2006 in review, 2007 ahead...

Ah, the end of the year. They just seem to be racing by, to be honest. I said in a previous post I'd set some personal goals for 2007 to go with the business goals, so I'll get on to that in a minute. First up, though, 2006 in review. I doubt anyone's interested; this is as much for me to be able to remember what went on this year.

2006 was the year in which, after over a year of planning, umming and ahhing, general scaredness and procrastination, I quit my job and became my own man. Scary? Yes. Worth it? Definitely. It's been the best thing I ever did. I miss the people I used to work with; and, I suppose, the certainty of the pay, but nothing beats the feeling of working for yourself, in your underpants. 2007 is going to be the year it all takes off. The last couple of months were just practice.

2006 was a good year for music; Wolfmother, who I have on iTunes at the moment, were my big discovery for the year. I've been to lots of gigs, too; the Subways, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, local bands, the list goes on. Theatre-wise, I've seen some oddness. Film-wise, Bond was very good, but little else really sticks out.

I discovered the Backstreet Bistro this year, which I fully intend to go to again, when I have some money. Also, Ta Bouche, with nice food, pleasant staff, and free wireless. I've found a love of The Pickerell, which is a great little pub. I've managed to not go to The Snug, the pub I've been intending to try out all year.

I watched the World Cup in Cambridge and didn't enjoy it. I bought a giant china cat from a charity shop and now keep my pens in it.

I fell in love with Apple computers this year, too; my little Mac laptop is the best investment I made all year.

2006 was the year of living like a month; my budgeting exercise. Not exactly fun, but well worth it.

I said goodbye to two great friends this year; Michelle, who I met, had a wonderful time with, and then watched (well, metaphorically) fly to New Zealand; and Monty, my lovely MG Midget, who I had to sell to finance the business.

All in all, a good year. Wouldn't change a thing. Except perhaps the World Cup bit.

Aims for 2007

So what's next? Here are my personal aims for 2007. I've not actually thought about these at all, so I'm just making them up as I go along. I bet I won't achieve any of them.

• Get back on the stage - I'd like to gig a few more times, just to keep my hand in.
• Live like a monk - extreme! - that's January. No going out, extremely careful budgeting, buying the minimum of anything and not wasting a thing. Time to clean off the bike.
• Fence in a couple of competitions- if I can afford it, I'd like to compete a bit more. It's nice to fence some new people.
• Pay off my credit card - somehow. I may alternate months of living like a monk. I'm certainly going to be working as hard as possible and saving every penny I can. Maybe I'll alternate live like a monk (living to a set budget) with live like a monk - extreme (just not spending anything).
  
• Take more photos - I like photos.

And that's it... a modest set of targets. I'm going to print these out and tick them off as I achieve them.

Being unreasonably ambitious

Way back in 2004, the organisation I used to work for held one of their series of "ideas talks", getting leading thinkers to talk about business, ideas, and creativity. This particular event - Robert Heller holding an "ideas audit" for three leading regional businesses - called for business to be unreasonably ambitious. Well, I'm working on version 2 of my business plan at the moment and I'm trying to do that. So as we round up 2006 - the year in which I quit my job with nothing to go to, sold the car I loved, discovered fresh ingredients are far, far superior to anything you can get from a supermarket, and won my first awards for something I've done at work - I've decided to set out my unreasonable plans for 2007:

1. Find a designer to work with. To provide a fuller service, I'm going to need a designer. I also need to find someone who'll be there for small projects - I've got "associates" who are perfect for bigger projects, but I doubt they're interested in little bits of work here and there. A freelance designer who thinks like me would be a great boon to my business. Someone I could learn a bit more design from would be ace in itself.
   
2. Go limited. Earlier than I originally planned, I'd like to go limited in the middle of next year. The paperwork as a sole trader isn't as bad as I thought, so I can handle that; the benefits would be great; and the risks seem lower than I thought at the moment, with some decent clients coming in and some good work on the way.
3. Refine what I offer. Small business stuff doesn't seem to be particularly "me", or in demand, while public sector, strategic work, and content - writing and planning - are working well. I think I might drop the small business side of things. When I've used up a few more business cards.
4. Sort out an office. Working from home is great, but the cat can be incredibly annoying, it's difficult to concentrate at times, and there's no-where to hold meetings or anything. I'd like an office. I'd like something interesting and different. And room for a decent chair and desk.
5. Join a professional body. Like CIPR, CIM, or - possibly, but it's too design focussed - UKWDA
   
6. Upgrade the PC. And replace it with a decent big Mac running Parallels.
7. Market. Market hard.

I think that's about it from a business point of view... I imagine I'll write some personal objectives over the next couple of days too.

Even more awardy

There are photos of the awards ceremony online now - rather small, but I'm about to email the photographer to get a copy of at least one of them.

See them here: http://www.ipr.org.uk/prideawards/eastanglia/2006/photographs/photographs.asp

Oh dear, oh dear.

I've succumbed to seasonal fever... not to the point of looking forward to Christmas, or anything like that, but maltpress.co.uk has been updated to reflect the season.

Of course, it's going to be a little while before the fairy-lights go up in Maltpress HQ, what with me being a grumpy old scrooge who's not a massive fan of Christmas (I think I'm just quite ant-hype; I don't think it's worth all the fuss and pressure put on it... although the parties are fun). Mind you, the corporate world moves at a different pace and it's probably about time to be thinking about sending cards to my contacts. Being a new company, and having better things to do with my time - and not actually having that many contacts yet - I'm probably going to send actual, physical cards to people rather than electronic ones.

I've also updated the site to reflect the fact that I'm now an award winner - or at least part of an award winning team. See the post below for more details. But I'm going to remain smug about this for some time.

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.

*puff* *pant* *wheeze*

Arrrgh... I've just been for my first ever jog. I've learnt some things:

• Fencing doesn't keep me as fit as I thought.
• I run like an idiot.
• It's not actually as cold as I thought and a fleece might not have been a good idea.
• I'm a wimp.

That's right - 0.75 miles nearly killed me. So when I got back I made an Excel spreadsheet to keep me motivated and to tick off how far I do every time I jog. I'm planning to do it every other day, in the morning. Oh yes - that's the other part of this hare-brained scheme. I'm going to get up in the mornings a bit earlier. As it is, I'm at my desk and at work by nine - half past at the latest - and I'm not going to change that. But I am going to have been up and for a run or walk to the shops before that.

They (and by they I mean the BBC, who were the first hit for "jogging" on Google) say that you should have something to aim for. I'm not sure "not having a heart attack on the fencing piste" is clear enough. So I suppose the Grunty Fen half marathon, next September, is a decent enough aim.

Of course, what I really mean is not dying of a heart attack on the Grunty Fen half marathon next September...

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.

Blogger beta

You may have noticed (if you're a regular reader) that the blog's had a major re-design. And that my spelling's getting a lot better. Two innovations I'm quite pleased with are responsible for these things:

Blogger Beta is the new version of the Blogger software - and it's really quite good. It's almost as flexible as WordPress (which I use for Cambridge.IsHome, about which more later). The template I'm now using is almost completely as-is from Blogger, and it fits my branding almost perfectly, which is why I've kept it. The new templates available are really very good, and I am pleased with the way this new one looks.

It's also going to allow me to do more clever things with my feeds and the way I parse them on my sites. I can tag posts on here with a particular keyword (much like WordPress allows) and then - when I eventually found out how - I have a feed for each keyword. That means the Maltpress.co.uk site and the JuicyFly site can have different feeds on them and I can choose which site my blog posts go to.

FireFox 2.0 is responsible for the better spelling you can now see, thanks to a lovely inline dictionary function for web forms. You simply download the dictionary you want to use - UK English or US English (or any number of others) and all your sperling misteaks are suddenly underlined in red for you. Lovely.

Joel left a comment below saying some nice things and asking about Cambridge.IsHome. Well, as he guessed, I've been somewhat busy lately. Things are about to change though - I'm about to re-start it, and that begins with a bit of re-design work. I've never yet managed to get a design I've been happy with, so I'm going to spend some time tonight on the mac with the Gimp (and perhaps with some felt-tips first) to get it looking nicer. Then I have some articles planned which I'm actually going to go out and research (well, do) and write.

I would have reviewed The Bluetones at the Junction the other night had I not been late leaving a business event, meaning I only got to see three songs.

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.

Monty makes a choice

Well, well, well. What an interesting day.

Got the MG back. Long story. Deeply unhappy about it, but you live and learn. Top tip from today: don't sell a car on eBay, and never sell to someone who's not viewed it first.

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.

Reminisce

Yesterday I didn't have masses to do, which was a little dull. I did a lot of ironing, and while I did it I listened to a bit of Bowie. Which got me thinking about the film Velvet Goldmine, which I saw one snowy day in the first year at university, at the Taliesin cinema at Swansea University.

It got me thinking about Swansea and how much I miss it there. I think it was - as much as anything - the fact I could walk through the park every day to get to things. The fact that I was a "regular" in the university coffee shop and my cup of tea was on the counter by the time I got to it. The lovely big house I had. And the lovely heavy rain.

The point of working for myself, from home, was to recapture that a little - to get the independence back and to do my own thing a bit more. To be completely in control. And I'm loving it. Still not a regular anywhere, but once I have a little more cash available I'm going to start working on that. But it's great to have some control.

Today is paperwork day. I'm - surprisingly - quite enjoying it. There's something very satisfying about it.

Some very general updates

Things seem to be picking up a little - I have some work to do, which makes a very nice change and will be keeping me out of trouble (and should start to pay the bills as well, which is the most important thing). I'm certainly starting to settle in to the somewhat different pace of life working from home - it's been odd to work a normal day and then not have to do anything until the next one, rather than finishing one job and then coming home to another.

There are still odd setting up admin things to do here and there - today I started my VAT registration process, the results of which I'm now going to have to wait for in the post. That should just about be it in terms of set-up - at least until I'm ready to make the change from sole trader to limited company, something which I'm trying to avoid thinking about but which has an inevitability about it.

I've also got my first fairly big networking event coming up - the Ideas Exchange, hosted by my old employers, EEDA. It should be a good afternoon - catching up with a few ex-colleagues, plus there are some interesting speakers lined up. It'll also be the first real test of my networking and selling abilities and it would be nice to leave with a few more contacts and some possible future work.

Then, at the end of the month, I have the CIPR PRide awards - a campaign I advised on (in much the same way as I now intend to work - web and e-marketing consultancy) is nominated in two categories, although it's really only the integrated PR campaign I can take any credit for helping on. It's a great selling point for me and certainly something I think I should be shouting about more - tomorrow evening I intend to add a link to it from maltpress.co.uk. At some point I need to hire a DJ so I can look my best for the winner's photos... here's hoping, anyway. If nothing else I'll be throwing business cards around like confetti.

And finally, I now have Skype, but not a number for it yet - I'm waiting for some income before I actually spend any money on it...

Anyway, how are you all? It's been ages since I actually heard anything from anyone on here... I know you're out there, I'm rapidly approaching 2000 hits, many of which are mine, but surely there's someone out there...

Corporate social responsibility... kind of.

I've discovered the good thing about working from home is the ability to walk down to the shops rather than having to wait until the evening to drive to the supermarket. It only takes five minutes, it's free, it's non-polluting and - best of all - it gets me out of the house.

Plus I'm supporting local shops and eating healthily...

Maybe - hopefully - things will change when I get a bit more work to do and I'll have less time. But until then I'm making the most of it.

In other news, the JuicyFly site is completely refusing to work in Safari 2.0.4, which is thoroughly annoying - I think it's something to do with the variables I'm trying to set, and using display:hidden, but I'm not sure. It's a puzzler. If anyone wants to have a look at http://www.juicyfly.com and see if there's anything stupid - and obvious - I've missed, that would be great.

I'm going to crack on and build the rest of the site and fix that page later. In the words of Brian Wilson (I'm watching the Pet Sounds live in London DVD) "I know there's an answer"... I'll find it when I stop thinking about it, I'd imagine.

Hopping on the bandwagon

I've been reading a lot of articles online recently about MySpace. Opinions are divided - it's either the best thing to happen to the web, bringing people together in new ways, or it's the worst thing ever, encouraging grooming, phishing, stalking and - probably provoking most horror - bad design.

So I decided to get my own profile. Not just to see what the fuss is about; not even to see if it is possible to make a nice looking page which is actually readable (it is, but they don't exactly make it easy). Oh no; I was looking into the business applications of MySpace.

In short, there are very few. Very, very few. You can have a rant about it as a web designer because that's the "in thing" (and most rants about it are justified, to be honest), but aside from that - and the special case of the music industry - it's very difficult to see a way a business could make much use of it.

I did think that, perhaps, it would be a way of making a small (well, one page) promotional page about a small business - after all, all "the kids" are using MySpace and there's the possibility of getting some credibility with your customer base by using it. However, there are many site-builder options out there with far more flexibility and just as much customisation available to them - setting up a WordPress or Blogger blog would be a far better option. There's the usefulness of comments and friends as product endorsements, but that's about it.

I said the music industry was a special case. Well, it is. It's what MySpace was created for and it works really well - free samples of music, gig diaries, images and of course endorsements... and if they're from other bands, so much the better. There's also a two-way thing going on here - people want to be listed as the "friend" of a famous band. Bands want to look like they've got lots of fans. Everyone wins. But the model is virtually impossible to extend to other businesses. And you'll see that bands have another website anyway - the only real purpose behind a MySpace account is to give away samples of their music to a very specific audience. And once they have a video, YouTube's the better place to do that.

Anyway, that's my opinion on MySpace - and it's not just sour grapes because I find it exceedingly frustrating trying to get it to look right. Oh no.

Panic! Not at the disco, though.

So... tomorrow is my last day in the office and from that point on I'm alone and need to find business. I think I'm about ready; bank is sorted, website is sorted, contacts are sorted (although I need more), business cards have arrived, I've had training on legal things today (which made my brain hurt a little and is responsible for the current state of panic) and I feel ready - as ready as I'll ever be.

In other news... the JuicyFly site is coming along now, and I've learnt lots of interesting JavaScript - not just a couple of individual functions, but (long overdue) a lot more about the syntax and putting it to use. You can see it in use on the navigation for the test page I've set up - http://www.juicyfly.com/template.php - it needs cross browser and cross platform testing to make sure it's all OK, but it's getting there. Still a lot to do on this but it's certainly moving now.

All that remains is to find a way to stop the cat constantly bothering me for food. We wormed him the other day. So far it's had no effect.

Business devices as consumer electronics

I love my Mac. Using it, and reading about BlackBerry's new consumer handset, has got me thinking about the differences between business and consumer electronics, the closing gap between the two, and the interesting consequences for the way we use them.

If BlackBerry can succesfully create and market a consumer device with the purpose of giving you push email and the web on the move, then it means one thing: consumers want access to their email all the time. Even down the pub on a Friday night. So what's wrong with phone calls? Well, nothing, but there are several reasons for email and the web on the go; it's cool (honestly - that's a big factor for the sort of people who'd buy one), the world's growing smaller but timezones aren't (it's easier to email someone in New Zealand than call them) and attention spans are getting shorter. Waiting for someone to get to the pub? Now, rather than eyeing up the barmaid, you can fire off a couple of quick emails, organise the next night out, maybe even keep ahead at work. Blog a bit. Shop online.

So what are the consequences for business? They're two-fold. Firstly, it means small businesses can get hold of business tools for lower, consumer prices, and for phones on cheaper, consumer tariffs which still fulfil our needs. Often we have to sacrifice some functionality or benefit - in the case of the BlackBerry, it's ruggedness and keyboard size. But for a small business that's fine - and it can kill two birds with one stone because our business tools become something we're not ashamed to be seen with out and about.

Secondly, it means people are using our websites and services in new ways. At different times, on different devices, and with different restrictions. Site "stickiness" changes when we come to using a mobile or small screen; before, it was a comprimise between giving people what they were looking for and pointing them to other things to browse to that they *didn't know* they were looking for. On a mobile, though, people don't want to browse for ages. It's about giving them what they want quickly but - after the transaction is complete - encouraging them to return. Doing a site variant for the mobile web is less and less about just fitting it on a small monochrome screen - it's about changing the whole navigational system and user experience.

Being 28

Being 28 feels no different to being 27, really. Not that I thought it would do.

The beer-belly my brother promised would arrive at 25 still hasn't materialised, but then again I don't drink beer, and I do lots of running about waving swords, which I think holds it at bay. That and living on nervous energy and caffiene.

This coming year's going to be a good one. Much working for myself and general career-based merriment will follow, I'm sure.

Oh, and thanks to anyone who gave me a present or a card. They were much appreciated.

Maltpress.co.uk finished!

Well... mostly finished. I need to have a rest from it for a bit before I do final testing and see if there's anything which needs re-doing, typos which need correcting, abd so-on. I've also got to do the header images on the home page because I messed up the reds when converting to gifs - and it took non-colourblind people to point that out to me. From now on I design in black and white...

Actually, no I don't. I'm about to start on the JuicyFly site, which is going to push me even more. Maltpress.co.uk is a fairly safe site, which tries to be a good corporate one - it works on all the browsers I can test on, it's standards compliant, it's content-led (the design doesn't detract from what's going on) and it's pretty gimick-free. There are only three complex elements on the site - the blog parser, the contact form (just waiting for sign-off on that from the bloke who runs the server - don't want to open it up to any attacks) and the search.

The whole point of the JuicyFly site is to be something a bit different - to push the boundaires a little more. There's going to be some interesting JavaScript, which I'm playing with now (ByteFX - although there are a couple of typos on that page) and some decent PHP, hopefully. I'm just going to go all out. Work to FireFox, and possibly sacrifice IE a little. Bad, I know, but I'm playing.

Playing is good.

Getting older

So... I'm nearly 28. A mere week away, in fact. I'm loving it. Getting older, so far, rocks. I'm working pretty hard (in fact, I've worn myself out so I'm about to go to bed, now I've sorted the navigation on my site in Safari - seems to be working well in everything but Firefox 1.0.7 for some reason).

The business is going well, especially now I'm part time at the day job. I've made a list of things to do and got some of my deadlines into iCal. I've bought felt-tips and big paper (surprisingly one of the most useful bits of kit in my arsenal - I've done massive amounts of really good work with nothing more than an A3 sheet and a couple of felt tips). All in all, things are good.

But with birthdays come presents, and I'm rapidly running out of ideas. I don't really want that much material stuff. Mostly because I'm running out of room. I'm using del.icio.us to put my list together, here, but I've not got much on it. What do I want?

That's my plea for human contact today. In the words of Scaryduck, plz to suggest-me-up.