An ‘Independent Web Advice’ Blog

Changes to this site are ‘nearing’ (ha)  completion.

Each major section is supposed to have it’s very own Dragon on it. However, apart from this blog, I still have not found the time.

My 3 year old son, Adam, had conjunctivitis and was off from nursery for a while. Then just as he went back to Nursery my 8 year old son, Rowan, caught some virus from school and was off for ‘a few days’. Then it was a bank holiday, then family gatherings to attend on Saturday (when I should be in the office building web sites) and finally I begin to feel under the weather myself!

I have been told (by a female of course) that it is because I am male that I think I work harder than Julie, my female partner. So how does any ‘normal’ mum manage to run a business AND raise children? All the men I speak to about it, who are in the same situation as me, agree that we have a difficult and terrible time doing both at once. Yet I meet women doing the same thing every week, and they all seem to agree that I am just a ‘bloke’ bemoaning the loss of my freedom.

So my own website, which takes a lower priority than my customers, and my children, and my family commitments, is not finished yet

This should not be a surprise really, as a site is never ‘finished’. A website is not a brochure, job and finish. It is a labour of love, in an ever changing medium.

Perhaps I should get on with the Dragons as opposed to writing these posts. Who knows.

I only really wanted to say ‘try out the new help desk‘, it is fantastic IMHO.

Speak soon,

Paul

I am considering creating my own search engine. Obviously it will simply scrape results from the big seven, but I can control the results and perhaps provide a better niche service than is already available.

I thought about calling it ‘topsy turvy’ or perhaps ‘wwearch’. But the last thing we need is another Google clone.

So I am stuck.

The search engine will return results only from the UK. It will search Google, MSN, Yahoo, Altavista, Ask etc etc and find relevant results. Those results will be limited to several themes and perhaps a keyword or two. Those results can then be presented in any format and any sort order, creating a niche provider search engine.

Should it be part of this website? Or perhaps a more catchy domain? Independent Web Advice is not particularly easy to type, but how many times do you actually type a domain name? Usually you follow a link or a bookmark. So does it matter?

Any suggestions welcomed!

Paul

Running a successful web site should ultimately be fun. When you have reached your goals you realise that the work you did, the people you met and the places you visited were all part of the wonderful journey. Remember to smell the roses on your way up because the climb is better than the view!

You work and work and work over the months and years and often wonder if you are wasting your time and efforts. You are not. You are learning, developing and creating a web site that is all yours. You are investing in your own skills and talents. You are presenting a site that you are in control of. You are doing it exactly as you want it, and what could be better than that!

One day something special happens. You discover that your turnover begins to grow all by itself. A critical mass of user involvement and search engine recognition is reached where your traffic generates it’s own traffic for you. Where your users become part of your success. This is happening every day to thousands of web sites and it will happen to yours one day too.

Others will say ‘how lucky were they?’, but you make your own luck with persistance and hard work. Enjoy it while it lasts because when you have made it, your website will no longer be yours, it will be everyone’s.

Enjoy the journey,

Paul.

It is amazing what you find out with a bit of idle surfing.

I was born in 1970 (yes I am that old!). Of the millions of animal species alive on Earth when I emerged into the world, a massive 31% have since become extinct! Never to be seen again. We have killed them all.

What amazing creatures, what mysterious life forms, what organic compounds have we lost forever? And why? So that my plastic christmas tree can be stuffed with plastic toys in plastic based wrapping paper. The whole shebang shipped accross the globe mostly from China. (And the myriad of other trivial items we seem to think are worth more than the entire world!)

If you haven’t already, I urge you to visit the wwf web site and consider joining them.

Did you know that the UK has twice as many people in it than it’s biocapacity can cope with! No wonder it often feels like we live in a toilet or a rubbish tip.

What truly terrifies me is that nature always persists. How will it decimate the Human threat? War? Famine? Drought?

I can hear the horses of the apocalypse approaching even as I type.

Feeling a bit down about the stupidity of our so called ‘humanity’ - Paul.

I often hear people mumbling under their breath “we’re just a small business” as an apology to larger organisations. In a culture where big often means better, small businesses are often driven to feel somehow unfit for the attentions of larger organisations.

Yet small businesses offer exceptional benefits to larger organisations and we should be proud to be small!

With exceptional benefits
I believe we should be proud of the exceptional benefits large organisations recieve from small businesses. Our businesses may be small, but we are often rich veins of pure gold.

Let me tell you why I love my small business and why you should love yours.

Small businesses have the freedom to focus
Small businesses offer better customer care
Small businesses have a passion for what they do
Small businesses can give you the freedom to innovate
Small businesses offer flexibility
Small businesses offer great value for money

So be proud to be small, be proud to be independent and take justifiable pride in your work.

I do and I am.

I read something amazing the other day and I am sure I had read it before but you know how these things slip sometimes… anyway…

Imagine there is a test for a disease or condition that someone conducts on you. Here I am imagining a doctor performing a blood test for a serious diesease, but any scenario still holds.

The test is conducted on you and lo and behold to your horror, it is positive. Worse still, the doctor informs you sadly that the test is 99% accurate.

So do you have the disease or not? What are your chances of not having the disease?

Explanation coming soon but to not leave anyone in suspense, it is not 99% certain you have the disease, oh no, not at all, not by a very long way. In fact in certain situations you are still more likely not to have the disease than to have it. Even if the test is 99.99% accurate.

Anyone care to guess why?

With over 70 million downloads of videos a day, You Tube has taken the market by storm.

YouTube is a place for people to engage in new ways with video by sharing, commenting on, and viewing videos. YouTube originally started as a personal video sharing service, and has grown into an entertainment destination with people watching more than 70 million videos on the site daily.

If you have not tried it, then take a look now. It is fascinating viewing! Highly reccommended.

My web stats are now public and available at the bottom of the Web Status section of the home page. I shall leave it to you to find them. The challange is this…

Can you tell me at what time and on which day I tried a naughty black-hat ‘traffic’ trick?

There should be a prize but there isn’t - sorry. I was going to give you a clue but have decided it is too easy anyway. So no clues.

Good luck (estimated time to solve - 5 minutes. How did you do?)

So many scammers!

From a great forum: Read original article here

Re: National Association of Approved Internet Services NAAIS
[posted on: Feb 6, 2006 3:38 PM by john doe 447004 Reply
I used to work there (NAAIS) I’m sorry to inform you all that it was a huge scam. Run by a couple of monkeys who used to sell advertising space in publications that dont exsist. The closest they came to auditing there subscribers was employing a 16 year old girl to check that the site had meta tags. I worked there for two weeks selling the service over the phone to internet designers. I think I sold one subsciption at a cost of ý400.00. The accreditation means nothing (I mean you only have to look at the logo to realise that much). I’m amazed how many websites are still proudly showing that they have been approved by NAAIS. Which really means tracy from downend in Bristol clicked on some HTML code that they designed and confirmed that they had meta tags attach. Good Scam top marks for timing with the industry’s state of play. I’m only writing this because the *******s didnt pay me for 1 of those 2 weeks I worked there. Hello to DOM & Mike if by some strange co-insidence you read this post. I’m now in canary islands after winning lottery 6 months ago. Good luck chaps, maybe look me up.