Marketing hard!

Yes, just like I said I would in my "year ahead" post below, I'm really pushing my marketing at the moment. My target is to find at least two opportunities per day; yesterday and today it's been people I know and agencies I respect. There's a few of them, too, so that should continue for a while.

I've also joined EMMA today - the East of England Multimedia Alliance. Having worked at the East of England Development Agency, I have something of an unfair advantage in knowing about networking organisations like this... and I intend to join as many as possible. EMMA is free, so even if I don't get any leads from it, I've lost nothing. The benefits, of course, include better search engine listing because there are more incoming links; better links with other EMMA members; and a central place to find tendering opportunities. They also run events, so I'm going to try to get along to one or more of those and meet some more people.

Other marketing activity has included updating Maltpress.co.uk to include my new contact details (thanks to Skype, I have my own land-line number now) and - at long last - working on JuicyFly.com a bit more. It's about half done now, and I hope to get it finished tonight. Then work begins on a new toy - some PHP image manipulation - before I re-do Cambridge.IsHome again. Then the empire will be up-to-date, which will be very, very nice.

Award winner...

Last night was the East Anglian CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) PRIDE awards - which I went along to, and at which the project I was there with (Running the Gauntlet) won two gongs. A gold and a silver.

My role in the project was as an internal consultant - providing advice and support for the electronic communications part of the campaign. Because one of the awards was for integrated PR campaign, I'm rather proud of my involvement. It shows that what I'm doing now is something I'm actually pretty good at and I can prove the results I'm capable of getting; a job for today is updating maltpress.co.uk to highlight the award.

I'm also rather pleased that I'll be getting a copy of the physical award which will be taking pride of place on my window-sill. Oh, and the fact that I wore a self-tied bow-tie - although I did have to have help tying it...

EEDA, my former employers, won five awards in total last night - including the Grand Prix overall prize for an internal communications campaign. It was incredibly nice to sit and bask in the reflected glory for an evening.

The global web - a challenge for the web professional

As long as I've been writing professionally - for over six years now - I've been aware of the need to write for people who don't necessarily have English as a first language. Whether it's writing for an international intranet for a pharmaceutical company or for a regional website recently in the news for initiatives on migrant workers, there's always been some reason to bear that in mind with what I do. It's not just about internationalisation - the average UK reading age is apparently 9 years old. Factor in dyslexia and learning difficulties and the non-written aspects of web deisgn and build suddenly become incredibly important.

What's been an interesting challenge recently is working on a website which isn't in my native language, but in Italian, which I don't really know a word of. It really drives home some of the things you need to think about with the language you use and the way people use visual cues on a site. In the research stages of the project I'm working on I've found myself muddling through several sites simply with what little GCSE Latin I can remember and the images the sites use.

It's taught me a lot - especially about the assumptions we make regarding design:

• Photos are at first sight a lot less ambiguous than most stick-figure diagrams might be - but there's so much detail in them you never know what's the important bit. There's a photo of a man wearing a pilot's uniform. Does the section it links to relate to men? Men of a certain age? Professionals? Pilots alone? Strip all the distractions and present a representation of an action, a profession, a type of person and things become clearer. Subconsciously we know that if a detail is present in a simple diagram, it's probably there for a reason.
• You can often muddle by with words which are similar in several languages. Useful for European languages with similar roots, but of no use with other languages.
• Big chunks of text suddenly become even more daunting. They're bad enough at the best of times but in a different language you switch off immediately and start looking for pictures, numbers, anything you can relate to. Use this - make contact numbers, email addresses, maps, names, prices, anything internationally recognisable - stand out by using bold formatting and bullet points.

Working with bilingual sites is actually quite easy, if you have the money - there are plenty of content management systems out there with multi-lingual support, and if you can afford someone to do the translation for you it's not a problem. It's when money is tight but you still want to open your market internationally - or even multi-culturally across one small area - that you need to address the way you write, design and build your site.

Corporate life spoils you

I'm finding this out more and more lately. It's the little things which you never think about until, like me, you suddenly have lots and lots of time.

The big things - like regular pay, sick leave, having people around you, IT support - I never took those for granted. I was always grateful for them and knew I'd miss them when I was gone. But the following things, I have discovered, are the ones office-bods never think about until they have to start paying for them from their own pockets.

• A decent mouse. I'm getting fed up with cleaning desk-scuzz out of the rollers of my cheap mouse; but an optical mouse costs money I don't really have at the moment.
• All the red-tape and paperwork and suspicion. I have to fill in a form to prove I'm an actual business to the VAT man. Not that I mind, really; it's good that they check and, I suppose, if they didn't you could get away with all sorts. But I don't have a dedicated business landline, and that's a matter of suspicion, apparently.
• Having cups of tea made for you. I still drink a silly amount of tea, but rarely have it made for me any more. It surprised me how grateful I was on Friday when my brother did it for me.

It's been one of those weeks when I've wondered a little bit what I'm actually doing this for. It's been hard work. But then I look at the other option; wasting my life in a job where I have no prospects or control over what I do; taking the easy route; not feeling satisfied. And I think of the Friday morning I had, in the company of possibly one of the nicest men I've ever met, who made me lovely Italian coffee and put my mind at rest that I'm not alone in this at all. For a couple of hours that day, it all made perfect sense.

Hello and goodbye

It's been a difficult couple of days, to be honest. Some hellos and some goodbyes:

Hello - to the new version of Blogger. I'll be sorting the template out tomorrow, and taking advantage of the new-found ability to tag posts with keywords - and to generate feeds for each keyword, which is going to make it very easy for me to choose whether or not to put posts on my websites.

Goodbye - to the car I loved, my MG Midget, once called Monty. It was bought today and it was a real wrench to see it go - there was a tear in my eye as it drove away for a new life. Still, it's paid the wages for this month, which is good - any paid work for November is a bonus.

Hello - to some new contacts, who I met at the excellent EEDA event last night - the Ideas Exchange. Yes, I used to work at EEDA - I ran their website for three years. It was good to see the staff there again, because they're good friends, and I also got to meet some very friendly new people and found out that I'm not alone with the fears and worries I have starting this business.

Goodbye - to the routine of Cambridgeshire Enterprise Agency training courses on a Wednesday. I've done all the ones I can afford now. They were very, very good, and a great way to meet new people.

Hello - to a new phone, which doesn't work. Damn. Back to the shop tomorrow.

Things are going to pick up soon, I'm sure. But for the last couple of days it's been incredibly, incredibly hard work and quite lonely.