Be careful what you blog

I met one of my clients this week to take a brief on editing the copy on their (fairly chunky) website. My client had obviously done his homework by checking up on this here blog - but thankfully the only offending comments he could find were my obsession with Volvo Car Corporation.

In the immoral words of Dudley Moore, "They're boxy but they're safe".

I actually have fond memories of reading David Abbott's 1980s ads for Volvo when I was growing up. Maybe it's a Sunday supplement, middle-class thing, but Abbott's copy really connected with me. I still rave about the tone of voice in these ads today. And much as I admire Innocent Drinks, I find their copy style artlessly copied by lesser brands. David Abbot did something different, and his copy really stands out as belonging to the brand.

The long-winded moral? If you're going to blog, be prepared to take a hammering over your choice of automobile.

I may be gone for quite some time

Well, the new business roll continues - with a couple of corking web copywriting wins that I'm not quite at liberty to disclose. At least not yet.

What I can say is that while I've been writing about web technology in education for the last couple of weeks, the next month or so is going to be spent editing another education website - but for a different client.

Then March looks like being taken up with web copywriting for a legal service. Oh, and then I go to Applecross for two weeks of pristine isolation in the West Highlands of Scotland.

The new business wins aren't really news in themselves. What's interesting is that almost every project that lands in my inbox is web copywriting of one flavour or another. And about time too - I've been banging the browser about this for years, and it seems clients really are shifting their attention to the web.

In the meantime, expect the "No new work until..." area of my website to look increasingly off-putting for new clients