July 2007

Well, Newton Clothiers is chugging along at a slow but good enough pace.

 Three days ago I marked a small milestone which I’d like to share - I have my first 10 shirt customer.  He placed his fourth order three days ago to bring the total to double figures.

 He experimented with his last shirt, choosing a contrast colour with an unusual pattern, and the day after receiving it wore it to a meeting. He told me he got complimented on his shirt by all five people in the room.

 As a result of this I have a new customer, and a new three shirt order from a satisfied customer. I’m pleased as punch, and that’s the only reason I’m writing this.

Probably the number one thing that’s going to bring a customer back to me, even over fit, price, or quality is if they receive compliments from other people. We all want to impress when we dress.

I’ve been making my own little websites for a little while now - www.jonksbargains.com; www.matnewton.com/mongolia and my most famous website (for a couple of days I was all over the news in Australia) www.savethemexicanwave.com.

The Mongolia one is my most recent and I’m highly cheesed that I didn’t make this discovery sooner.  Have you ever made a website only to notice a little error which requires you to go through 20 pages just to fix the same thing? I have. In the case of the Mongolia website, this happened maybe five or six times. Why couldn’t I just drag all the repeated code from the same file, I asked myself as I sobbed into my beer. (Ignore that last bit.)

Well today I found you actually can do this. It’s called Server Side Includes, one of the greatest inventions in the history of HTML.  A search for Includes HTML on Google will yield page after helpful page saving you hours and hours of time.

You can store HTML in a single file which can be accessed every time a new page is opened. I really, really wish I knew about this a week ago.

My travelogue is up : Mongolia tour.

Another pleasant surprise is that my australia internet bargains website Jonk’s Bargains is growing in visits per day despite me not doing anything to it.

Each month the average visits/day goes up 10. Not huge but maybe it will snowball at some point - currently am seeing 90 a day. Much of this growth is Google…. I think my PageRank is floating up as Google and Google.com.au are now firmly entrenched as my top two referrers.