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Well here we are back to the start of yet another year and it does look as though this year is going to be just as interesting as last year was.

Not only are we facing yet more interesting financial times ... although there does seem to be some light at the end of a tunnel that isn't a freight train about to run us over ... but Google continues on its merry way of winding down the screws on organic search and prodding more and more people to head for paid search.

And if that wasn't all enough we're going back to having some very real lack of uniformity in the way that browsers ... and in particular good old Internet Explorer ... handle some important coding. Years ago I'm sure a lot of us were certain that by now we wouldn't have to be writing hacks to get every browser to handle our code in the same way but sadly Microsoft still wants to do things differently to everyone else.

Google
So let's start by looking at one of the changes that Google has implemented because it specifically involves porn and how it appears when someone uses Image Search. For quite some time Google has had a SafeSearch filter in place so that people could ... if they chose to ... only see non-adult related images in their search results.

I'm sure most people didn't really bother to turn that filter on so they would see non-adult and adult related content but now Google says that everyone will see the results with the SafeSearch filter turned on and people will have to make a conscious choice to turn it off if they want to see adult related content.

I'm not sure how much effect that will have on most adult webmasters but I know that there are some that make quite a tidy amount from being able to rank well for various image searches but most of those guys are getting their money from surfers who are looking for explicit content and not those who just happen to stumble upon it when they're searching for something quite different.

However it's worth mentioning and it might just prompt you to think about targeting image search as a way of getting your marketing message in front of those who really do want to see it.

If you don't know what you need to do to use Image Search to your advantage then spend a few pleasant hours search for your favourite porn subjects and see what makes some images/websites rank better than others.

Gee thanks Microsoft
If you've been hiding in your cave for the last year or so and have had no contact with the rest of the planet then you may not understand what I mean by the term 'responsive web design'. That's the label given to a way of designing websites so that the same code enables a website to look good in a large monitor and gracefully collapse and continue to look good as you go down the scale to tablets and smart phones.

Many web designers ... I'm not one of them ... feel that responsive web design is the perfect way to do the job just once rather than building a website for the big screen and another for the smaller screen. There's quite a lot of discussion going on around the world about responsive web design and there's at least one weekly newsletter that covers the topic in depth and often gives you plenty to think about.

However last year Microsoft released IE10 and ... as I mentioned earlier ... by now you would think that the lack of uniformity in the way different browsers handled the same code would have gone away and we would be dealing with far more interesting challenges but unfortunately we're not when it comes to responsive websites and the way it displays those websites on Windows Phone 8.

Instead we're now faced with the challenge of Internet Explorer 10 treating 'device-width' in a totally different way to all the other mobile browsers that are out there.

Of course there is a fix ... as there was to an earlier problem with IE 10 and mobile devices. That earlier problem was caused because IE10 ignores the 'viewport' tag the fix was in the CSS but with the release of Windows Phone 8 yet another problem became apparent and, as I said, there is a fix that you find if you search for it.

But this 2013 so why should we have to be searching for fixes ... shouldn't every browser be singing from the same song book? Evidently not.

So we're off to an interesting start to the new year but adult webmasters are good at improvising, adapting and overcoming and we'll still be here at the end of the year.