We’re almost there ppl – we’re almost one year old! I actually can’t believe this – it’s been an absolutely fantastic year for Inspired Mag, but we’ll talk about that in a future post. Now I’ll walk you trough some changes, updates and future plans you should be really excited about because we’re bringing much more to the table. Please take a seat!

Social Sharing Bar

First of all, I want to introduce you the new social thingy we’re very proud of – a nice sharing bar you can easily spot on the left (thx Mike). So if you like our posts, we’d buy you a beer we’d be very grateful if you’ll click on the bar and share our articles with your friends (or enemies). Now we have sharing options for Twitter, Stumble, Digg & Facebook, plus the most relevant social news sites for the design niche – Design Bump, Design Float and The Web Blend. We also supported Design Moo but it’s been sold and right now it’s on hold. So if you think we should consider more sharing options, please let me know in the comments.

Facebook Fan Page

A few days ago we’ve launched our Facebook fan page and it’s been such a surprise to see it grow to more than 700 fans so quickly (thx Alex). Anyway, we hope our daily selected stories, news, links & videos we publish almost once an hour will be appealing enough to grow our fanbase even more. BTW, you can check here to see if you are an Inspired Fan – if you get the image above that means you’re not; so if you want a good karma you should press the Become a Fan button right away.

Inspired Publishers

We always supported new blogs in the design community by publishing a roundup every month, but starting this January we began to do more: publishing amazing guest posts from up-and-coming or established bloggers in the design community and introducing their blogs to our readers, compiling a Twitter list with the new Inspired Publishers and offering them exposure trough the widget we show in the sidebar (that means everything they write is seen by our visitors) plus whitelisting the selected blogs for our sister website Inspired News (and there’s another widget in the sidebar for that). A new creative directory it’s also on its way so if you feel you belong to the Inspired Publishers family don’t hesitate to write me an email with your blog and some guest post ideas.

Sister Websites

Inspired News – the one-stop relevant design news service – it’s been our only sister website for a while, but this is gonna change because very soon you’ll see two new websites joining the inspired network. Can’t reveal too much but I must tell you we put a lot of passion & research in these two so the results will really blow your colored socks off.

Inspired Blogging – the secrets behind running a successful design blog

And the biggest announce I’m going to make today is that we’re preparing an exclusive guide on how to get a successful design blog in a short period of time – a small ebook packed with tips, strategies and insights from the team behing Inspired Mag.

That’s it for now guys, I’d be more than happy if you’d leave some comments about our plans and about how Inspired Magazine is going, what would you like to see next on our blog, on our Facebook page, on our Twitter account and so on. Have a great 2010!