I Used To Believe gets a makeover

Many of you will already know our website of childhood beliefs, I Used To Believe, started as a personal project back in 2002. You may even own a copy of Butter Comes From Butterflies, the book created from the website in 2004.

It's by far our oldest website that still exists, and was created at a time when websites were found by word of mouth and in newspaper and magazine columns for "best websites to visit". Mat did countless phone interviews before radio phone-in segments and we even visited a studio in Sydney for an interview when we were travelling in Australia.

I Used To Believe website has had a couple of design refreshes over the years, but we've just given it a major new look, with illustrations that fit the quirky, fun nature of the site. We love the cute new characters that illustrate each section.

This is how Mat described I Used To Believe when he was pitching to publishers back in 2002. There are some real throwbacks to websites that were popular at the time (actually b3ta.com still looks pretty much the same as it did then!)

"It really started to take off when I exhibited the book at the Brighton Festival in May this year, where I got about a hundred submissions. The book is really beautiful because you get much more feeling about the entries when they're handwritten. This is the only thing I regret about the website, that it seems a lot less personal. The site launched in June this year, and to begin with I got a couple of new entries a week, increasing slowly. The real breakthrough came when the site was featured in the weekly newsletter of a British humour site, b3ta.com - within an hour of the newsletter going out I had received 300 new entries - in the first week after it was featured by b3ta we got about 2,000. There are currently about 6,500 entries on the site.

The website is very popular, with numerous links and awards on the internet including Yahoo’s pick of the day. It has also been featured in the press. Among others, it was the subject of an article in the Melbourne Sunday Herald Sun and featured in The Guardian on October 26th and the November 7th edition of The New York Times."

The website now has nearly 80,000 beliefs, and we still run it as fun, free website. Submit your own belief if you haven't already!