Our office will be closed this coming week while we take a much needed vacation to relax, rest up, and get recharged. We will not have internet access where we will be at (going dark for a week), so we will be unable to respond to any support emails until we return to the office on Monday morning June 30th. We hope this does not cause you any inconvenience.

Blueball Design just completed a fairly large and extensive Rapidweaver 3.6 web site www.charlieengle.com, using a modified version of our Blueball Designer Colors 36 theme and Rapidweaver 3.6. Charlie Engle is one of the world's best ultra distance and extreme adventure athletes. Last year he was one of the 3 runners who ran across the entire Sahara Desert (more than 4500 miles) in just 111 days for the first time in history. National Geographic is coming out with a movie this year on this incredible endeavor. There's a lot more on the site about Charlie, his races, and adventures. It's a fun site to discover, look at and read about Charlie Engle's life.

It could not have been done without Rapidweaver 3.6, it's many features, and capabilities! Also invaluable were the Collage plug-in from yourhead.com and Rapidblog from loghound.com. Thanks guys!

The months of November and December will bring a lot of new things from Blueball Design to Rapidweaver and Sandvox users. First a brand new redesigned Blueball web site with a new look, layout and features. There will be several new Rapidweaver themes (at least 3) and Sandvox designs (at least 2) coming as well. And our RW 3.6 theme updates will finally be wrapped up. Stay tuned for more info.

We will be closed and on a much needed beach vacation next week for some serious relaxing, surf fishing, and recharging.

We will not have internet access where we are staying at the beach and will not be able to respond to support requests or other general emails until we return to the office on Monday June 18th.
We are taking the laptops to work a couple of hours each day on new stuff and updates as time allows (at least that's the plan). :D See everyone in a week!

We'll will be out of the office starting tomorrow, and back in on Sunday afternoon. Any support emails sent in during this time will be answered late Sunday or first thing Monday morning.

We've not gone anywhere in case anyone was wondering, just been very busy working behidn the scenes on some custom themes and 7 new Rapidweaver theme layouts. And our new Blueball site redesign is just about complete as well. Stay tuned for more announcements this month!

You never realize how much you depend on your internet access until you lose it. We've been down since yesterday (Thursday) morning. Finally got through to a real live support person at Windstream this morning and it should be resolved by 2 pm this afternoon. Some kind of programming glitch on their end when they did a system update we were told. For those of you trying to email us and expecting a quick response - we'll get back to you this afternoon as soon as we can work through our backlog of email messages. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

After many email requests from Sandvox users, we are happy to announce that we are expanding our product lines and in addition to Rapidweaver themes, we will also be offering original high quality professional Sandvox Designs in the very near future.

With each new Blueball SV Design you will receive at least 2 different width Designs (760px and 960px), detailed ReadMe files explaining the design's features and how to modify elements of the design, and more.

Watch our blog page at our new Sandvox Designs site http://sandvoxdesigns.blueballdesign.com for more details on our new releases.

We are in the process of adding in the theme variations which should be completed tomorrow. Then it will go out for testing Friday and if all goes well will be released over the weekend. Look for more details here soon.

Due to a significant increase in Rapidweaver related support request emails the last 5 days, our response time to these requests is taking a little longer than normal. We try to personally answer each email but with well over 100 a day currently coming in, we are having trouble staying up with them all so please be patient. We will answer them as fast as we can and take them in the order that we received them.

If your support request is with Rapidweaver itself and is asking how to do something within the program, please consider posting the question on the Realmac forum for some help. If it deals with a third party plug-in, please email the plug-in developer directly for assistance. Once this increase drops back to normal our response time will as well.

We have had several recent theme buyers use emails that were not valid so their theme download emails could not be delivered, and we could not follow up with them on their theme support requests that we received. If you have recently purchased our themes and did not receive your email download, please contact us using another email address so we can get you your theme files. This affects only 3 recent buyers. We want to get you your themes that you purchased from us but until you contact us we have no way to make this happen. Thanks!

Developing Rapidweaver Themes has not been the main focus or that large a part of our design business to date. Graphic design and website work has been our mainstay and where the bulk of our business has been focused - i.e. this pays the bills. I just returned from working with a client on our last major design project and with most of our clients off on vacation this month, we are going to devote the next 4 weeks to just Rapidweaver Theme development (ok maybe 90% of the time would be more accurate) and see how many of the 9 themes we have in development we can get out the door in that period. If the return on the themes is enough we will continue devoting a significant portion of our production time in the future to just RW theme releases and custom theme work. We will also be spending more time in the Realmac forum which we have not been able to of late.

We are taking a much needed vacation break at the beach to recharge the batteries. We'll only be gone next week and will be back in on August 7th. All support emails will be answered when we get back in as we will not have any internet access. If you get stuck on something, please check out Realmac's Rapidweaver Support Forum and post your question there. It's a great group of RW users who will be happy to help you out if they can. See you in a week!

We've been hard at work on our normal design projects here and got several large ones out the door to the print vendors finally on Friday. Now we can get back to our new themes and the last theme updates and try to get them wrapped up too this coming week.

Our new theme should be ready to go to final testing on Thursday and will be released over the weekend sometime. It will include some new features for a RW 3.5 theme, but that seems the norm now with all the theme developers trying to one up each other of late. Nothing earth shattering but still pretty cool we think and things that should help the new and experienced RW users alike. We'll make some more posts with bits of info about the theme as we get closer to the final release date. Have a great 4th everyone!

If we seem to be taking a little longer to respond to your email message, please bear with us. Since RW 3.5 was released the amount of emails we usually get in has sky rocketed. We'll get back to you as soon as possible but it may take up to a day now until things level off some. Thanks for your patience!

When you purchase a Rapidweaver theme from us that has been updated to work with Rapidweaver 3.5, you will also receive the theme's 3.2.1 version file. This will allow you to use the theme with RW 3.2.1 until the final version of RW 3.5 is released. Before opening any of your RW 3.2.1 site files up in RW 3.5, we strongly recommend making a back up copy of your RW 3.2.1 site file and storing it in another folder on your hard drive.

Blueball Paradox 1.0 has been tested by the Softpedia labs and certified to be
completely clean of adware/spyware components.

We are offering our new Paradox theme at the low introductory price of just $9 for the next 7 Days. Don't miss out on picking up this minimal professional looking Rapidweaver theme offered at our lowest introductory theme price ever. Click here for details!

Our new theme is just about wrapped up. We decided to add in a few more features to it so this has pushed back the release date until later this week. Look for it on Friday along with some other new stuff from Blueball Design for the Rapidweaver community. More to come soon.

Look for our new PARADOX theme later this week. PARADOX is another cool looking minimal theme from Blueball that gives you a variety of the most requested theme features. A new update for the Phantom and Newzpaper themes will also be emailed out this week to all registered buyers. And check out the new additions to our Theme Showcase page and our NEW showcase "Site of the Week. Thanks again everyone for your support of our theme development efforts. As always, it is very much appreciated. Check back for more info soon on other new theme releases.

We are hard at work on our next new RW theme design and should be releasing it later this coming week after we finish testing it out. Some cool items in the theme layout that all RW users should have fun playing around with. We've also updated our showcase section with many new site additions and added in some more testimonials. Our FAQ section will be updated this coming week as well with more of the most common questions we get asked about our themes and RW. Talk with everyone more soon on our next theme. Thanks - Charlie

We recently completed the development and production of a custom Rapidweaver theme for TBWA China. The theme will be used along with Rapidweaver 3.2 to produce their in-house intranet. For those of you who do not know who TBWA is, they are one of the largest advertising firms in the world. More information on this custom theme and how it was developed will be available soon.

We just added 3 new standard sized 80px by 15px web badges for everyone to use to our Web Badges page. You can click here to check them out. We've also added in some more sites to our theme showcase page so you can see what other Rapidweaver users are doing with our themes.

We've had quite a few requests the last month for Blueball Design and Theme web badges, so we made up a few that you can download and use on your site if you'd like to. Click here to check them out and let us know what you think, or if there's any others you'd like us to make for you.

We were honored that Don at www.screencastsonline.com selected our Designer Colors theme for his new site design. He has pushed the limits of what the theme and Rapidweaver can do, with the end result being a first class site that showcases his informative videocasts and podcasts. Be sure to check out what he has done in the sidebar of his site. Also for anyone new to Rapidweaver, be sure to watch his 3 video tutorials on Rapidweaver. They will be a huge help for anyone just getting started with Rapidweaver and will answer a lot of your questions.

We've added in a lot of new sites to our theme showcase page that are definitely worth checking out. If you'd like to see your site listed in there send us your url and what theme you used and anything special about it you would like us to note. Our next theme's testing is well underway and will be out for final beta testing in a few days. Man if we could lose IE6 it would take a week off of development time. We also just finished up a cool custom theme for a major design company that is very well know. There will be more information on this custom theme in the near future. We will also be updating our Blueball Design site now 1-2 times a week as our schedule permits and will be adding a couple of new features to it over the next 2 weeks. Stay tuned....

A big THANK YOU to everyone who took advantage of our 7-Day Customer Appreciation Theme Sale! The response was more than we expected. As a way to say thanks to everyone, we have permanently reduced the pricing on our top selling Minimal Colors and Ultima Colors themes. Stay tuned for more new things from Blueball very soon.

Wanted to let everyone know that our new site design is out. New copy, images and some new theme designs in the next few days. Check it out and let us know what you think. We will be fine tuning the new site over the next week to make sure everything validates for those of you who might notice it does not at this time.
We've also been busy developing a lot of custom Rapidweaver themes for clients the past 2-1/2 months (39 completed to date) and have not had any new themes out for a while, but now we're ready to go again. Look for lots of new Rapidweaver theme designs coming throughout the next 2-3 weeks from us.