New Web-site, New Blog
Since January, I’ve been working in earnest to get my new business up and running. As per the original plan, I am looking to build a Portfolio Career with the bulk of my time spent consulting on Business Strategy & Planning along with time reserved for writing. I am getting a little closer to the point where my web-site, http://andrewmunro.co.uk, is fit for public consumption although it needs some more work still. In addition, I am developing a separate blog for more business related topics. The new blog can be accessed via the above site or, directly, at http://andrewmunroassoc.spaces.live.com/. Currently, there is no unique content up there but increasingly I will try to separate the two streams so that high-minded business folk do not need to suffer my trials, tribulations and celebrations on guitars. Nor will they need to submit to a conversion to the music of Warren Zevon.
I used Microsoft’s Office Live service to build the site and it is, generally, a great offering. It includes a personalised domain name – on an enormous creative surge, I opted for andrewmunro.co.uk (because some imposter has andrewmunro.com) – up to 25 email addresses and some fantastic tools to actually build the site quickly and reasonably professionally. I have a couple of gripes however. Firstly, I am struggling to get some custom HTML to run. In particular, I wanted to use an amazon.com widget to display recommended books but it simply crashes the page. Second grumble is one of those infuriatingly basic things: the text formatting is poor and unpredictable making it impossible to cut and paste formatted text into the web pages. My final grumble is closely related and that is how the Blog appears on the web-page. Again, the formatting is crap. All the line spaces have gone and it looks unprofessional. Also, there seems to be no way to include the usual blogging tools and widgets which I’ve had to add onto the underlying spaces site.
That said, of course, I am up and running with a service which looks as if it will grow with my needs as business develops. And for that, I would heartily recommend it.
