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October 5, 2003 Alexandra has now started her law degree at the University of Central Lancashire. As I work there I can easily drive her to and fro every day. She's enjoying it a lot - I'm very proud of her and know that this will give her so many more life chances. The business continues to grow. The online shopping cart has generated its' first new client - I was very excited because it represents a client who didn't know me and wasn't someone who signed up as a result of a personal recommendation. The mickwood.com site generated record traffic in September. In fact the last two months have seen increases in excess of 20% which is very encouraging. I'm also in the process of developing two new ideas which should generate income and hence enable me to give even more to The Harvesters Trust. I don't want to say too much at this stage but watch this space! This week sees the launch of another client Web site - rougecreative.com. I'm very pleased with this site and have received a wonderful testimonial from the site owner Roger Moore. Roger wrote ... I would like to place on record my sincere thanks for your assistance in the planning,design and construction of the Rouge Creative Web site. Your depth of Web site knowledge, combined with technical know how, have transformed a piece of paper with ideas into a reality. One of your greatest skills is understanding exactly what the clients needs are and making accurate proposals. Your honesty combined with trustworthyness are very reasurring in current modern life. The Web site meets all my current requirements and gives me exposure to a wider target audience. A truly first class and professional job Mick! I wouldn't hesitate in recommending you to any of my business associates. I wish you all the very best with your future Web projects. I certainly know where to call for future guidance and expansion of rougecreative.com! Yours Sincerely, Roger Moore Creative Designer Rouge Creative Why not have a look at the site and tell me what you think? Bye for now Mick # August 25, 2003 The children are back to school next week and flags will be displayed throughout the land. My eldest daughter Alexandra has decided to go to University to study law. She will be moving back home soon which means we'll have to reorganise where everyone sleeps. I'm really glad that she has decided to get a good education - it gives people so many more options and life chances. This week I have completed two major projects. First of all mickwood.com Newsletter Services is completed. I decided to set this up when I recieved a really nasty email from someone who had been maliciously subscribed to the mickwood.com Monthly Newsletter. The new system prevents this from happening - news subscribers have to confirm their email address before the subscription process is completed. mickwood.com clients can also use the Newsletter Services to administer their own monthly newsletters. This service will be free for the first 12 months and thereafter a fee based on subscriber numbers will be charged. Newsletters can be html or text-based - one of the great features of the new service is that newsletter archives are automatically generated. Missionary Ventures Europe are the first to take advantage of this new service. Why don't you sign up and find out all the latest MVE News? The second major project completed this week is the online Domain Name Registration / Web Hosting Shopping Cart. Prospective and existing clients can now search for and register new domain names, transfer their existing names to mickwood.com, and purchase new Web hosting accounts. The system is integrated with PayPal, the global leader in online payments offerings clients a Secure, Accessible, Fast, Easy (SAFE), and reliable environment for making online payments. My aim is to make life easier for mickwood.com clients and I'm continually on the look-out for new features. If you have any thoughts about new features or services let me know by emailing mick@mickwood.com. More next time - remember that Jesus loves YOU! Mick # August 16, 2003 The holiday in Wales was wonderful. The sun was very hot with temperatures in the 90's on most days. I managed to find an Internet Cafe which meant I could check my emails every day. As I hoped there were no client problems at all. So now it's back to business and things are going well. I've upgraded all the hosting plans and scrapped the Diamond Plan altogether. Each account now has double the disk space and all accounts now have ASP and MySql as standard. The installation charges for bulletin boards, guestbooks, etc have been scrapped because they are now included in each clients Personal Control Panel. It's now as easy as clicking a button to get a fully-featured bulletin board! I've also upgraded the Flash Animation software. The compression rates are fantastic. For example, the Outlook Express animation was originally 2.95MB. The new software has brought that down to just 1.14MB without any noticable reduction in quality. The file sizes of the other animations have also been substantially reduced. More next time - best wishes - Mick # August 3, 2003 I haven't really got into the habit of updating my journal - life is so hectic which is good in many ways but the journal often gets forgotten. Must try and update more often! Anyway, the day of the graduation ceremony was fantastic. As you know Diana (my wife, who prefers to be called Di) and I have five children and only a small car. Di suggested that we should get a 7-seater minibus / taxi to take the whole family to the ceremony. Of course I agreed and didn't think any more about it. On the morning of the ceremony a white stretch limousine turned up at my door! I was totally shocked. What a brilliant surprise and a wonderful memory. I'm still thinking about how I can get Di back. Below you can see the family posing in front of the limo and the kids enjoying a celebratory drink in the limo - Lauren is on the telephone.   Two weeks ago we also celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary, Di celebrated her birthday last week and it's my birthday next week. The celebrations are coming thick and fast and my wallet is crying for mercy. The August 2003 edition of the mickwood.com newsletter has been published. Readers who subscribe to the newsletter will be able to take advantage of some special 'subscriber only' offers. You need to sign up to see what you are missing !? As many of you know I am particularly interested in making the Web accessible for the disabled. This month's newletter has been produced using the accessible TEN standard. My hope is that those of you who are not disabled will not be put off by all the headers and plus signs, etc. The format really does make a difference to disabled readers, especially the visually disabled. What else is new? I've finally got the hang of the new flash animation software. I have also written a couple of new articles . One is on the subject of Domain Names Registration cons and another deals with Cybersquatting and the importance of registering multiple domain names. One of the most common questions I get asked is 'how do I set up Outlook Express so that I can read my e-mail?' To help clients accomplish this task I have created a flash animation which specifically guides people through the process. The animation is quite large (2.95MB) but, even so, will still download in about 12 minutes on a slow Internet connection. It's time to sign off. We are going away on a family holiday to Wales tomorrow and I need to help Di to pack! Best wishes - Mick # July 5, 2003 I cannot believe that it's been 6 weeks since I last updated my online journal. I've finally completed my MSc and passed :-) The graduation ceremony is this week on Thursday 10th July. Life is beginning to return to normal (whatever that means!) and I've caught up with all those jobs I've been putting off. The best thing is that I can now be pro-active instead of re-active and I'm making lots of progress. The business is going really well - I'm working on 6 sites at the moment but, for various reasons outside my control, I can't seem to get the content to complete them. NEW WEBSITE CONTENT Check out the latest Flash tutorials on using your website more effectively. The first tutorial explains how to forward email from one address to another. The tutorial's available at http://www.mickwood.com/articles/email_forwarder.shtml. Do you really need to make your website accessible? I've written six new articles that not only answer the question (yes!), they also explain how to do it. Check them out at http://www.mickwood.com/articles/index.shtml. The latest edition of my newsletter is also available online at http://www.mickwood.com/newsletter/july2003.shtml. The newsletter includes information about 2 FREE software downloads, a great FREE Newsletter course as well as my latest tutorial on streaming MP3's. More next week Mick # May 17, 2003 Not much to report - the MSc has totally dominated my life for the last two months but now, at last , it's finished and handed in. Results will be released at the end of June and hopefully I'll be graduating on the 10th July. The trip to Cannes was very interesting, I saw lots of people spending hundreds of Euros in the Casino, some of the yachts in the harbour were bigger than my house! Bottle of water costs £5 (about $7). Anyway, time to get on with running the business, currently working on 4 Web sites and updating 3 others, loads of work to do and I've also been asked to write some articles on Web Accessbility for dwfaq.com. More next week Mick # March 22, 2003 Time passes so quickly - we really should live every day to it's full potential. mickwood.com understand that customers want more control of their website, faster servers, and a control panel with more features. We are in the process of moving all of our clients onto new servers which are three times faster than our current ones. The new servers include a new control panel that provides total control of your website and includes lots of superb new preinstalled features. For example you could host your own Chat room, bulletin board, Forum, or even install a complete content management system at the click of a button. The hardest part is choosing from all of the options. The moving of these websites involves no downtime and no extra costs although we will be forced to change the login information for email accounts, FTP/FrontPage accounts, and MySQL databases. The configuration of any scripts and programs will be updated so that they continue to work properly. Customers will be advised as necessary of any changes. This week I've configured and set up a newsletter subscription service. It's really easy to subscribe to, or unsubscribe from, my monthly newsletter. You can also read my first newsletter online. I've also added some new features to the showcase. Check out the counters and clocks, and the date, and countdown / countup utilities. They are pretty good and really easy to install. I'll be adding more of the new preinstalled features soon so that you can take a look. This week we received a cheque for The Harvesters Trust from Secure Giving. - this represents our first online donation :-) If you would like to make a "Guaranteed 100% Secure"online donation to The Harvesters Trust, or if you would just like to find out a bit more, please visit http://www.mickwood.com/general/missions.shtml. This week I'm off to Cannes in the south of France to visit the MILIA Multimedia Exhibition - I'm really looking forward to meeting other multimedia professionals and companies from all over the world. See you next week. God bless, Mick # |
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