After a few weeks of hectic WordPress theming, I’ve finally unveiled my latest project — Grand Rapids Grub. The website, http://www.grgrub.com, features restaurant reviews from around West Michigan, as well as event listings and an “On the Road” section for reviews from other locations. The project is a collaboration between myself and Rob Kirkbride.

The WordPress theme is a heavily coded magazine theme to fit our tastes. It features user polls, several ways to share articles, and will soon feature the ability to rank restaurants on a star system, as well as other collaborative items. In our first 24 hours online, we received over 100 followers on Facebook, and are now well over 300.

In addition to the website, I produced a logo based off of an orange and dark red color scheme that fits well with the rest of the site.

Anyways, I’d love to hear your thoughts regarding this, so go check out the website and let me know what you think! http://www.grgrub.com

Update: Be sure to follow GR Grub on Facebook and Twitter too!

As many of you have probably already heard, Yahoo! entered into a 10-year agreement with Microsoft today. Yahoo! will feature Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing (which must be related to the sound that Windows errors make). Despite the two companies joining forces, there is no way that they can surpass Google’s dominance in the search engine market.

Why? Look at the numbers. Google owns 67% of the global search engine market as it stands today. Combined, Yahoo! and Microsoft make up a mismal 11% of the market. Unless Google drastically changes the way they work for the worse (which I see no signs of), or if Microsoft and Yahoo! both know something that we don’t, Google will remain on top.

Sure, it’s a great marketing strategy to join forces like this. It gives Microsoft a heck of a lot more users for Bing, and gives Yahoo a better search engine than what they currently have. It makes sense for both companies. But in order to catch Google, they’ll need to do a little bit more.

First of all, welcome to the new eslercreative.com. Those of you who have been following me over the past few months have seen now three different iterations of my site, all for good reason. While each of those designs were uploaded to my server rather quickly, without a second thought really, this design has been carefully looked over, and I’m quite pleased with the end product. Gone is the orange and yellow colors that served as my color scheme “sunset” for the last few years. Back is my “steel blue” look, which had gone missing for the past three years or so.

And for the first time, I have a personal website completely coded in CSS and XHTML, and 100% validated by W3C standards. I have been doing this for quite a while now with client sites, and I’m so glad I finally made the switch with my own site.

Anyways, now to this business of what I like to call my “notebook.” Past designs have included a similar idea, but it was never really implemented well. I’m starting completely from scratch with this version, powered by a custom WordPress theme. It’ll serve as a central hub for tips and techniques of all things marketing — whether it be web design and programming or branding. In addition to this, the notebook will serve as my news board, where I’ll make occasional announcements having to do with projects I’ve been working on.

So that’s my new website. Just to give you a little taste of what’s ahead, I’m planning on relaunching the AQ STARS site sometime later this summer (you can see the mockup in my Work section). I’m also working on moving over all my past website projects to valid CSS and XHTML programming. I’ve already done this with a few clients, including the Building Bridges of Hope website.

That’s it for now, but stay tuned. If you have any ideas or suggestions on what you’d like to see this notebook become, feel free to let it be known in the comments.