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I must be insane, as I write this it's just after five in the morning and not even the birds are up yet. I know I should still be tucked up in bed sound asleep but I can't, I've just got too much to do. So here I am, getting an early start on the day.

And it's going to be a rather interesting day too. We've got some print ads to send over to a client for approval ... and he should like them because they turned out a whole lot better than what I was expecting. The client had given us several poor quality images that came from the Net with the expectation that they would look good in print ... which they rarely do.

Really they should have looked like crap but our graphic artist has managed to work a miracle so the client should be happy.

Last night we had a meeting with a new client and his partner. They run a local business in an industry that doesn't seem to have seen the value of marketing on the Net so building a site for them should be interesting and we expect that they'll get back to us today with the approval to start. So that's something else to look forward to.

If you're working out there in small towns and cities and you want to open up a new income stream then think about mainstream web designing. Many of the design principles that you use here in adult apply over there in mainstream. Obviously there's likely to be competition but perhaps look around for some businesses in industries that haven't yet hit the Net in a big way and then work up a proposal for them that will show them how they can benefit from a website. It's nothing more than marketing and if you can show a person how they will benefit from a site and you price it right then you'll find that they'll more than likely buy what you're selling

When we left that client last night he and his partner were still talking about ways that a website - that was more than just an online brochure - would benefit their business.

Firefox
I know, I'm a Luddite but I don't like Firefox. However Steve just loves it and rarely uses Internet Explorer for anything much these days. If you're like Steve then you may be interested to know that the next version of Firefox is not all that far away. In fact, if you don't mind playing with beta versions you will find that the fourth beta version of the next Firefox has been released.

It looks as though it addresses some of the problems that Firefox has had with things like memory usage and speed and it's claimed that applications such as Gmail will run twice as fast in the new version of Firefox.

Internet Explorer
While we were showing a couple of our designs to that client last night we discovered that IE seems to have had an update recently that affects Windows Media Player. On one of the sites that we've built there's an embedded media player window that appeared with no problems at all the last time we checked the site. Now though there's nothing there but a red X and a message that suggests users click for further information.

So if you've got some embedded players on sites around the place it might pay to spend a little time checking them in an updated version of IE. You might be in for a rather unpleasant surprise.

Plural or singular search terms
Hitwise has produced some interesting figures on the difference between singular and plural search terms in the United Kingdom. The example they use involves the term 'laptop' and 'laptops' and it seems search strings that include those terms do differ in popularity.

For example the top singular search term according to Hitwise is 'free laptop' but the top plural search term is 'cheap laptops'. The plural term 'free laptops' only makes it into number two position while the singular term 'cheap laptop' is down at number three.

While those figures are certainly interesting and something that we should take into account when we're writing the text for our pages what we really need to consider is what is appearing in the search engine results pages for those terms. It's been a little while since I checked so do a little test for yourself ... you might be surprised at what you see.

And that's it for me today. Now it's time to jump into some work for clients.