Under mouse arrest

No. Still no news. Not a stir despite Kathy trying to hurry things along by trying a variety of tricks from old wives tales. And some from new wives tales too, which are a heck of a lot more fun I’m told.

My being confined to barracks the long weekend and the one just gone hasn’t actually been a bad thing. It gave me a full five days to work uninterrupted on a couple of things.

The inspiration for my main project was when Annie wrote: If you’re still using Internet Explorer please do the world wide web a favour and download Firefox instead. It’s free and it will get you laid.

The folks at Mozilla will adopt this as their tag line as soon as they find out. It beats my one hands down: Internet Explorer is just a big girl’s browse.

I figured the time had come to rebrand my business website. I had already repositioned myself. Rebrand. Reposition. What consummate corporate crap.

By repositioning, I mean I moved the desk to the far side of the room - not ideal, but a little further from the noise of the builders. The real work was in rebranding. I redesigned my logo, developed a new CSS theme, recoded the site in PHP and added all new content.

The new logo happened by accident. The intention was to recreate the existing one but with a new tag line. A font selected by mistake looked ten times better than the old one. Not that I ever doubted Darwin, I am now sure he was right. In logo terms, this was survival of the slickest.

The theme evolved to suit the logo. It might sound like buying a house to suit your curtains, but it worked.

Recoding in PHP wasn’t as tricky as I thought. Switching from Perl was pretty painless. If only learning spoken languages could be as easy. I still prefer Perl, but some customers baulk at my using it - usually as they’ve read some magazine article in the waiting room of the STD clinic or wherever and it was about PHP not Perl.

Now the content. And this is where Annie really inspired me. Okay, her Firefox slogan may be funny, and if your read her post, made out of frustration. But it is so true that Firefox is better than IE. So is Opera. So is Safari. I could go on.

So I took a chance and used a tone of humorous honesty throughout. I included a page entitled Mad Stuff that lists some of the jobs I’ve been asked to do e.g. research a topic on the Internet for a time-starved journalist and mail them a 100 word summary.

This is a big gamble. Mad Stuff certainly does not have a professional ring to it, but I’m hoping it will attract clicks out of curiosity.

I’m taking an even bigger flyer with a short list of things I don’t do. Too many folks out there are still IT illiterate and will call the first company they find on Google and ask for someone to come fix their printer, even if it is a webdesign house they’ve contacted. Hopefully this too will pull clicks and clarify things without alienating business.

The new site will be going live mid-week. Wish me luck. If it works, then Annie, you are owed scoops. If it doesn’t, then I’ll hunt you down and stuff, or maybe just switch back to the old one.