Flying Back from Canada

11th September 2005

I'm writing this first 'blog' entry as I fly back from Canada, wondering how long the battery will last in this 2 year old Acer laptop (the battery meter said it had two hours spare 20 minutes ago, now it says just over 1 hour). Laptop batteries don't last very long - at least not the way I use them.

So I'll be in the market for a new laptop on my return, something with a battery life more suitable for transatlantic travel. I've been very impressed with the IBM X-Series, and will probably end up getting one of those as and when I can get the time to sort it out.

During my trip away I have been working on a few things, most notasbly this new website. So... a few words about the new website, why we changed, and what it's all about. Firstly I believe gives a more professional image for our company, and shows better the level of technical and internet marketing skills that we have to offer. We will still be using the 'old' headed paper and business cards until these run out - we don't believe in wasting these things unnecessarily.

The images on each page have been chosen for their artistic value rather than having any deep meaning, although some images have an obvious connection with the subject matter, and others have a more subtle link - I'll leave it to you to spot these.

We have built a new content management system (thanks Massimo!) to host the new Mysterious Ways website, and have come up with a clever solution to a common problem - dealing with broken links when you change your website. Broken links can be bad for two reasons. Firstly, links to your site on other websites stop working, and secondly, you can lose some of the benefit in search engines that you have built up on particular pages.

Our new CMS has been built to deal with both of these issues by allowing 'rewrite' rules to be configured for any page, so we can set any page in our content management system to be given any URL we wish - so we simply set these page names to the URL of the original page from our old site. Links continue to work, but we gain the power of a new content management system. I have also made a couple of decisions that will be interesting to see the results of.

We are being fully open on the site about our charges, about the general costs for projects that we develop, and our terms and conditions of business. I believe many people are put off when visiting a company that they have no idea what the costs will be, and especially when we put in place a new site that is deliberately 'up-market' compared to our previous site, some people will assume we charge hundreds of pounds an hour.

My battery now says I have 39 minutes left.

For those of you who don't know me, I collect rocks and minerals. This has been my passion since I was 6 years old, and I spent one of my two weeks in canada travelling around with friends hunting rocks to add to my collection. And collecting was good! I developed mindat.org, the world's most popular website on minerals and mineral locations worldwide - this site is coming up to its fifth anniversary as a website, and a future article in my blog here will explain how it's become an internet success and what lessons can be learnt in bringing community-powered web projects to aid your business.

That's enough for today. Signing off while I still have enough power to save the article.