If you’re already running or managing a business (or at least your part of one), what one thing would make your work life easier? I’m not asking which of the things I currently sell might benefit you most.

I really mean, if there was ONE thing you could change, fix, eliminate, introduce, acquire, produce, save time on, figure out, learn, or otherwise make your life easier, what would it be?

It doesn’t matter how big or small it is, or whether you think it’s relevant. If it’d make your work life easier, let me know. (OK if there are two or more, you can include them, I’m just trying to make it easy for you, and help you focus).

Are you, or someone you know, thinking of starting a business?

Similar to my question above, but I recognise that your needs are a bit different to people who are already up and running. I’d like to focus on what information you’d like to have – what do you want to learn more about before starting your business?

Or, if you reckon you have or can get most things you need to get going, what’s stopping you from starting your business right now, today?

Let me know by leaving your comment (click on the comments link below).

1. Be in an urgent hurry
2. Get your documents, invoices, catalogues etc ready and open to the right page for the important task at hand
3. Curse and throw things while you try to find or remember your username and password
4. Find your bookmark, favorite or URL and go to the web site to get your task done
5. Go to the site in question – and it will be down, either for maintenance or some unforeseen technical glitch – GUARANTEED
6. Do this for every site you’re a member of

Note that this works best for banks, the tax department and other government sites – the ones who can really penalise you for NOT paying up or filling in forms on time.

I have a magic knack for somehow subconsciously causing computer and machinery failure whenever I need them most. If I chose to, I’m sure I could use my power for evil and bring down the entire internet – but then where would I get my porn how could I procrastinate if I couldn’t blog? (Joking! )

But the real lesson here is, just because it’s the internet and theoretically web sites are available 24/7, don’t rely on this availability to get critical things done. Give yourself plenty of time in case you need to (heaven forbid!) pick up the phone or visit on office in person to sort things out.

Things go wrong – plan for it.

I use an IBM laptop. It has a trackpad, but also a “nipple” situated in the middle of the keyboard for moving the cursor around (it’s actually between the “G”, “H” and “B” keys). For some reason that I can’t yet figure out, I can’t use the nipple to scroll around documents in OpenOffice. This is despite my turning ON the automatic scrolling for the middle “mouse” button in the Options of the Tools menu. Instead I have to move the cursor over to the scrollbar. Or use the “PgUp” or “PgDn” keys. I find this a bit inconvenient.

While I’m on the subject, I also find that while I can scroll up-down in the FireFox web browser, I can’t scroll left-right using the keyboard nipple. Again, annoying. If it’s simply a matter of a setting I haven’t found yet, that’d be OK. Strangely inconvenient, but OK.

It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

Now the question you must be asking yourself is why didn’t I notice before? Wasn’t there a slump in business? Well, there was a small slump, but you get that when you move (or can do). But, I had notified my existing customers, and the vast majority of my other enquiries come in by email.

But since I’ve been blogging, traffic to the main Harris Campbell site has been increasing, meaning that those poor women getting my phone calls had finally had enough and got in touch with me.

Again, I feel so stupid, but it’s a lesson well learnt, and one I can share with you now so you don’t make the same mistake:

When you make any changes to the contact details of your company, or you employ someone new, or more importantly, if they leave, make sure you check ALL your marketing pieces: business cards, brochures, shop signs, WEB SITE/S, car signage, and uniforms. Have I missed anything?

My current thoughts are that the background image at the top of the page will change over time, using my photos. Photography is one of my hobbies and I have quite a few shots that I think are good enough for public consumption. Where appropriate, I’ll make the original photos available as desktop (wallpaper) images to download – my gift to you! I’d really appreciate a note from you or comment if you do download these images – it’s nice to have your work appreciated!

The current header is a detail of a photo of flowers (don’t know what they’re called) which were hanging all over a neighbours fence. I then applied a woodcut effect. I hope you like it. It’s available as 1024×768. If you’d like other sizes, let me know by leaving a comment to this posting and I’ll get back to you.

To download the image, click on the thumbnail and the larger image will open in a new window. Simply right click on the image and choose “Save Image As…”. Enjoy!

I’ve been sitting on this article for a couple of days trying to figure out what to make of it. If you only read the Sydney Morning Herald article, you’d think that the web developer in question was one of those cowboy operators who does dodgy work and rips off the unwary.

I did a quick Google of the web developer’s name and she seems to be a member of reputable organisations, has won various business awards, gives talks on matters of eMarketing, and her web company apparently specialises in $2,000-$10,000 web sites (ie the average small business web site).

I wasn’t able to find anything more about the court case in question. I don’t know the facts, just what the article lays out in its six paragraphs. The article says that the web developer made some typos, had awkward copy and used “inappropriate” nude photos.

But I just don’t get it.

The process of building a web site for a client usually includes a number of steps where the customer has a chance to have a say on the graphics used, and at any rate, this sort of thing would be discussed long before any design work was done. I’d imagine that there’d be a case for tasteful and appropriate nude photos on a plastic surgeon’s web site. I have no idea what kind of photos where involved in this case. But if they decided that it wasn’t for them, the customer would say so during the development process.

Also, even with the best processes in place, sometimes typos do get through to a live site. Where it is brought to the attention of the web developer, it is usually an extremely simple matter to fix the problem, and is almost always done free of charge.

So what really happened in this case?

Was the customer involved in the development of the site? Did they sign off on the site, then change their mind later? Did the customer get presented with the final site with no chance for review beforehand? There are a number of possibilities here.

But I’m left wondering why this couldn’t have been sorted out without going to court.

And I’m also wondering why this is news. Is it because of the handy scars/scares pun based on a couple of unfortunate typos that found their way into the copy of the site? Is it because it reinforces the stereotype of the dodgy backyard web developer?

I could be wrong on all counts – the web developer in this case could indeed be dodgy; and their process and/or contract may have left the customer with no way out, paid up in full for something they didn’t want.

But something about this story just doesn’t seem right to me.

Sure, you could just save your documents as PDFs with embedded fonts, but then you end up with files a lot larger than they have any right to be. And the average person has plenty of real things to worry about without trying to figure out what “embedded fonts” are, right?

I subscribe to Philip Shaw’s Code Style font survey. Apart from a solid list of links for font sources and web stuff like style sheet information, it has a really great, continually updated list of the most common fonts installed on people’s computers. He lists results by what percentage of users filling in a survey have the various fonts installed on their computer. He covers all the major operating systems:

Windows
Macintosh
Unix
Combined results

Want to take the font survey yourself? Or want to receive the latest survey results? Then go to the following pages. To sign up for the results, scroll to the bottom of the following pages, fill in the form and choose “Yes” to be notified if the list is updated.

Windows font survey and sign up
Macintosh font survey and sign up
Unix font survey and sign up

And for those of you who like statistics or have some questions about the accuracy of these results, then check out his Font Survey FAQ.

So, all design, branding and aesthetic issues aside, if you want to know if there’s a fair chance that the people will be able to see your font and hence actually read your document, check out the above links before choosing your fonts.