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The end of the month is upon us and that puts us just 84 days away from Christmas ... why does time have to go so fast when you're having fun? And yes, that's exactly what we're having. Despite all the work that we have on at the moment we really are having fun.

Yesterday we took some time out and went for a drive just to get away from the computers and the phones for a morning. It was great to sit there in the car and just brainstorm about some of the things that are on the horizon for us. It also gave us a chance to look back at what's been happening over the last couple of months and that was really interesting.

For some months now the mainstream side of our work has been getting close to equaling the adult work we do but this month, for the very first time, it looks as though we've earned more from mainstream than we have from adult. What's even more interesting is that the amount of work that's coming to us from adult hasn't decreased one little bit ... if anything it's actually increased.

So now we're looking at ways that we can cope with the work from both sides of the fence. It would be easy to wind back the amount of work we do for either mainstream or adult but we don't see that as being the best way. Instead we want to go on pursuing new work in both areas and growing our team to cope with that increase.

It's always been a challenge to find good reliable people to be part of our adult team and now we're going to be facing that same situation for mainstream work as well. But we've done it in adult so we're sure we can repeat the process in mainstream too.

One of the interesting things we've also noticed is that some of our mainstream competition is really beginning to struggle. That's not surprising in the part of the world where we live because there are so many small web designers and even though the quality of their work is rather dubious the fact that they can charge ridiculously low rates is having an impact on the big guys. (But then the big guys aren't producing much in the way of quality with their web designs either.)

Even though the big guys might be suffering that doesn't seem to be having much of an impact on the amount of work we're getting. We can produce good work and at the same time our business model helps keep overheads to an absolute minimum. At the same time there's every chance that all that low quality work that's being turned out will eventually lead to more work for us. If you think about it for a while you'll see where the opportunity is for us and it's there for you too.

In every town across the western world there are web designer wannabe's who are producing websites that are never going to do what their owners expected of them and that's where the opportunity is for you to step in and turn their rubbish site into something that will really work for them.

As long as you don't get greedy and try to charge too much for the work you do on these sites you could easily become the go-to guy for web design in the town where you live. You would be surprised what word-of-mouth can do for your business and once you have one or two satisfied clients they will spread the word for you.

What's hot this Christmas
Seeing it is getting so close to Christmas I thought I might leave you for the month with some clues on what people are searching for right now. It may help you tweak your mainstream sites to attract more traffic and even make some sales.

Hitwise suggests that, after analyzing the top 2,000 search terms used to reach the top 100 retail websites in the United Kingdom, the gadgets/terms people are looking for are Nintendo Wii, sat nav and iPods. If you're trying to market Sony Playstation 3 then the things look a little gloomy; it didn't even reach the top 10 list of searches.

Checking your stats
Now I'm off to do a little stat checking just to see what terms people have been using to hit our sites. If you're not spending at least a few minutes every week or so checking those search strings in your server stats then you really are missing out on some valuable information.

And while you're checking those search strings also have a look to see which sites are your top referrers. The most popular stats package on servers these days only lists your referrers by their IP addresses but there are some tools out there that let you trace those IP addresses but to their corresponding domain names.

And that's it for another month.