This blog has been long overdue an update, but I have some good excuses! Since my last update I have been to two web conferences, the first being OpenWeb 3 in Southampton on the 11th of June and the second being @media in London last Thursday and Friday, I'll talk more about those in a second; there's also been a bereavement in the family which meant I had to take time away from my desk, but lastly, there have been some internal changes here at my studio.

For the past six years, since I was 18, I have been trading under the name Mallmus, which was once Mallmus Design and then became the more well-known MallmusMedia!, in the beginning it was great, things were exactly as I'd dreamed, while I was still a student I'd managed to generate income and stared to build up a brand around myself. The first people who hired me asked "what do you call yourself, what is your business called?", and I shamefully admit that I decided to use the name of a character from a game, a wizard called Mallmus, and before I knew it I'd become "that Mallmus guy who does logos" and the name stuck.

At first it didn't bother me, without really understanding why or how I had started a business, people were willing to pay me for what I love doing, so I didn't have second thoughts about the brand I was building. After I'd finished studying, quit my day jobs and decided to do this web design malarkey full-time some interesting real-world situations became apparent again and again.

The first, which probably sounds the silliest, people couldn't pronounce my businesses name. If I were on the phone and needed to tell someone my email address, which was simply "adam@mallmusmedia.com", I had to spell Mallmus; or the other person would pronounce it "Mul-mass", "Mall-mass" or "Mal-moos". To start with this could be seen as an upside, a quirky and original name, something unique that people grow to like and remember, but over time this became more of a problem.

The second situation, which more recently has become more of a problem, people couldn't instantly tell what it is "Mallmus" does just from the name. Since Virgin Media appeared I'd genuinely been asked if I do broadcasting and telecommunications. The "media" part of the name came about in 2007 when I had a series of clients all wanting to have lots of videos, audio and tap into the rise of social networking, I thought to myself "I'm not just doing design here, this is a broad spectrum of services I'm offering", so the word "media" seemed appropriate, it encompassed the many different channels of communication my clients wanted to use to reach their customers.

When I was a student my favourite tutor told me a piece of advice, he said "never ever name your company after yourself, always choose a trade name." he said, "If everything goes wrong its difficult to re-brand your own name and start again, trading as a business name means you can instantly disappear when it goes wrong", I believed this to be solid advice, which is another reason I stuck to the name Mallmus.

Its become clearer to me over the past 18 to 24 months that my reputation is probably the most important thing in this industry, and in some ways the name Mallmus was holding the progression of my brand and my reputation back. So this is why I've decided to change the name simply to Adam Wintle Design.

This is also an indication that it's not always me trading only as myself, but I still have small teams working on projects and I still hire sub-contractors and freelancers, but I'm the driving force behind the brand, and it's generally me who wins the projects and gets the clients.

This brings me to the second part of this blog, which is all about web conferences. I won't give an in-depth review like I did in my Future of Web Design post, but instead go over the highlights.

At this OpenWeb, Paul Boag, one of the directors of Headscape came down to Southampton to give a presentation titled Getting Your Clients to Say Yes. His talk was filled with tips for project managers and freelancers; its great seeing Paul speak at such a small event like this, it gives people like myself and small businesses an opportunity to ask experts with years of experience in this industry a few question.

Alongside Paul was Kevin Wilson from We Collaborate and Jof Arnold, both run small businesses and both spoke about developing applications for the iPhone, their presentations had solid advice for anyone thinking about developing for the iPhone platform, both guys had been though Apple's tough app vetting process and had some great insight for those looking to go down that path.

@media 2009 Hot Topics session with Jason Santa Maria, Jon Hicks, Douglas Crockford, Jeremy Keith and Chris Wilson - View more of my photos from the conference.

My next web conference of the month was @media, I'd been looking forward to this event for about six months and it met and surpassed all of my expectations.

It was my first two day conference and only the second I'd been to in London; the line-up of speakers was extraordinary, some best-selling authors in the web design industry, as well as designers and developers from renowned companies and great portfolios.

The highlight of the event for me was seeing Andy Clarke, Andy Budd, Dan Rubin and Jason Santa Maria speak, and having the chance to meet them in person; each presentation was to a very high standard, all on topic and very engaging.

There were two after parties, the first which was between the two days was organised officially by the Guardian newspaper. There was a tab behind the bar and a great atmosphere, it gave me an opportunity to network and chat with the speakers, after the party a small group and I moved on to a restaurant for a meal and by chance some of the speakers were there also; so overall the after party was great fun.

The second after party was at the conference centre, they opened a bar, and this gave me the opportunity to do some last minute networking and get some more business cards and contacts.

I may blog about my experiences at @media again in the near future, there was so much to absorb and towards the end I started to feel a bit of information overload.

So until then thank you for stopping by and I hope you enjoy the new site!