In January of this year I started a little bit of an experiment in affiliate marketing by launching a blog called Carbon Fiber Gear. The blog covers a variety of “cool” products made with or out of carbon fiber. To give you an idea, some examples I’ve written about are:

• Rob Diamond Carbon Fiber Belt Buckle
• Blackbird Rider Carbon Fiber Guitar
• Carbon Fiber & Aluminum Tissue Box
• Carbon Fiber Wallet
• Bell & Ross Carbon Fiber Watches

While the site isn’t making a ton of money, I’ve started to really see some potential in it. I have plans to further expand it out, including a possible direct store, and maybe even our own branded products…but that’s all down the line.

When I initially launched the site, I was using a pretty basic Wordpress template that anybody could use. With the new custom design launched on this blog, I really had the itch to give Carbon Fiber Gear its own unique look. On top of that, I wanted to try and tackle doing everything on my own. When I re-did this blog, I designed it myself, but then worked with Suffolk Software to code it up and integrate it into Wordpress. If anything, re-doing Carbon Fiber Gear would be a learning experience in Wordpress and HTML/CSS…and great practice…both of which are needed.

I managed to do everything from the design in Photoshop to the blog being integrated into Wordpress in about 3 days (Although I did work on it pretty much non-stop). I still have a few things on my to-do list, but the majority of everything is completed. I’m really proud of the work, and feel fairly comfortable integrating a site into Wordpress now.

I have some really interesting articles I plan on writing for this blog in terms of the entire process behind re-doing Carbon Fiber Gear. For those of you interested in what it takes, it will be a must read. In the meantime, I’d like to give a thanks to these two people:

• Mubs from Suffolk Software - Mubs was extremely helpful in answering a few questions here and there when I was stuck on either some stupid CSS quirk or trying to get something to work correctly with Wordpress. I was also able to recycle some code that he had done to create the theme on this blog…which saved me a ton of time/work myself. An example of this is the comments section on a post, that was restyled and rehashed on Carbon Fiber Gear from this blog.
• Collis Ta’eed from Eden.cc - Collis has been on fire lately in the web scene. He owns quite a few sites that you may know of: PSDTuts, NetTuts, FlashDen, AudioJungle, and FreelanceSwitch. While he didn’t directly help me, he (and his work) has been a huge source of inspiration. Enough of it is visible in the site that it definitely deserves some props.