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The end of the month is upon us as I write this column. Just one more day and July is over and we're heading into the final four months of the year.

I almost always use the last day of each month just to take a look back over what my business has achieved in the last 30 days and whether we've moved any further towards achieving our goals.

Sometimes I can look back and be astounding at how far we've moved ahead in the last month. At other times I can see that while we may have been working our nuts off all we've managed to do is stand still. And then of course there are those times when I look back and realise that we've actually gone backwards.

It's great to see that we've moved forward ... sometimes the fact that we've managed to stand still can be good too ... but there's no doubt that I never feel good about seeing us go backwards. While just standing still can be a sign that we've really achieved something in tough times any sign that we've gone backwards is a cause for some alarm.

So when was the last time that you looked back over the last 30 days or so? When you did look back what did you see? Did you see positive signs or did you see signs that scared the daylights out of you?

For me looking back this time has shown that we didn't move ahead but we didn't really slip back either. However just managing to stand still has taken a major effort that's made us begin to rethink what we're doing and where my business is going to go in the future.

So be honest now ... what did you see when you took a look back? Was what you saw enough to make you think about where your business is going? Sometimes looking back can change your business ... if you have the wisdom to understand what the signs are trying to tell you.

In some cases the worst thing you can do when you see positive or negative signs is to do nothing and either ignore the signs or be lulled into a false sense of security by them. At the very least those signs you see should be telling you that nothing is set in concrete ... we live in a world of change and everything about our business is changing.

And one of the major things we should be thinking about is the change in the way that people are interacting with the Net. Businesses that do some of their advertising on television are noticing that change and it's something that we should be very conscious of.

I've mentioned before that more and more people are surfing the Net while they watch TV. They're sitting in their lounge rooms with their laptop or tablet on their lap and they're multi-tasking and of course, when you multi-task, you're never really giving any of the things you're doing 100 percent of your attention.

So what does that mean for us? Well at the very least it should be making you think about the way your surfers are interacting with the galleries and free sites you're building ... and don't for a minute think that men and women aren't surfing porn sites while they're watching TV.

So when was the last time you looked at the way you design your sites and galleries and thought about how people who weren't really paying attention interacted with your websites?

What do you need to do to make your marketing message stand out for someone who is skimming through your website and watching television at the same time?

Of course we've always had to deal with the problem of getting our marketing message to stand out for people who only want to get to the free stuff but I believe that the situation worsened over the last couple of years. If that's true then we need to improve our site designs so that the marketing message really does stand out.

We've just finished designing a website for a client who wanted something more than just the standard navigation that you find on most business websites. They were happy to have that sort of navigation but they also wanted something more eye-catching too.

What our client settled for was some big buttons right at the top of the text on the main page. They weren't heavy on file size but they're certainly in your face when you hit their front page and I wonder if that's the sort of approach we need to be thinking about with our adult sites?

Whatever the solution is that you come up with there's no doubt that our target market is changing the way they surf the Web and if our web designs aren't keeping up with those changes then we're going to stop making sales and start slipping back till we've gone so far back there's no way we'll ever catch up.