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Hooray, it's Friday and boy do I need it to be Friday. This week has just gone in a blur and I think I need the weekend just to get back in touch with the real world.

They told us so
One of the crazy things we discovered this week really brought home to us what some webmasters had told us years ago. Back then, when we hung out on newbie boards and helped newcomers to this industry some webmasters told us that we were doing the wrong thing. By helping all these newcomers all we would be doing was creating competition for ourselves.

Back then we tended to laugh and even now it's hard to believe that the online industry isn't big enough to handle a little competition ... but this week we learned that there are some aspects of the online industry that are very small, very competitive and you could be shooting yourself in the foot if you offer too much advice.

In another place Steve runs a couple of blogs that deal with mainstream issues for small business, web design and search engine optimization. Here in town the competition for mainstream web design is fierce and, without trying to sound big-headed, we're the only people in town for search optimization that works.

On Wednesday one of our competitors - not known for their experience or search engine optimization ability - asked us if we would be willing to write the text for a new site they were building for a customer and Steve went round to discuss the requirements with their web developer. And what did he see when he got there? He saw one of the staff reading through Steve's web design and search engine optimization blog.

Basically it looks as though these people have been taking free lessons from Steve. So for all those guys who told us we were doing the wrong thing by helping people become our competition ... it looks like you were right and you can now feel free to say 'I told you so!'.

However, all is not lost. There's a lot that Steve knows that he never shares with other people so we should still have the edge when it comes to search engine optimization.

The shape of things to come
Did you see the unveiling of Microsoft's vision of the computer for the future? While everyone else is going smaller here is a guy whose company is developing a table top computer that is operated by touch!

That's right, there's no keyboard and no mouse; everything is operated by touch. Even transferring photos from a digital camera was no more involved than placing the camera on the top of the table and resizing the images was done by touching the photo that appeared on the table-top screen.

Now what will that do for web design and what will it open up for our industry. Suddenly being able to reach out and 'touch' the model will be a reality so how can we exploit that new technology?

While table top computers in every home are a few years away now is the time to start thinking about how to make them work for us.

The Google shuffle
Were you one of those who were affected by the Google shuffle that happened early last month? Did your sites suddenly disappear from the front page of all the great keywords and keyword phrases that you had targeted? Did you panic and run around in ever decreasing circles? Have you been brave enough to go back and see if the search engine results pages (SERPS) had changed again?

Well last month I suggested that, at that stage, if your sites had been affected then the best thing to do was ... nothing. Back then I suggested that it might take a little while but if your sites really deserved to be on the front page of the SERPS then the chances were that they would find their way back to their old position.

At the time I noted that some of our pages that had suddenly disappeared had returned while others, belonging to clients, were still out of sight. Today, while writing a report for one of our clients, we found that all our client's pages that had been missing in action had now returned to the first page for keywords and keyword phrases that were important so we're basically happy campers once more.

If you haven't been brave enough to go back and have another look at where your sites are appearing in Google now might be a good time to pluck up the courage and have a look. You might be pleasantly surprised ... on the other hand you might have to spend the weekend re-assessing your search engine strategies.

Personally I'm going to spend the weekend unwinding ... and getting ready for a huge family gathering that's going to happen here next weekend. There are even people coming in from overseas and somehow I've got to fit all that into what is already shaping up as another busy week.