As you may have noticed we are back with a fusion of our prior homepage design and new elements.

The story behind is much more simple as you might want to believe. Some weeks ago we were on the lookout to give our site a refreshed look. We have 50+ blogs now and all of them have an individual customization that 50+ differs from the standard css that we use. At the minimum the graphical header is different.

So WeblogsInc had a cool idea to simplify the approach to communicate with the three different groups every blog network is communicating with. We used the homepage as an idea for our designers but were not expecting things would be so close. The result was much too close and to put it online was a mistake. That is no doubt my personal mistake as well, as I could have easily looked a little closer to check how it must look like for outsiders. But sometimes things work out differently.

Believe it or not. We certainly do not and did not want to look like WIN in any way. We certainly want to make sure we provide a viable alternative to them and make sure wherever we can that we are not mistaken as WeblogsInc. Clearly - resembling the homepage design did not help this cause!

However to keep things in perspective - a blog network lives from its individual sites and not from its homepage. While branding and CI are important the customer usually does not steer for the homepage first (as he would do with a classic portal) but comes through links or search engines to an individual blog site.

Why did it take us so long? Well again the reason is much more arcane as you may think. CW is very distributed organization. My last company Newtron has offices in India, Singapore, 5 in Germany, Austria, New Jersey, Brazil and some other locations. However product development and design were in one (or at times two offices) in Germany. Even people who tested our applications (all ASP) came to our offices. The mantra was when you are not in the office you can't do any good.

In comparison to that CW has just two offices but development is done in India, US (both coasts), Romania, Poland, Germany, Canada and New Zealand. We have never met the developers, designers or hardware administrators and they have never met their colleagues. This has a lot of advantages but the down side is that the flexibility the company has is also mirrored by the flexibility our developers enjoy.

We took steps to bring a new design up and running on Friday last week. Too bad our main designer got hired away to a Boston based tech startup. Our design crew in Germany was not reachable and as we finally received first mockups we were not happy with the results.

So we simply made sure we can switch back to our old design now as a default. We are still working on something new...

Sorry again for the trouble caused and again we apologize.

However just to make sure whenever we blog something we try to quote all source that are out there. All our content is original or gives source information for each little piece. This policy is not exactly new (we started in January 2004) and have it in place since that time.