Luke’s been ill this week, and we had a couple of days in hospital – which were very scary but thankfully now it’s all over and he’s made a full recovery. So needless to say work was dropped completely for a few days and I’m now trying to catch up.
In terms of the website, we’ve made some great progress with a new feature we’re planning. I’ve employed an editor, Michelle, who’s got some great experience and I’m sure she’ll make a fantastic job of the pages. It will be one of the ‘freebie’ items on the site and will add to the editorial content, while remaining focused on our key objective of helping parents/carers entertain their kids.
There’s quite a lot of research to be done before we launch the pages – hopefully by autumn we should have something to run with. Michelle’s got all the information she needs to get going. I started investigating this idea a couple of months ago, and then realised what it could grow into and I decided we’d be much better designating someone to take care of this as a separate project in its own right.
She’s pretty much got creative control of her pages much like Wendy does on the Holidays pages. Michelle needs to consider now how she wants them to look and how they’re going to work. In a week or so, when she’s had chance to formulate some ideas, I’m going to arrange for her to meet Lee, Andy & Ste at Fluid, who now form the core team responsible for the design of our website. So they can discuss her ideas, translate them into something workable, and get the pages ready for launch. In the meantime, Michelle’s going to be doing the research, writing the editorial and making sure we have sufficient content for a steady growth of the pages after launch.
Talking about growth, our Holidays pages are looking a bit full now. I think it’s time to bring in a contents list to breakdown the different reviews into sections, otherwise it’s going to become too difficult to find what you’re looking for. So that’s something for Wendy to think about over the next couple of weeks too.
Holidays are kicking in now, so we’re all away at some point over the next couple of months and inevitably things take longer to progress at this time of year. So we’ve got to plan that into our timetables.
In case you haven't noticed, the World Cup has started! As I’m writing this England have just won their first match 1-0 and I hope they keep up that form for the rest of the championships! We’ve provided a bit of themed content on our site, such as colouring printables of the competing nations' flags. I’ve also uploaded a colouring printable of the World Cup.
So if you fancy making your own World Cup (on the extreme off-chance that England don’t win, or of course if you’re not English!) then you’ll find it on our ‘Games & Colouring’ section! A bit of tin foil and back it onto cardboard and you’ll never know the difference!
Good luck to Oliver by the way – Oliver Milman, the Web Editor of startups.co.uk, has just left on a charity trek (so he’s missing the World Cup!) to Thailand & Burma to raise money for Cancer Research UK & you can sponsor him on www.justgiving.com/jungleexpedition. Go on, you can spare £5 can’t you for such a great cause and such a sacrifice?!!
Come on England!!
Kirsty