S3 Web Design have launched a new website for Cupcakes To Your Door, a Norfolk based supplier of cupcakes, birthday cakes and celebration cakes. Reasonable prices, fast delivery and wholesome recipes – no “bought in” mixes used. See the new website with lots of lovely pictures and the online cup cake shop.
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.
2010 is Our NEW YEAR when Desire Solutions CMS our SEO friendly content management system is properly released and our resolution is that it will be fantastically successful. I have already set up several websites using it and have been amazed at the speed of setting those websites up. And of course they have been indexed very quickly by Google as we knew!
See our SEO Friendly CMS at Desire Solutions CMS, where you can SEO in a few seconds with no bloated code or more importantly rewritten code – how annoying is that even with WP! – No FTP so upload is fast and effective.
You will know that for a few days we have been pretty much snowed in in Norfolk. The water in the stand-pipes and under our motorhome froze solid and so for a few days we have had no running water. The only water we had was what we had sensibly collected in the water containers. So we have not had a shower for quite a while… well finally today the pipes thawed a little just before the -5 predicted for tonight! So we dived in the shower, ok yes it was cold, there was no way our little water heater could cope with the low base temperature of the water, but I do not think I have ever enjoyed a shower as much!!
Anyway despite the weather, or maybe because of it, we have been working hard. After all there’s not been much else to do. So I have set up 4 websites over the last few days and have played with my design tools doing artwork. Best of all though has been really playing around with CSS style sheets which I only started to learn a couple of weeks ago. Mike of course is expert at all the coding etc but I want to learn too. I am particularly pleased with my latest effort which is a portfolio for S3 Web Design. Here is a picture of it. I used CSS to create a gallery effect.
S3 Web Design Portfolio
Yes I love living in our motorhome but today I am just very glad that we do not live in close proximity to other people as beautiful as the snow is our pipes have frozen so no shower today…
It is so incredibly beautiful but living without running water is strange however we are resourceful and have thawed out the well water tap, we just have to hope that the pipes under the motorhome thaw soon. Despite the weather however it was still warm enough to sleep last night and today I have put a chicken in the oven so its wonderful and toasty warm in here and of course the sun is streaming in warming us up.
We put our Christmas decorations up and I love the grotto effect!
Christmas Decorations
The decorations are wonderfully tacky but have really made me feel Christmassy at last.
Our first snow in the campervan. We are still parked up in the lovely field in Belton, Norfolk with the donkey! We ahve now been living for 2 months on the road in our antique Bedford CF340 aged 31. This morning we woke up to about an inch of snow. Everyone assumes we will be cold but nothing could be farther from the truth. We are very cosy and particularly so at night despite having no heating on. There is something about our bed above the cabin that just keeps us wonderfully warm.
I think part of it is that we have become acclimatised. I realised that yesterday when eating a bourbon biscuit – I was perfectly warm but realised that the cream inside the bourbon was rock solid!
Workwise we continue to work long long hours but I have spent the last week or so mastering CSS to try in some way to catch up with Mike – some hope! But I have managed to right the style sheet for 2 websites, one of them particularly complex with equal sized columns regardless of the amount of text in each, so I am pretty happy with myself.
Obviously business can slow up quite a bit just before Christmas and this did concern me but we have had calls from 4 businesses in Norfolk to set up meetings the first week back after Christmas to discuss some pretty large websites so I’m happy. Very few people walk away after meeting us regarding websites so we are hopeful of a reasonable amount of business from those meetings.
Recently I provided SEO advice to a larger corporation and am waiting so see if I get a long term contract from them. It’s all very exciting.
I am looking forward to our first Christmas on the road, Christmas dinner in a motorhome, wonderful. We have decorated the motorhome with tinsel and lights and it is like living in a grotto – it makes me chuckle each time I walk back in. I have taken some photos and will put a pic in when I have taken the photos off the camera, now I must get back to work!