked the web’s cream of the crop, their latest selection finds that location-based services, work-anywhere collaboration and video are prominent –
100 top sites for the year ahead

To all the people we’ve worked with in 2008, to all our readers, family, friends, peers and everybody else. A big thank you and looking forward to more success and interesting work in 2009.

A list of the most popular articles on Callender Creates in 2008

• Top tips for HTML email development
• Geek desk spaces
• Email newsletter statistics
• Essential web design and development conferences
• Callender Creates website redesign
• Pagerank – A client guide
• Top 5 time management tips
• Online charts and diagrams

From a recent patent application filed by Google for ranking blog search, one of the three things a blog should have is a blogroll, and being included in some high-quality ones will help too.

Google Blog Search has been gaining fans, just as its web search did years ago, thanks to sophisticate ranking technology. Have you moved your blog searching to Google, or do Technorati or other blog searches work for you instead?

SEO by the Sea blogger Bill Slawski has made a recent blog post about a filing by Google for ranking blog search turned up several points that could help a blog show up in a search, or keep it from being a factor.
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