About the author: Logoangel.com is a website dedicated to offering custom logo designing services at extremely affordable rates. We also design marketing collaterals which can be intergrated with the logo designing service and can even help you get printed marketing materials delivered at your door steps.

If you are thinking about designing new websites or web templates, you should take time to research before making some crucial choices. You don't want to spend your money on designing a worthless websites that can only spoil your image. The following article is about basic choices you need to make before developing a new website.

The first international SOA Symposium was held on the 7th and 8th of October in the Amsterdam ArenA. Ironically enough, the abbreviation "SOA" in The Netherlands is the translation of a STD (Sexually transmitted disease). But at the symposium, everyone knew what a SOA ment for programmers: a Service-oriented architecture.

A little background on this article: As some of you already know, I'm a student at the College of Arnhem and Nijmegen Computer science Communication. I'm doing my minor right now, which is about EAD (Enterprise Application Development). Not going into further details here, but a SOA is one part of the EAD. This is the main reason why my fellow students, teachers and myself were present at the symposium.

This post is a review about my personal impressions of each speaker session and the overall symposium, just in case you're planning to visit the next International SOA Symposium and sharing my thoughts. This are the speaker sessions that I've been following.

7th of October, 2008

1. Art Ligthart, Thomas Erl, Sandy Carter - Opening Keynotes*
2. Thomas Erl - The Architecture of Service-Orientation*
3. Sandy Carter - Understanding SOA and Web 2.0*
4. Umit Yalcinalp - Enterprise Mashups with SOA*
5. Mark Little - Using REST and WS-* Together for SOA*
6. Thomas Erl - Introducing Design Patterns

8th of October, 2008

1. Art Ligthart, Dennis Wisnosky, David Chappell - Opening Keynotes
2. Prakash Narayan - Developing Killer SOA Apps with Java EE*
3. Chris Riley - Design Patterns for Web Service Contract Versioning*
4. Andre Tost - Implementing Service Models with Java
5. Mark Little - Web Services and Transactions*
6. Brian Loesgen - A Preview of Microsoft Oslo: How Oslo will Help Build More Sophisticated SOA Solutions

Sessions marked with an asterisk (*) are explained in further details below.

I've already told you before I'm working on a new layout for Marcofolio.net. I don't know when this design will go live (I'm really busy these days) but I'll promise you: It'll be a lot different than this one.

The design is a matter of taste, but articles is another story. Therefor I'm requesting feedback on articles you would like to see on Marcofolio.net. Just like other websites / blogs, I really want to bring the best to my readers.

If you have any other ideas that are interesting, please share by placing it in the comments. I'm all ears and maybe your idea will make it in the next update of Marcofolio.net. So the question really is:

What do you want to see on this website?

Thank you for your time and helping me improve this website.

Yesterday the 9rules network released their list of accepted sites from round 7. And guess what: Marcofolio.net made the list and is now a 9rules member. I made it in round 7, together with a couple of blogs that I personally like too, like Fuel Your Creativity, Freelance Folder, Designer-Daily and Tutorial9 .

Examples of blogs that already are member of the network are SmashingMagazine, EliteByDesign and PSDTuts. These are examples of the high quality sites on 9rules.

If you're a 9rules member, please share the experience with us (What are the benefits for you?). Or what is the reason you don't want to join this network? Discuss.

Everything has to start small. The same counts for blogs. These days, the blog-o-sphere is dominated by a couple of blogs that have many readers. I'm pretty sure you've heard (and seen) blogs like PSDTuts, Abduzeedo and Noupe. One day, I hope Marcofolio.net becomes one of those big websites too.

But did you ever wonder, how these awesome websites looked liked in the good old days? Look no further, because here's a list showing blog layouts before they were big.

The image above is showing my website (Marcofolio.net) on Jun 09, 2002. It wasn't my domain back then, so I don't know what kind of website it was. If you want to take a guess, I'm all ears.

This article is showing the old designs of popular blogs that currently have a beautiful layout (mostly design blogs). It's possible that the moment the screenshots were taken, the owner of the site is someone else than now (like my website).