Happy Easter to everyone especially our S3 Web Design clients.
I hope you get lots of lovely easter eggs but I must say I am quite disappointed with the Smarties one we had a few days ago, yes I know it was early but it was one of those evenings.
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When I wrote the last post I really thought we had had the last of the snow but NO, it came again… the water stand-pipes froze… no water again. To have a piping hot shower would be such bliss.
Just my luck that the one winter I decide to get out of the rat-race and do something different we end up with the worst winter for 40 years. My daughter Emma joked we should at least get a book out of this and she may well be right. Amazing as this has been it has fundamentally put the perspective solidly back into life. When you have to fetch and carry your drinking water by hand, walking over two sodden fields, you certainly treasure every drop you have, especially when the stand-pipe could freeze at any time in this weather. And hot water that runs out of taps rather than having to be heated up in my stockpot is a luxury I can at the moment only dream of!
Business has however been great, we have a number of websites we are working on and, more so than at any time, we are very happy with the designs and functionality we have come up with. They are all being designed with our content management system Desire Solutions CMS and as the person who normally ends up putting the content in, I have to say it is a dream to use compared to WordPress etc.
We should have all 3 websites completed this week hopefully and then we have a few more quotes that should come in. So I am hoping that by the time it comes to my Birthday on Friday we have a lot to celebrate.
Now I must sleep, although we have been very good and rather than working to stupid times in the morning have been disciplined and been asleep at a reasonable time and up at 7 each morning. One of the most difficult things when you both do not have conventional work is to maintain the routine of sanity but getting up and hearing the birds tweet is definately working for me.
Why do a whole load of spammers who write using symbols I have never seen before think I will want their comment on my posts!! If I can’t read/understand what you have written it will go straight to trash/spam.
Plus if you have a generic email eg hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc then I will only accept your comment if you DO NOT leave a website link. Website links where the email comes from a different domain will be trashed/marked as spam. A bit of a rant but it’s annoying – I know you won’t even read this post but it makes ME feel better!!!!
Am I the only one who feels that Twitter is increasingly not available. Why is this? It does rather hold internet marketing up, suppose I will have to go back to the washing!
Does anyone have a quick and easy template for setting up Google analytics for just checking where the website visitors come from ie country, no of unique visitors, bounce rate, travel source ie referral website or search etc and which page they enter, which they leave from, average pages viewd and average time on site.
Well we are still in our field and finally the snow has gone so now we live in a marsh! The snow in melting has turned our beautiful field into a quagmire, I’m sure one side of the campervan is sinking faster than the other as everything rolls to the back of the kitchen worktop.
Obviously now we are reaching the heady heights of even 4C the stand-pipes have finally defrosted which means a celebratory shower today I think. I cannot tell you how much am I looking forward to that. Then afterwards we must work like crazy as we have had our best week ever in web design and need to get numerous quotes off and numerous websites set up. If it can just continue like this it will be wonderful.
Mike’s Content Management System is flying off the shelves, you might say, and from my point of view it is an exceptionally lovely and easy to use CMS package to deal with.
We met up with Jenny and Mark of Research Plus on Thursday and had a great meeting and lunch and are absolutely delighted to be redesigning their website. We have known Jenny and Mark since we first set our business up and they have always come up with great ideas for us.
We also met up again with Rhonda Deal of RD Homestaging and should be releasing her new website over the next couple of weeks. Rhonda also is a long standing customer of ours and it is a pleasure to redesign her website.
David Tyrell of Tyrell Therapy has now expanded his business into London and so this week we have updated his website also and Merv of ASAL also wants to expand his website so we have our work cut out over the next few weeks.
Actually reading through that it is obvious that we are getting a lot of return business which is fantastic and means that our original philosophy we drew up when starting the business is actually happening. When we started up we asked people what they disliked about web designers and what they wanted and then we tried to build our business around those principles. You can see what our principles are on our About Us page on the main S3 Web Design website.
This week there has been lots of news about Google so most of my blog posts have been about that. I have also this week redeveloped the SEO4all website and added an SEO blog to that.
Back to work now.
Well we are still, slightly unbelievably, camped out in Belton surrounded by snow snug in our lovely little Bedford Campervan. It is the most amazingly beautiful way to live, the view through the windows is idyllic and we have everything we need plus lots of people to love. What could be better?
Anyone who knows us knows we really never really stop working but tomorrow is our first proper day of work for 2010 and I am really looking forward to it. Much as we work together, Mike and I, we have a meeting first thing to make our plans for this year and it so excites me. I live, eat and whatever with this man, he is my best friend, but much as I think we are undisciplined at times we are exceptionally good at the work stuff. We agreed 2 weeks ago to have a “move forward” meeting on the 4th and strangely we have stuck to that and I know this because we have both at times noted stuff down but not discussed it.
I really don’t know why I am so excited but I just know that when we sit down together and discuss business a million ideas appear that neither of us had thought of before. Never have I met a brain that so inspires mine. Never a man who’s intellect beats me, but only sometimes of course!
I am thrilled by the idea of a new year and a new decade and hope you all are too. If not then just visit our websites, particularly the art ones and take advantage of some logo designs etc. I will put a link up for the free logo website soon.
We hope you all have as happy and prosperous new year as we hope to have xx
PS Just a few of you do please pray however for temperatures above zero as yet again the water is frozen so no running water!! We use so few resources we at least have the satisfaction of knowing we are ecologically sound!