Crenk

I would like to welcome everyone to the new Crenk design. Before I run through the new features of the design I would like to thank our designer and coder, Astrit. Astrit has a great company which really helped us make our ideas become reality.

As you will notice with the new Crenk the design and branding has completely changed and become a lot more simplistic. The logo and tag line has remained the same as well as the highlighted red colour. However, in terms of basic navigation there are a lot of changes. Navigation now is more recognisable on this design and each channel is easier to navigate into. Additionally, you will noticed that we now have our most recent article list in the left column. This is aimed to help making content easier to find within the design.

The other major changes are in terms of advertising. Crenk now has a top 728 x 90 banner in which acknowledge some of our main sponsors. Additionally, a 300 x 250 banner can be found in the right column, as well as a 160 x 600 at the bottom of the left column. Crenk is very thankful for our sponsors because they are the ones that help us stay in business. Finally, we are going to open 125 x 125 advertising which will be located in the right column above the 300 banner. If anyone is interested in one of those positions, please drop us an email and let us know.

Finally, I would like to welcome our new contributor Abdylas, who will be adding to our You’ve Been Crenked section which focuses on startup reviews. Keep and eye out for more contributors in the near future, additionally if you are interested in joining the Crenk team please drop me an email and let us know why you would be a good addition to the team.

Well I hope you all like the new design, but im sure that is not going to happen. If you have any ideas or feedback you would like to add, it would be much appreciated.

Just when you thought iMac had everything, now there’s even more. More powerful Intel Core 2 Duo processors. And more memory standard. Combine this with Mac OS X Leopard and iLife ’08, and it’s more all-in-one than ever. iMac packs amazing performance into a stunningly slim space.

Im not too sure why I am really posting about this new product offering from Apple, but I thought it looked very sexy and I simple just want one!

Revision 3 has launched the new version of their website. The site has been under development for more than five months and has some great new features. Revision 3 is basically a production company that launches shows based around a tech type theme and the releases are only on their site.

The design itself is a great improvement on the last site. Overall, it is so much cleaner and has a much better generic layout. Plus, there are no stupid Google ads on a professional companies website.

The site has much better branding for Revision 3 itself, plus has better branding for each individual show. They have made it easier to find their shows and to find episodes you might have missed.

The key improvement for me is that the shows are now on a much bigger player. 555 x 337 window. Before i really hated coming to the site and only finding a small player with an option to increase to full screen, but this has been much improved.

Revision 3 has been talking about more improvements to come, so stay tuned.

Napster have announced that they are dumping their desktop client and re-launching with a new web-based version. Napster customers will now be able to listen to their music from any computer anywhere in the world. This will hopefully enable Napster to also develop embeddable widgets that can push their products on possible web enabled devices.

Napster is still going to be based as a subscription model, which most industry experts think is holding back the company, because it makes Napster incompatible with the iPod. Consequently Napster has lagged behind Apple’s end to end iTunes system which reportedly controls 70% of the digital music market.

UMG has announced they are now happy with iTunes and the revenue split, so it is only a matter of time before DRM free becomes standard and Napster will really need to gain some market share before Apple.

If you would like to see a slideshow of the new Napster service, please head over to Crave.

I have made the decision to start a new promotion tool here on Crenk! Instead of selling advertising in 125 x 125 banner slots I have decided to give the banner slots away to Web 2.0 companies.

Every month I will be offering 5 (125 x 125 banners) slots to web 2.0 companies either startups or established companies looking to gain more exposure. At the end of each month I will be selecting from random the 5 slots for the next month. There is really no guidelines at present, you just need to email me: info (at) crenk.com , with your banner ad and a little more information about your company. If you are selected you will not only get your ad on the site for the month but you will also get a writeup about your company and what you do.

So make sure you email all the info to: info (at) crenk.com, or head over to our contact page and ask for some more information.

There are so many startup and web 2.0 companies out there and I know how hard it can be sometimes to stand out from the crowd, so i hope this helps!

Myspace seems to be finally improving their user interface. Today they released a new beta home page which can be selected after sign-in. For so long myspace was just winning the race in social networking by sheer number of users and customizability options. However, since Facebook has opened up, there seems to be much more of a struggle and Myspace need to pull their finger out and get the site looking professional.

There are still a lot of issues on myspace that annoy me, for example music launching on a profile once it is opened and some profiles are just so high in flash and other objects it just shuts down my browser. With these new interface and nav options it seems to be looking a lot more professional and even has little web 2.0 looking buttons.

Options now include module selection and customizable colour combination. The new profile editor is only available for Internet Explorer users. Well I suppose one step at a time!

It was announced last week that Wordpress would be launching a new release soon, and it happens to be today! Crenk has already upgraded our Wordpress and some new features are: tagging, tag clouds, plugin updates and also the cleaning up of URLs.

So make sure you head over to Wordpress and upgrade now!

I was just surfing around the web as a normally do at the end of a hard day and I just happened to have a look at John Chow, the miscellaneous ramblings of a dot com mogul, and found he has a new blog design.

The old design had pretty much become and institution and there is even a parody of the site, John Cow dot com.

Anyway, John Chow’s new design was done by Nate Whitehill at Unique Blog Design and I must say it is one of the best blog designs I have seen in a while. If the Techcrunch boys are reading this, Michael Arrington, why not get this guy to design your blogs!!

Hangon, why Techcrunch, Nate how about you design a new template for Crenk!!