Herewith
some of the things I have been ‘working’ on …
in between renovating my old house, mainly making it look as old as it is and tending to my small garden, it shrunk during the 1980s, got smaller still in the noughties and now is just too small
and a little bit of nothing during lockdown …
Crikey … you are not so busy that you have time to keep your website up to date?
No, not really … this is very much ex post facto
I know that most people cannot keep their website up to the minute unless their business model depends entirely on it. If that is what you want to do – rely on your website for business, I can probably help you monetise it, make sure it is designed strictly around your proposition (without distractions) and looks the part. I can also help with marshalling your existing design assets or creating new ones, perhaps (if your budget extends to it) the creation of new assets and use video creatively to engage your audience.
Some recent projects are not at all recent
but its only recently I got around to publishing them
- Video Projects
I have been using creative techniques, using digital imagery, simple animation and video for consultancy projects ever since I started using the internet for publishing everything and anything. - How walkable and cycleable is East Lothian?
It depends. The following map shows some illustrative isochrones (a travel time concept similar to isodistance) evaluated using Travel Time’s (TT) app for QGIS. The layers were simplified for web display when imported into ArcGis. - Recording Local History – the 4th Statistical Account 2.0
Last summer I did a project with the good folk of the East Lothian Antiquarian and Field Naturalists Society to revamp the East Lothian Fourth Statistical Account website. I had previously made the web presence for the society, which included all the published volumes of the transactions since 1937 and other manuscripts and books, around… - Companies are exploiting failures of the market
Where companies are exploiting the failures of the market in which they operate, where consumer choice is inhibited by deliberately complex pricing structures, we must set the market right. So said Theresa May at the Tory party conference in 2016. In 2016 I picked up a short consultancy contract with Cambium for Citizens Advice Scotland to report on business models that companies use in regulated markets that alleviate or exacerbate the so-called Poverty Premium. - From Free to Infinity – How much does a Website Cost?
More than a long piece of string? This answer is of course: “it depends” Basically the more you expect from your website project, the wider the range of features and functions, the more bespoke the design, the more complexity you build in, the more content you have, the more it will cost you. But these… - Our Locality How Refreshing
When we first setup the ourlocality network we had global ambitions. This of course didn’t happen. What did happen though was gratifying all the same. After 5 years of operation, we are on our 3rd server and refreshed the site at least 3 times, with the latest release occurring just a few days ago. We’ve… - Zero Waste Town Update
I’ve spent the last few days doing a rapid induction and handover of the Zero Waste Town project. It was not that long ago in August that I gave a short presentation to an invited audience and attended by the Environment Minister Richard Lochhead, who had swung by to make public that our pitch to become the… - The Ridge Network
The Ridge is a local community interest company with big ambitions. There’s a market gap locally in the provision of traditional and new rural skills. Training opportunities for the young and those who are not in employment are decidedly limited and difficult to get to in a practical sense. - Zero Waste Contract
We’re leading this work in association working with CW Hayes, a feasibility study to determine whether Dunbar could be come Scotland’s first Zero Waste Town. More info: Zero Waste Town, which sets out the brief and how the project aims to drive forward the zero waste agenda. Although we had to work over Xmas to… - Rewarding Greener shopping: Minimum Viable Product
In 2007 I launched a Green Rewards programme on a shoe string budget, ie less than £50k (= my redundancy). More than a just demonstration website, the rewards programme was fully functional with 250,000 products advertised at its peak. - Integrating the Horizontal Themes
It does not seem so long ago that I worked on a multimillion pound project to provide support to the Romanian Ministry of Development on ways of integrating Sustainable Development into their Regional Operational Programme, regional development funds known as EU Structural Funds. The programme to 2013 was to be worth a staggering €19.8b. On contract to… - Better Rural Buses
Originally a free standing website, Better Rural Buses was ported over to Ourlocality.org when the domain was due to expire, to keep the project as a demonstration. Now it is only available as fragments via the Web Archive project. Functionally, the site was intended to allow anyone in the street (or a field for that…
So …
if you have a stalled project that needs a rapid reboot, an overhaul, or re-orientating, want something done yesterday …
… project killing advice also available too