A Depressing Statistic

Friday was a successful day. The website I'd been working on went live after a brief intermission while the DNS played catch up. It was rather satisfying to see it live after a reasonable amount of work. I now have a basic design that I can reuse - just change the colour scheme, edit the menu and get to work on a Photoshop banner. Phoebe came home from school with an award certificate celebrating her success at reading. She really is coming on in leaps and bounds and her confidence is growing by the day.

I found out on Saturday that there are 72 web designers in Tauranga. Sigh. Well that figure is wrong because there are 73 now. I got myself added to the list. With that amount of competition it's going to be rather hard going drumming up business. My Google ranking also needs a little work. Careful analysis of the pages that are coming up first seems to be the order of the day. One thing I did notice is that Google seems to pay quite a lot of attention to the contents of the "alt" attribute of the "" tag. I've never really bothered to set anything meaningful in these attributes before other than making sure it was present to stop the various HTML validation tools from complaining, but it seems I have learnt a valuable lesson.

In the evening we went to a party/barbecue at V&W's next door neighbour's house. We got invited I think because he's a Norton Commando owner, and I'd passed on some service tools I found lurking in my tool box. We met quite a few interesting people, and I even managed to pass on a business card to one who apparently had paid $3500 for a "basic" 5 page site. I wonder why I never manage to find that sort of customer. A basic site, probably only takes a day or so to put together and most of that's Photoshopping. Maybe I'll get lucky. The testimonials page is coming on nicely, though, and maybe that will help.

On Monday Di started at her new job. Well, started is probably a bit strong - she went into the office and met everyone, and then went and blew the company's money on a new phone. She didn't spend the whole amount on a phone, but kept some of the available funds for phone credit. She has, perhaps unwisely IMHO, decided to use her private number for business purposes. This will mean the phone's never off which may prove to be an issue at some point in the future. The other less than ideal situation is that she's switched to Telecom XT, because that's what the firm uses and they were throwing money at her to switch. Given all of XT's recent failings, this again may prove to be a disaster.

In the afternoon we went to do our house inspection. The woman had forgotten/not been told we were coming and attracting her attention was a bit of a challenge, but we managed eventually. Everything seemed to be working except for a blown light bulb. We also found out that the place has mains gas - quite a rarity round here. Sadly it's an electric hob but we do have the possibility of switching. The water heater is also gas powered, so it should be cheaper to run.