So where do we start, ok what does the user want. In many cases the web surfer is looking for an answer to a question; how do I do something, what should I buy (reviews), where should I stay (travel / business accommodation), what should I read … and so forth.

The web visitor will either go straight to your websites if they have already bookmarked it – well occasionally, or they will search for your site or more usually the topic of interest. When searching it used to be people would use a single search term (amazon, books, Scotland) now they often use two and three (or more) words in a search engine phrase. Therefore for people to find your website or web page you do need to consider how and what people are searching for and to optimise your website and pages to meet what is called “long tailword” keywords; search terms such as “amazon uk books”, “hotel ullapool Scotland” for example. One way to optimise is to use the long tail keyword phrase in the url of your web page i.e. hotels-in-ullapool-scotland.html as an example, then use the <h1> tag to put in a Title at the top of the page for the same phrase … Hotels in Ullapool, Scotland.

If you develop websites then this is old hat, you will probably know this and a lot more, so what is new? Well I have been putting my head in the sand for years now … mobile phones, smart phones, tablets and have consistently developed websites for the good old desktop computer with a LARGE monitor, and for semi-decent laptops with quality 15 inch screens or better. All of my web pages have been developed to be over 900px wide, often 1000px and static width. Therefore the sites will not be of any use to anyone searching for information using a smart phone or tablet device (7” or 10” screen size). That got me thinking, especially after looking for templates to use with a WordPress powered site (this one) that allowed me to resize my browser down to a very small size (equivalent of a smart phone) while still showing the information. And to top it off these templates also resized my images, simply amazing.

Yes there are very bright web developers around and while I am not one of them I hope to be bright enough to start from my existing knowledge and harness the talent out in the open source community to help me redevelop and redesign my websites to meet the end user requirements of … quick access to an answer (if I have it), to allow my content to be viewed on any device, to have my web pages load quickly and hopefully meet search engine “quality tick list” so that my web pages list well and people can then find the content I present.

In this process I have decided to create web pages that can go from 960 px wide to 300 px wide and to test it on a number of mobile devices. To do this I am investigating the use of the open source html5, css3 and JavaScript coding provided by Twitter’s development team – Twitter Bootstrap

If you want to keep up with my experiments, frustrations and success using this and other design tools then I will be adding it to this website.

Well I did try and tell my sleeping wife that there was a bat in the house, but all she did was make a few noises and mutter something I did not understand but probably was on the line “well what do you expect me to do” then promptly went back to sleep. So first things first, make sure the dogs are safe – got one dog into the bedroom and closed the door, got the other collie out of the house and into the car. Got myself set up for battle – I have read about a Bat worker dying due to a bat bit in Scotland a couple of years ago so I was taking no chances, heavy garden gloves, woolly hat over my bald hair just in case the bat decided it liked the look of my head as a landing space, on with my heavy garden jacket … taking no chances with this monster of a bat which by now had settled down somewhere … but where! I also looked out a cardboard box and a towel – so I could catch and release the bat.

After a short investigation around the living room (I had closed the door on it) I found the bat hanging on the window blind cord, seemingly at peace with everything. So I decided it was a good time to take some pictures of it for my website and to post up on twitter. The pictures are below. Funny enough I had just wondered how to capture a picture of the flying bats in the garden just today and was thinking about posting it on twitter as a question. I think I will leave the outdoor bat photography for another year as I suspect I will need most expensive camera equipment to capture them in flight. So I am delighted with my bat visitor staying still long enough to let me take a few photographs of it.

Bat in the house

So at the point I have my photographs and now want the bat out of the house, I open the window next to the bat, but being a security window it only opens so far, so that idea is not going to work. The next idea is to wrap a towel around it (while I am wearing my heavy garden gloves of course). Of course at that point the bat decides to scare the living daylights out of me by flying around the living room – I hold up the cardboard box with the hope that it will land inside the box and allow me to put it outside. No of course not, a daft idea for a not so daft bat. It is flying around me all the time at this point, wondering where all the midges are probably. So my next idea is simply to let the bat fly out the house the way it came it. I open the living room door and it flies out down the corridor towards the kitchen and conservatory. I go and look for it, no sign of it, then it starts flying around the conservatory and I open the kitchen door and it flies out without even saying goodbye.

I then did a check to make sure there had been only one bat, and then let my collie in from the car and opened the bedroom door again, all is well as is the bat.

I did mention that we have a colony of bats in our croft house and they visit in the spring and leave in the autumn. During the spring and early summer they certainly have a lot to say to each other and it is amazing to listen to them talk to each other … probably to the youngsters have just been born and growing up about how to catch midges and so forth. Their chatter must mean something, probably just complaining to each other about the noise of the TV which is next to the wall they inhabit. Having bats in the wall and seeing them fly out and return when we are watching TV or reading a book is wonderful. We do have several bat boxes we plan to put on the garden shed next to the house to see if they will take up residence in these boxes, but as usual we never got around to putting them up this year, well maybe next year we will have the bat boxes up to encourage more bats to eat the midges around the garden.

Bat in the house

Bat in the house

If you are interested in Bats then visit http://www.bats.org.uk/ and to identify UK Bats

One of my fears is about rabies although after reading about the low possiblity of getting rabies from a UK bat species I feel a bit more relaxed, although I still will be very careful if I come across a bat outside or in the house.