A long time on the web

I've just come back from a holiday in the north of Scotland (Newtonmore, if you're interested). It was great, if a little cold at this time of year, but that's hardly the point of the blog.

The thing is, we stayed with my friend and former colleague Shirlie Geddes. Along with her husband Chris, she runs the Coig Na Shee guest house - a very grand former hunting lodge on the outskirts of the village where they shoot a lot of the Monarch of the Glen TV series.

Coig Na Shee means "A fifth of fairy land" (...or something like it) in Gaelic, and the name really does justice to the place and the building. Shirlie and Chris have created something very special.

I wrote Shirlie's website around a year ago, and it's funny looking back to see what I'd do differently. There's definitely some extra search engine optimisation work required (the optimised page titles I wrote somehow got lost in the publishing process).

What's more interesting is how theit website will come to reflect the business. For example, they get tons of repeat visits. And their (offline) comments book is full of genuinely cracking reviews. Shirlie's also getting around 80 per cent of her business from the website - including a Google Adwords campaign.

So, we need to make the site reflect these facts, and get it working even harder for them. Should be fun - and perhaps an excuse to visit this beautiful part of Scotland.

It's tough being a web copywriter.

Repurposing. Innit lovely?

I'm editing a series of business start-up guides for a customer. These will be printed, but will also be published as PDFs on the client's website. This online/offline publishing means I need to make them work well wherever they're viewed.

Unfortunately, there's not the budget or the time to create two versions. So, I've agreed with the client to approach this like a web copywriting project. That means lots of sub-headings, short sentences, a personal tone and all the usual hallmarks of web copy.

Anyway, it's a 45,000 word project and I've only done 6000 so far, so I really should be going.

Content management horror

I wasted three hours today wrestling with a client's unruly content management system. The lesson? Ask the copywriters when you're writing the functional spec sheet. And make sure stability and speed are given more weight than some whizz-bang feature or other.