If you find yourself in this predicament with government tax inspectors checking out your finances, then the lawyers at Irwin Mitchell can help you. If doesn’t matter if you are an individual or a large corporation, Irwin Mitchell has the knowledge to help.

Irwin Mitchell can help you by explaining your rights to you, as well as helping you understand the complex tax laws. If needed, they can also obtain necessary evidence and witnesses to help create a defence for you or your company. Irwin Mitchell offers initial consultations that do not create any obligation on the part of the potential client.

With HMRC investigations, Irwin Mitchell works hard to keep the matter out of court. Also, the lawyers at Irwin Mitchell work collaboratively with major accounting firms to provide the best representation. They also seek to lessen the change of prosecution. Additionally, they seek to find the lowest possible amount of tax payable. When you put your trust in Irwin Mitchell for these matters, you are in the best possible hands.

Irwin Mitchell has a long history of defending those involved in HMRC prosecutions. They can negotiate settlement agreements. They also represent clients when they are order to a tax tribunal. Irwin Mitchell also has dealt with special investigations.

Irwin Mitchell makes a great effort to keep clients informed of the costs as they go. They also provide estimates of future fees as well. Some clients have difficulty affording legal assistance. For some, Irwin Mitchell may be able to still provide service if a legal aid scheme is an option. Check with Irwin Mitchell and they can discuss options for payment of services with you.

As well as these services, Irwin Mitchell also offer several other services such as personal injury. If you are looking for a personal injury lawyer in Leicester,

For more informatio, please visit www.irwinmitchell.com

Artsin Productions Ltd has been formed to provide a company that will take over the publication of online magazine, Arts in Leicester/shire. The company will also take over B2B Web Consultants, a long established web design and hosting business.

Working as a social enterprise, Artsin Productions will initially plough profits back into the business to help it to grow.

The company will publish the arts magazine and provide a range of services aimed at artists and entertainers in the local area.

Information about what the new company will do can be found on the Artsin Productions page.

Having gained an award in Social Enterprise, Trevor Locke can offer business advice to people needing to earn their living as artists or entertainers.

Artists can be from any genre or art form. Entertainers can be from any form of work: musicians, singers, comedians, magicians, dancers, actors, writers, poets … if you think that you need advice about how to earn a living from your work, I will be pleased to hear from you.

You can contact me by email, via my web site, link up with me on Facebook or call me by phone if you want to know more.

My main web site is

www.artsinleicestershire.co.uk

and on Facebook

I have achieved the SFEDI accreditation in Social Enterprise, Core Units of Compentence, 1 to 8, Social Enterprise competencies A to D.

Whether you want to operate as a social enterprise company or only as a sole trader, I can still help you.

If you are worried about your Tax Affairs, see my blog about the services offered by Irwen Mitchell

Today I publish an Arts Magazine which is read by more people. I publish it digitally. The phrase “webzine” was coined to give a name to magazines that are published on the World Wide Web. I am proud of what has been achieved on

www.artsinleicestershire.co.uk
It did not start life as a magazine. In fact, it was created as a spin-off from a web site that was about travel. Back in February 2005, when the domain name was registered, it was intended only to be a small web site that provided a bit of information about music and the arts. Now, with over 200 pages, I consciously and deliberately always refer to it as being a “magazine” and never as a “website”. To me, the product is just as much a journal as something that sits on the shelves at newsagents or which goes out in the post, as some still do. I am a journalist first and a web designer second.

My mission is to contribute to the methodology of digital publishing and to achieve the same status and recognition for a digital product that might be conferred on a paper-based product. I call it a “journal” rather than a periodical.

Artsin, as we nickname it, is not published periodically; it does not come out once a month. It’s content is renewed on a daily basis. It lacks back issues but some of the pages can be on line for a very long time and we maintain some pages intact as they were in 2010, 2009 and more rarely in 2008.

We do not, of course, revise every one of the 200 pages each day. New material is published as and when we write it or when it comes in. That is the first distinguishing characteristic of digital publishing: disengagement from a time-scale to achieve continuous on-line refreshment of content. If an important news story comes in, it can be available to the public long before the local newspaper can put it out and often well before the broadcast media.

The second characteristic is that it does not mimic a paper-based product. I have seen some versions of on-line magazines that are laid-out and typeset like paper and even those that employ huge amounts of overhead script to give the impression, on the screen, of pages turning. In fact there are companies offering to sell the software to make ‘e-Mags’ that will visually turn pages. I laugh at these ludicrous ideas as much as I do web sites that are composed entirely in Flash. I am unabashedly ‘old skool’ and Artsin is entirely handcrafted in traditional HTML.

It’s also accessible to people with visual impairments and meets most of the accessibility standards which many of the page-turning efforts do not.

I have seen products where the publisher has gone to immense trouble to publish the product in PDF format which is then e-mailed to subscribers. Well, it’s a solution and it sticks to the idea of publishing periodically. There are numerous examples of companies that send out newsletters using full HTML formatting and that are delivered by e-mail. Fair dos, it serves its purpose.

I never even thought of doing things in this way. At no time did I sit down and say to myself “I want to publish an arts magazine”. The online magazine that we see today evolved. It came from the spin-off web site of 2005 and only as I worked with it, over about five years, did I realise that I was edging gradually towards a magazine format.

So, what is the difference between a magazine and a web site? This is largely a matter of approach to the content. I wear two hats: I have my web designer’s baseball cap and I have my editor’s green eye shade.

When I am working on Artsin I am a journalist and editor and my work is based on those years of laboriously preparing paper based periodicals.

I like to think that Artsin works as much as a magazine as it does as a web site. The methods and principles that are used to put those 200 pages on the web share a lot in common with what paper-based editors do, as much as they share some things in common with what web designers do.

Artsin borrows some conventions from paper publishing but I have never wanted to mimic print layout or make pages appear to turn; when I have been on sites that have done things in this way, I have had a really good laugh.

It is true that there are some things we have done on Artsin that the paper editor might have done: The mast head, the use of by-lines, the occasional use of a two-column layout, the disciplined use of headlines, subheads and intros … but there are aspects of paper layout that I have deemed to be inappropriate to digital production.

The layout and styling of Artsin is driven by web principles; it has to work as a web site because that is how people are going to use it. People do sometimes ask me where they can buy a copy of the magazine. During the day time I simply respond by saying its an online product and you don’t have to pay to read it. At night, in the pub, after a few jars, I tell them they can print it out from their computer. I then go on to warn them that they will need more than two reams of paper and a large collection of cartridges because on paper it would be bigger than the average telephone directory. I know the equivalent number of A4 pages because we systematically archive pages using a PDF printer which reports the number of pages of A4 size that have been printed to the hard disk.

Why have I never published a paper version? I have never had enough money to do this. Artsin has cost little to set up and run; its overhead cost is the renewal of its domain names, an annual hosting fee for the web server and, of course, the economic value of my time as editor. If I had wanted to produce a paper version of it, I would have to have had access to tens of thousands of pounds in set up, typography and distribution costs.

At the heart of digital publishing there is a big commercial issue. Sales of newspapers have been plunging down; more and more newspapers now have their digital equivalents on the web. A few pioneers have opted for a digital only approach – The Huffington Post – and a few national newspapers are now charging a subscription to access their online content – The Economist, The Times.

I doubt that Artsin will ever charge people to read its pages although we have seriously considered this for another of our publishing outlets. What prevents us from giving serious consideration to this option is that the publishing industry is an a transitional state.

Since the emergence of the web as a mass market, publishing is going through a revolution, every bit as dramatic as that which occurred when Caxton invented his printing press. In the West, at least, people have been used to accessing online textual content free of charge. They might have got used to paying for music and films, but they sure have not got used to the idea of paying for news and feature articles.

It will come. The commercial realities of digital publishing will inexorably move both publishers and readers back into a priced relationship. Consumers will get used to paying for content, just as they were used to paying for their newspapers and magazines at the newsagents. I know that if I slapped a subscription charge on Artsin, tomorrow, only a fraction of the current readership would pay it, however small the charge might be.

Web surfers have not got used to the idea to paying the full economic value of what they see on their screens. They think it all appears there by magic and costs nothing to make it come up, so why should they have to pay anything to read it.

My rough estimate of the cost of producing Artsin is that we are talking of between £25,000 to £35,000 a year, in full economic cost terms. Roughly speaking, the page you read free of charge is worth between £125 and £135. That’s what I pay to put it there but you get to read it for nothing.

If you want to read your local newspaper or national arts magazine, you are reading a page that would have cost its publisher much more than that, to put on your screen and considerably more to put a copy on your coffee table. Ok, I have simplified the economics of digital publishing to make a point. Consumers are happy to pay £2.20 for a 65 page copy of Kerrang; they can take it home and read it and then throw it away or, like me, carefully file it away for future reference.

Newspapers are purchased and then invariably discarded or used for wrapping chips or as makeshift cat litter. When we look at books however, something rather different emerges. Paper books are still prized and valued by the literati. I recently read somewhere that, on the Amazon web site, the turnover from sales of e-books has outstripped that of paper products. This is due to the popularity of digital book readers, such as Kindle. The manufacturers and designers of electronic gadgets have achieved a remarkable success in revolutionising the world of book publishing. They have also revolutionised the publication of news.

Millions of people now access news through their mobile phones. In the age of Twitter, news has ceased to be the prerogative of newspapers. What the statistics tell us, is that reading paper news is now a tiny fraction of all such reading and that the majority of people now get their news from media that is broadcast rather than printed.

Should I see if Artsin can be produced in this way? Possibly. I have to bear in mind that Artsin has a deliberately limited audience. It is concerned almost exclusively with the Arts and Entertainment of Leicester and Leicestershire. That alone takes it out of the ball park for other e-media.

Today, there are local newsagents on every street corner. In most large supermarkets there are shelves laden with paper periodicals. I wonder how long this will last. In an economy that is systematically weighted against small businesses, more so in retailing than in most other sectors, how long can the corner shops survive? It would be a shame if the purchase of paper magazines becomes limited only to those who can gain access to the large chains of supermarkets that are invariably positioned in locations that require car ownership to access them.

If I want to purchase a copy of Kerrang I can walk to my local shop in the city centre and pick one up. If I wanted to I could pay a subscription by direct debit and have it dropped into my post box. If I happened to live in some remote Scottish Island, it still would not be an option for me to pay for it online and have it downloaded to my hard disk but, I guess that option might well be round the corner. Probably, more so than the local newspapers.

I want to say one more thing about Artsin as a digital product. If you go to our front page (notice I didn’t say home page), you will see a list of social networking sites where Artsin has a presence. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, ReverbNation and quite a few more networking portals play a prominent part in the online presence of Artsin.

Unlike a paper product, we can show videos on our pages, we can link to music downloads, we can offer ticket sales directly and, in the near future, we want to get into pod-casting, allowing visitors to listen to interviews rather than just reading them.

Our accounts on these third party portals allow us to do two things: spread news at national level and drive traffic to our main site. It works like this: if we go to see a band and like what we hear, we are not just going to write about them in the pages of Artsin. We are going to shout about them through our social networking outlets; we are going to Tweet about them to our national followers and we are going to write reviews about them on sites like ReverbNation.

I have closed down a number of my nationally-oriented web sites mainly because their role and purpose is now redundant in the age of social networking. The bands themselves could abandon the idea of getting signed to a record label or hooked up with a publishing house and do it all themselves. Many bands have made it this way. In music publishing, there is also a sea change underway, as there is in the world of text publishing. Sales of digital tracks now out-strips those of plastic products. We no longer go to the record shop to buy a plastic disk and we no longer go to the book shop to buy a novel. At any rate, not the numbers that used to be the case.

A small local band can make itself into a record label. A small local web designer can create an Arts magazine. They can do this with relatively little cash investment. For a fraction of the cost that would have been the case ten years ago, anyone can now become a publisher – of news, music or reviews. You don’t need a sack-load of money to get started in the publishing business.

To be successful in publishing you still need the same age-old skills, knowledge and commitment that our forebears had but if you have got it, you can do it.

References

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/oct/29/sales-fall-newspaper-readership

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/14/national-newspapers-sales-decade

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=46548&c=1

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12391899

I really enjoy doing training. I have over 12 years experience of teaching web design and this is part of my work that has been very successful and which I enjoy the most.

Most trainees opt for a session of 2 hours and usually do one session per week. All training (or “coaching” as I sometimes call it) is one to one and hands-on. I have worked in classroom and small group settings, training in web design but I like the personal challenges that come with face to face coaching.

I teach professional web design and very often this is for people who want to become web designers as part of their career path. My curriculum is based on professional experience and includes much that is left out by academic courses taught by those who are not jobbing web designers. You cannot learn modern practice from a curriculum manual that was edited some time ago but for many accreditation bodies, this is what happens.

To do this work well you have to be up to date with current practice. That is constantly changing. The whole world of website design has changed a lot, mainly due to the impact of Web 2 and social networking sites. Also, in the UK at least, most people are now using Broadband and this has introduced a layer of multi-media content that has radically changed what you can include as content on a site.

I write my own courses and have done for some time. I have course curriculums that I have made up myself to fit with commissions and contracts. Some of my courses are unique and I think I am good a designing courses and all the support materials that go with them. I charge very competitive rates, given that grant aid or funding for this is now extremely difficult to get.

Over the past few months I have been following the media’s preoccupation with the “baby boomers”. Being over 60, I am facing up to the challenges of not being classed as in my ‘prime’ any more. As current policy goes, I am in fact only a few years away from retirement age. What weighs on my mind however, is that by the time I reach 65 they will have moved the goal posts. I will have to wait till I am 70 and who knows, by then, they will have probably dismantled the goal posts altogether.

I am most probably part of the work-till-you-drop generation. Retirement is just a passing phase, in the broader historic scheme of things. My grandfathers worked till they dropped and retirement was a luxury afforded to post-war generations but, as an economic concept, its looks it’s being consigned to the museum of history.

What do we do? With a labour market that is almost universally geared to people aged between 21 and 31, people in my age group are struggling to find any kind of employment. Despite the government’s blandishments about the need to employ older people, the recruitment industry just does not want to know.

This is why I am building my future around self-employment, where age does not matter. After 45 years of working life, I consider myself to have a broad range of knowledge, skills and experience. Try telling that to HR consultants. Fortunately I now include. in that work profile, over 15 years experience of running my own businesses.

Several things have got me thinking about the future of work. Notice I use the word “work”; part of my vision of the future is that “employment” is likely to follow “retirement” into the graveyard of economic history – at least for a very sizeable segment of the population. The 21st century is going to see a sea change in how people earn a living. Large sections of the population are going to have to get into self-employment and running their own businesses, for no other reason than that is the only way they can avoid destitution and poverty. We are entering the age of the “sole trader”.

We saw the rise of the Entrepreneur in the industrial revolution, the rise of the capitalist and then the rise of corporate man. All that is now waning and the age of the sole trader is upon us. Company pensions are going to be a thing of the past and indeed several people have said recently that they have given up on the idea of a pension and prefer to invest in more secure containers for their wealth.

It’s an issue that government policy analysts are wrestling with. Western capital has moored itself to the rock of the pension funds, only to find that they have secured themselves to rocks that are beginning to sink to a watery grave, where they will find themselves gathering incrustations alongside the wrecks of “banks” and “building societies”.

In the meantime, my ship of private business is sailing into the new dawn of the twenty-first century economy. Those who are 55 and over, should be thinking about their futures as working men and women. Those futures are going to be self-determining. We are exhorting our children to start paying into private pension funds as soon as they start work, planning for a life-time of saving for their retirement. Don’t. It’s basing their future on the here and now. Not a good idea. Occupational pensions will soon become a thing of the part. Whether private pensions can replace them, remains to be seen. I ask myself this question: if you are not going to retire, why do you need a pension?

I would rather see the nation’s parents exhorting their offspring to go on business courses, so that they have the basic skills to go it alone, if they find themselves bereft of “employment” (a not-unlikely scenario, in my view.)

Tax strategists will have to start thinking outside of the box. Post-war society never had it so good because the state could easily collect its revenues from bulk employers: the corporations that could maintain an army of administrators to tax the work force and send the cheques to the Treasury. Very cost-efficient for central government. It is now not where things will be in the future. PAYE’s contribution to Treasury revenues will go down. Income related taxation will increasingly be based on self-assessment tax returns.

There might well be big corporations for the rest of our life-times but they are likely to be populated with contractors rather than employees. The relationship between entrepreneurs who run businesses and their work-force is changing. The old-style PAYE employment scenario is being replaced by a hire and contract approach. This will change the way working people are recruited.

I am seriously thinking about the amount of time I spend submitting my CVs to companies. My four hours a day of laborious sifting through vacancies could be better spent raising my profile in the market place. So, if you’re the MD of a recruitment agency or a jobs web site, take my advice. Plan for the future and re-engineer what you are doing. Your business is likely to find itself resting alongside the wrecks of the pension funds and banks. Jobs are out, contract tenders are in.

The old order is waning. We just need to stand back far enough to see the bigger picture and look for enough head to see the direction in which the world is heading. Listening to a social media guru tonight, I heard her say that she stopped bothering about getting herself listed on job web sites and concentrated on making herself “be found” on the Internet. Now, people phone her up to ask her to work for them. Much better. That is where I need to be.

Recruiters now should be searching for people to hire. If you want a particular type of person, someone with a distinctive profile, you should be out there looking for them. The time when we applied for jobs that were posted on recruitment web sites is passing into the shadows of history.

Employers, in this future world, will not be advertising for staff. They will be out there searching for people who have put their offer, their CV, their profile on the Internet and are waiting to be found. Age is not important. It’s a complete red-herring (just as is, gender or race.) If you need people with the right skills for the job, go out and find them. As tonight’s speaker said: “NEVER put your real age on a profile.” I totally agree and we both understand the reasons why this principle is of prime importance.

For me, it is mainly to do with identity theft, where date of birth is the key to getting the rest (I know from my years of doing genealogy.) I have decided not to put my age on my CV and I am busily deleting information that will give a clue to my age. If they are going to judge my application using age as a factor, I don’t want their job, I will just press the next button.

So, what am I going to do that will earn me a living and be consistent with my knowledge, skills and experience? I am going to work (notice the lack of the work ‘job’) for companies who can make money from people like me and share the benefits with people who want to work with them rather than for them. Forget the pension, the PAYE, the office, the set hours of work, the employment contract, the annual leave package. These are already legacy . Ah! I can hear some of you whingeing already about the loss of annual leave. Well when you work for yourself you arrange your own holidays. You decide how much holiday you can afford, when you want it and where and how you want to take it.

Wave good-bye to the concept of annual leave, conditions of service, benefits (such as the company car), the corporate credit card, health plans and all the other trappings of post-industrial corporate life. If you want something, earn the money and buy it yourself.

I did talk about “sole traders” earlier didn’t I? Well, it’s interesting that many of the people who are on the long march into the new economy are working together. Yes, they are still sole traders but they seeing the opportunities of working alongside other sole traders, in business pods, even in project swarms. Being a sole trader can be lonely and isolating. Until you discover all the other people who are in same situation and suddenly realise that if you all work together, you can be more than the sum of your parts.

Disheartened? Frightened? Filled with foreboding? I’m not. I am excited about the possibilities and the opportunities to show what I can do with my 45 years of experience.

Networked Neighbourhoods

which reminded me that I have been doing localised web sites for years, from my very first site Blaby.net.

I got to this via an article I chanced upon in the Joe Public Blog

On the Guardian web site

The piece claimed that there was a ‘new culture of localism’.  Well, there is of course, nothing new about localism, not even on the web. Only a couple of years after the world wide web took off, I put up my first web site, which was about the district of Leicestershire where I lived. I called it ‘Blaby on the Net’ and it brought together information about the local area.

The article on the Guardian site explored how the Internet is giving local people a voice.  That reminded me of the recent meetings I have been going to called ‘Amplified Leicester’, where people have been talking about how they are getting activists in very small communities to make use of the web as a way of connecting together and giving themselves a voice.

Finding a voice via the Internet, the authors argue, gives people power to influence decision-making. Well, nothing new about that and certainly this has been a feature of life on the ‘Net for the last couple of decades.  I did however recognise the issues that the authors of this recent study have uncovered. 

The small, localise web sites that I set up were about local information rather than offering interactive portals. I only ever produced flat-bed sites but because they were often the only sites for that area, a lot of people have read them, often from around the world.

Sites such as Stoney Stanton Village and Narborough and Braunstone Town readily came up in the search engines and were for a while the only content available for these neighbourhoods.

Fortunately the web no longer requires web designers to make sites and if you want to put your stuff up you no longer need to learn HTML. Instead you can now set up a blog (like this one on WordPress) in a couple of minutes.

All of this does offer the opportunity for local people to talk to each other as well as express their views to people in the wider political system. In that respect, the Internet now plays a real and prominent role in democracy (broadly defined.)

Thinking about another localised site that I run – ArtsinLeicestershire - gathers together a wide range of information and articles about the many shapes and forms of artistic life in the city of Leiester and county of Leicestershire.

As a result of editing that site, I now get asked to comment on arts issues by the BBC, on a fairly regular basis. Which is great, because every time I go on air, our web site gets a spike in its hits. It’s good to see that webzines are taken at least as seriously as traditional paper-based journals.

I contributed a chapter: Participation, inclusion, exclusion and netactivism: how the Internet invents new forms of democratic activity.

In this chapter I discussed how the rise of the Internet was having an impact on democracy and democratic processes. I had been looking at the emergence of community networks and how activists were using them to raise issues and engage in debate about political questions.

I was inspired to go back to this topic by a question raised by Rachael Quinn, the Chief Executive of One East Midlands.

In a lengthy questionnaire, she asked for comments about what intermediary processes would be required as part of the “Big Society”. Ill come back to this later.

What I want to consider is the term “digerati”. The digital version of “literati”.

Wikipedia defines the literati as being a scholarly elite.[1].

The term digirati is defined as “Opinion leaders who, through their writings, promoted a vision of digital technology and the Internet as a transformational element in society;” [2].

To my mind, the digirati are those people who have access to the Internet and use it effectively to debate, discuss, lead opinion and prompt comment because they are both literate in language and in IT.

In the emerging concept of the Big Society, there will be local neighbourhoods and the state. Local people will be empowered to take control of the services that they need or want. Instead of these services being delivered to them by local authorities, needs and wants will be mediated through bodies that represent people at the micro-level.

The question that Rachael Quinn posed was “how is this actually going to happen and what would be needed to give local people a voice in national government” (I am paraphrasing here). She used the word “intermediate” or “intermediary”, suggesting a process through which neighbourhood activists or service users can participate in the wider policy and planning processes and issues that will affect their capacity to access services, and indeed, call those services down from the national level of government to their local communities.

It was this that reminded of what I had been doing in the late 90s around the impact of the Internet on democracy.

Will the Internet of 2010 and 2011 enhance the ability of local people to engage in democracy and in the processes of local government? Does it offer the same potential for participation now as it did then?

Will the opportunity of the Internet make participation work or will there be inequalities between those who can only read the Internet and the Digirati who can exploit it fully because they are both literate in language and IT?

This blog is about social enterprise business.  I want to show how these Big Society issues will impact on enterprise and explore the relationship between the ideas being floated in the Big Society and the emergence of social business.

netactivism original paper from 1998

is the subject of a half day seminar on 29th September 2010

The seminar is being held in Leicester and aims to help people understand what social enterprise is all about. So it will be especially valuable to those who are thinking about this as an option for the future.

The session takes place between 9.30 a.m. and 12 noon.

In the afternoon there will be a session on

Social enterprise and health

which will look at how social enterprises can work in the health sector.

Is it possible to attend either of these two sessions

Is it also possible to attend both sessions as though they were a full day course.

Full details of the course including a downloadable brochure and booking form are available from our web site

Well for Living

or you can phone Trevor Locke on 07970 680 987 for more information

I have been producing websites for small businesses since 1997. Now, it looks like they are being made redundant. This is due to the emergence of Web.2. and the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

Registering a domain name, designing and building a web site, organising the hosting and maintaining the content is a costly and time-consuming activity. Many people are now claiming that these ‘social networking’ sites are making small, free-standing web sites obsolete. Is this just hype?

As a big user of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and of course blogs, I have seen for myself just how valuable these utilities have been. Having used them all, I have seen a huge growth in traffic to one of the web sites I run. I wouldn’t say they have replaced the need for a web site, but they have proven to be very valuable at complementing my web site and driving traffic to it.

I have seen people using apps like WordPress and Joomla as solutions to the need for a DIY web presence, with varying degrees of success. I guess that businesses that have gone down this road have saved themselves a great deal of money.

Web design has been (and still is) a technical skill. Many people believe that they have the skills to be successful web designers but I still regularly find appallingly bad web sites. Home made web sites tend to be poorly constructed because there are so many aspects to web design you cannot learn on your own. There are many courses that teach people how to use things like ‘Dreamweaver’ but don’t teach the basic technical requirements of good website design practice.

Another thing that successful business sites need is success in the search engines. Over recent years we have seen the rapid growth of experts offering “search engine optimisation”. So, many a poor business person has spent a couple of thousand pounds or dollars or euros having a web site made, only to be presented with another bunch of bills for optimising it for Google and other search engines.

So, why didn’t the web designers build in optimisation in the first place? It stems back, in my view, to the lack of professional standards and training in the industry. Any kid can download a copy of Dreamweaver or Front Page and start making web sites. They don’t go on courses. Some might read online courses. The end result is a site that fails miserably to meet any of the design standards you might expect of professional and experienced designers.

So will we see the end of small web sites? Quite possibly. People will become more and more expert in the art of the Tweet, the craft of using Facebook and the science of blogging. These applications can work a lot faster and more effectively that the old HTML page.

Footnote: Experts are claiming that by 2012, there will be more mobile devices than PCs. More and more people will access the WWW by something other than a laptop or desk top computer. That means that we all have to re-learn what web sites are all about.

In my seminar I will be presenting case studies of how I have successfully used social networking sites to work alongside one of my web sites and the results have been very rewarding.

Details of the course are available from the Well of Living site