I started this month by telling you about my January charity. I've come this far through February and still haven't sorted out February's charity. It's March next week!
So before another day slips away I shall make my February charity donation. I haven't been accosted in the town centre recently but I have started a new client whose husband is recovering from a stroke, so it's going to be The Stroke Association.
And I'm open to suggestions for March's charity.....let's see if I can get that done and dusted next week.
Leaflets
I've been out and about with leaflets. The calendar year has got off to a patchy start and I decided to tread the local pavements again and shove some reminders through doors! I have a Hereford street map pinned on the office wall and I've highlighted in yellow the streets I've leafletted over three years of business. I wrote several blogposts on the joys of distributing leaflets over a year ago and since then I've become more selective. Many local streets I haven't 'done' for two years. Each leaflet costs me 3.3 pence so I'm thinking quite carefully about the "likely" streets to target.
I've also had 500 "business" leaflets printed - leaflets which I shall put through the doors of small businesses. 500 is only a small print run and each leaflet works out at about 15p - very expensive - but this is a bit of an experiment for me. I'm going for local businesses, bed & breakfasts, mobile services like gardeners, plumbers, builders. The idea is to emphasise my website design, spreadsheet and database services. I can spread these leaflets around far more widely, because after the initial consultation I could do this sort of work at home. I'll let you know what response I get....
Attachments
Dare I mention email again? I wrote a series of posts about Microsoft's mail clients last year. My general lament was that they'd done away with Outlook Express and applied their policy of
"if it ain't broke, do away with it and force the public to pay us more for something that we rushed out before fully testing it."Well, at the moment I seem to be spending a lot of time steering people through the mysteries of downloading attachments with BT Yahoo! Mail. I'm not a great fan of webmail but if a customer has started using it I work with it rather than trying to introduce a mail client - unless it's AOL, of course!
I find that the important concept to get across is that 'webmail' means that you are looking at e.g. BT's mail computer, like any other website. So all your mail and the pictures that people send you are "out there somewhere", not stored on your computer. There are some advantages to this, but when you want to save those pictures, use one of them as your desktop perhaps, it's quite a lengthy process to download them.
I've spent a long evening taking screenshots of BT mail and compiling them into what I hope is a useful manual that explains how to download picture attachments and save them in a convenient folder. And it's the saving "in a convenient folder" that is the biggest problem. Perhaps I should say the fiddliest problem. BT still sends photo attachments in a zipped folder. The photos have to be extracted from this...and you have to be careful not to save the photos inside the same zipped folder!
- Does anyone know of any advantage now in using zipped folders? It seems that they save only a few kilobytes out of a total of megabytes - 3 orders of magnitude bigger!
- Does anyone else find that a major problem that people have with their computers is in the saving of things? The difference between Save and Save As... and the importance of choosing where to save stuff?
Is this what is meant by "cloud computing"? I suppose we'll all catch up with it eventually.
Colin
