i’ve started to take my website design more seriously and brought my portfolio website bang up to date with a more business like approach to my freelancing. previously it was a bit more casual in it’s content and copy, i also didn’t do too much in the way of promoting the site – there wasn’t even any meta tags or a sitemap submission to google to my eternal shame!

so i’ve updated, pruned and rewritten everything on the site. i’m also going to invest in a little advertising, both locally in the free newspaper and with google adwords. it should be a nice experiment as the one thing i did do correctly with the site as to add google analytics so i can track the before and after statistics.

here’s the link: www.martinlucas.co.uk

along with my own site i’m trying to organise my online brand, the avatar you see on the right is a cartoon version of me, complete with headphones – this appears on my facebook, my twitter, msn instant messenger and all the forums that i contribute to, so hopefully you might see him popping up around the world wide web and know that it’s me.

I was ripping a few mix cd’s for my ipod yesterday and i put a disc in the drive and it didn’t show up in itunes, or in finder – very strange…

so i restarted and nothing changed, i held down the eject key on the keyboard and still nothing happened. this was when i panicked a little and hit the Apple Discussions forum to find out if this had happened to anyone else.

there were a few similar scenarios but nothing exactly the same, but the solution was found. basically you have to restart and hold down the touch pad button until the cd ejects – and it did.

here’s the support page with all the info: docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88068

a short while ago i was contacted by a nice chap called scott, and he asked me if he could use one of my photographs [this one] on a dvd case for a new film that was about to be released.

he didn’t give me any information, apart from the fact there was no budget to pay to use the photo – my thinking at the time was some money would of been nice, but having my photo on the case was pretty cool, so i didn’t grumble and i let them use the photograph in question.

that was 2 months ago, and last week scott contacted me again and this time he sent through the final design for the case. it’s not the best design that i’ve ever seen – but, my photo is on the back and as it turns out the film stars ice t and gary busey – people who i’ve actually heard of – so that’s pretty cool.

here’s the layout.

the funny thing is that the photograph was taken using a 1.3 mega pixel camera phone, not exactly state of the art photography equipment.

I recently switched things around at work in regards to our email system. I was originally receiving all our work emails on my powerbook as well as all my personal and work related emails. which meant i always seemed to have a large amount of emails in my inbox, so i moved all the emails to do with the day job to a computer at work which has dramatically freed up my emails on my laptop. This also meant that i had to set up a new email address for my freelance work contacts – i was always using my work email for this.

so the problem now was what to put before the @martinlucas.co.uk for an email address. the obvious is my name, i.e. martin@martinlucas.co.uk which a lot of people do, but it’s something that i don’t like because of the repetition and i didn’t want the boring and predictable;

info@
contact@
mail@
email@

so i had a look around at work other ‘cool’ companies out there had. i know that i had seen websites with something different before the @ before – but purposefully looking for those wasn’t easy.

one of the more popular things to put before the @ was a greeting of some sorts, hello@ was found at a number of sites and i think this works really well – it’s casual, inviting and drops the rather stuffy and tired info@. but it still wasn’t quite right for me, as i wanted the email address to be (at least almost) grammatically correct, so you could actually say out the email address and it would make sense.

this limits the choices somewhat to verbs that came be done at a person or a place. here’s a couple that i came up with;

wink@ – way too flirtacious, but pretty fun
shout@ – would be great if it was for my dj site
sayhello@ – what i ended up going for

so i went with ’say hello at martin lucas dot co dot uk’, i think it works quite well. it asks people to contact me at my domain name, it’s an email address and a direction – it’s also quite casual without being too familiar and possibly off putting to potential clients and customers.