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So the end of the week is drawing ever closer and as it does life around this office just seems to be getting crazier.

There's been a bug going around ... thoughtfully brought in by one of our clients ... that wiped me out for the afternoon yesterday. I'm fine today but several appointments that I had scheduled for today got shifted to tomorrow because the people I was seeing have all got the bug too and that means tomorrow is going to be absolutely crazy with twice the number of people coming in to see me.

I've got a major e-commerce project about to go live ... if only someone in the shipping company our client wants to use will tick a box and make his account active. What's involved in ticking a box you might wonder ... and so do I. How hard is it to tick a box? It seems it's too hard for this company ... they were asked to activate the account two weeks ago and they still haven't done it despite phone calls and emails.

And then there's the client who can't seem to grasp how to make a post in WordPress. We've given him lessons ... written him tutorials ... and still he manages to spend hours writing something and then deleting it instead of publishing it ... and when it comes to adding images ... well that's just too hard for this guy.

Oh well ... enough of the insanity around here ... let's spend a little time looking at a couple of things I've talked about in the past.

Images and responsive web design
At the beginning of the month I wrote about responsive web design ... the latest hot topic among web designers.

If you're not up to speed on responsive web design I can tell you that basically it's the ability to design a site that looks good no matter what size screen it's viewed on. So it's going to look good whether it's viewed on a cell phone screen or a huge display on a desktop monitor.

It sounds great in theory and it's obviously got some merit if your site uses little more than text but problems are definitely going to arise as soon as you start using images. Imagine what an adult 468x60 banner is going to look like when a responsive design reduces it to something that can be viewed on a small screen and you will begin to understand the problem I raised back at the start of the month.

It seems I'm not the only one who sees images as a problem for responsive web design and there's an interesting article over on the Opera website that looks at the question of getting images to work in a responsive design.

You can find the article at dev.opera.com/articles/view/responsive-images-problem/ and it's worth reading as long as you don't expect to find a solution that will work for us.

Smartphone Apps
Recently I've talked both here and over on Porn Resource about the need for us to be looking at Smartphone apps and, seriously folks, if you haven't done so yet then you really need to catch up to where your market place is heading.

Yesterday we released a very early beta version of a mainstream app that we have been working on and it has given us some real insight into the challenges and the benefits of working with apps.

You certainly don't have to be a major coding guru if you want to play with apps because there are sites out there that give you the ability to design, build and publish your apps online. They are certainly not expensive to use but they do limit the amount of content you can put into your app. However they're a great tool to help you get started.

That's where we started but we've already at the point where we want to go further and when you reach that point there's software available that's not going to cost you an arm or a leg and we've got some of that on order too.

And don't for a moment think that you have to get your app accepted by the big app stores for people to be able to download it ... of course they're not going to list any hardcore app. All you have to do is provide a link to the app on any of your websites and invite people to download it.

I'd suggest that you even provide a QR code link so people who are using a PC to view your site can get the app on their phone simply by scanning the QR code.

Of course the app field is virtually untouched here in adult and we've got some thoughts rumbling around in the back of our collective mind on what we can do to exploit that and even in mainstream there are still plenty of niche things you can focus on for a phone app.

Think outside the box too when it comes to monetizing your apps ... think about who you can sell to and what you can sell them.

There's lots of exciting things you can do with phone apps so let them get away from you.