It has been some time in the making,  but we are delighted to announce that the new website for The Balloon Company has been launched. Excitingly, the site is our first for an international customer, with TBC being based in Norway.

TBC is a dual language e-commerce site split into two sections for balloon bouquet delivery and wholesale balloons.

Recently I came across this site - www.tradingnothing.com - while I was checking Google searches for TradingUp (that’s what this company used to be called). Perhaps I shold find better things to do with my spare time…..but that’s a different story.

Trading Nothing is run by a chap called Andrew. His plan is to make trades until he has a Rolls Royce or a Bentley. Quite an ambitious plan when you start with nothing. Andrew already has an impressive array of things to trade, and because I really like what he’s doing, I thought I’d try to get involved.

I fired off a quick email to Andrew to discuss some possibilities, and a few days later we’ve made our first trade. We now have a banner link to us from his site, and we’re displaying a banner to his site from www.tradingup.net.

I’m hoping to find something else to trade with Andrew soon!

Matilda Jane Smith - 30 minutes old

We’ve been a bit quiet recently due to the arrival of my first daughter - Tilly. She was born on the 6th August weighing 7lb 5oz, and is very healthy, particularly in the screaming department.

Mixing work with little sleep is proving to be a challenge, but all seems OK so far!

Well, it’s taken an embarrassingly long time to arrive, but we’re finally proud to announce the launch of our new site. We’ve been so busy building customer’s sites that our own has been at the bottom of the pile.

The site is still a work in progress, and we’re not completely happy with all aspects of it. But, having stalled it for so long we felt it really had to go live.

We welcome any comments or suggestions.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Using the rss feed from the blog our wordle (after some tinkering) looks like this.

you can make your own wordle and you dont need a website feed to make one, you can enter in your own text, you can visit wordle here, this would look great on a shirt…

With the release of firefox 3 you be wondering wheter you can run both versions of firefox at the same time, well some people will tell you you cant but you can.

It all boils down to 2 things, the profile manager and the shortcuts.

This post assumes that you know how to use the advanced installtion of firefox and have firefox version 2 in one folder and firefox version 3 in another (in my case “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2″ and “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3″)

Start by making 2 different profiles in the profile manager, to do this make sure firefox is closed and its not running in the background.

Run the profile manager by running the following command…

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2\firefox.exe” -profilemanager

Remember to change the Firefox directory to where you have installed firefox.

Within the profile manager make a new profile call it whatever you want. In my case just for ease i have called them Firefox2 and Firefox3.

Now I’m not sure if the following shortcut syntax works with Firefox3, but I add it just to keep consistency.

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2\firefox.exe” -P Firefox2 -no-remote

As with before make sure you change the directory to where you installed your version, and do the same on the firefox3 shortcut but change the profile name.

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3\firefox.exe” -P Firefox3 -no-remote

And viola, you can run two versions of FireFox along with your 3rd favourite browser.

As a quick sidenote if you want both firefoxes to have the same bookmarks, history, etc… just copy the contents of the orignal default folder to the new profile you’ve made.

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

The default folder should read something like…

4scygde1.default

Just copy the contents of that folder into your new profile folder.

And yes, I run three screens simultaneously.

The Website Design blog is now up and running, quite smootly if I do say so myself

It always amazes me that startup directories want to charge me to advertise on their sites. We were cold called this morning by www.bview.co.uk - and while I like their concept - an advertising directory with user / customer feedback - I can’t see how they can ask me for £160 per year to advertise on a site that has virtually no traffic. Surely a better tactic for them is to offer free listings to get some decent content onto their site, and then charge once they’ve got some traffic?

Just take a look at how their traffic compares with www.yell.com

OK - so Alexa isn’t perfect, and it’s probably massively skewed data - but the contrast is striking. For a sponsored listing with Yell I pay about twice as much as bview are asking for - but in comparison it’s a bargain. What’s more, bview will apparently only display my ad within 30km of our office. How can that make sense?

Oh, and the real killer of the call? As a special deal I can have 2 years of advertising for £360 - that’s right, more than twice the price of one year!

Where do these people get my number??? Probably from Yell!

This is great, a website design coding lesson from a rapper.

Just so you know what he’s rapping about here are the lyrics.

Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration

a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation
use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information

display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation

every page that they click should provide a explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination

but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction

follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time

make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat

tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate

check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox

title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong

when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker

design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter

if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it