Some days I think that everyone should have a blog – after all, I have more than one myself! And I enjoy writing these posts, nothing formal, nothing fancy, whatever’s on my mind or that I’d like to share.

Sometimes I tell a prospective client that actually they don’t need a web site at all, what they need is a blog, which – if they don’t mind using an off-the-peg design and address at one of the major blogging sites – won’t cost them anything, and will fit their particular needs.

But sometimes, when a client tells me that the marketing department has advised them that what they need is a blog, but they aren’t sure, and how much would they have to write, and how often…? Well, on those days I want to advise them not to do it, don’t get a blog.

The simple truth is that if you enjoy blogging, it can be made to work for you (Julia Darling’s blog kept her in touch with friends and readers through her final illness, and after her death became a play on BBC radio); but if you really hate it, it tends to show.

A blog which is frequently updated is a cheap and easy way of keeping a web site fresh and up-to-date; but nothing looks staler than an abandoned blog.

These aren’t new thoughts. But I thought them all over again yesterday, when I found this blog, set up to promote a collection of stories for teenagers, called Losing It: "If you’re a teenager," it says, "we want to hear your views! So tell us -" And there’s nothing else but a big white space.

The thing about blogs, you see, is that you have to write them.

There is a plausible story on the Register website this morning. “Malware-pushing scammers appear to be stepping up their use of telephone-based pitches, resulting in an increase in reports from the UK of high-pressure cold calls designed to trick people into installing rogue antivirus products and other nasties.” I say “plausible” because the reporter names names of people who have received these calls. The caller says that they can check over the phone whether your computer is infected with a virus. In fact they ask you to check for the presence of a perfectly normal, legitimate, file, and tell you it’s a virus.

If you receive one of these calls, ignore it, and don’t get into a conversation. Otherwise you could be charged up to £79 to have rogue anti-virus software installed on your PC, and then suffer the difficulty of uninstalling it.

Following on Valerie Laws’s commendation in the Poetry Society National Poetry competition comes the news that two of our clients have books shortlisted in the London Festival Fringe New Poetry Award 2010. The Coffee House Poetry website has broken the news that both Breath by Ellen Phethean (Flambard Press) and Even the Sea by Eleanor Livingstone (Red Squirrel Press) are in the running for this new £2,500 Award for 2010′s Best New Poet.

In total there are 15 books on the shortlist, selected from the 77 submitted. Our congratulations to both poets, to both publishers, and fingers crossed for a result when the prizewinner is announced on August 16th.

Ten days after Cornwell Internet’s return from Fair Isle, we are beginning to feel that the work is under control and some, at least, of the holiday photos are sorted. Time for a quick report back – and by now some of the work has been done for me!

The purpose of – or excuse for – the trip was to help Ann Cleeves celebrate the completion of her Shetland Quartet of crime novels with a party at the location where the fourth novel takes place, back at the Bird Observatory on Fair Isle where Ann’s love affair with Shetland began. Here is Ann’s account of how things didn’t go exactly to plan – but everyone had a great time all the same!

The idea had been that we would be a houseparty at the newly refurbished Observatory, but as the work was not completed in time, we all stayed at different locations around the island. Roger and I were at the South Light House:

it’s a tiny island, nowhere is very far from anywhere else, and we were very comfortable down on the southern tip of the island. Besides, as our host pointed out, Ann’s novel Blue Lightning may be set at the North Light (where, for the purposes of the story, Ann has located the Bird Observatory), but it is the South Light which appears on the cover. Our fellow guest there was Douglas Barr, who actually appears in the book, having won the prize in an auction in aid of Vaila’s Fund!

The actual party was, as Ann says, a tremendous success. Everyone on the island was there, from grandparents to babies, including two children whose birthday it was and a quartet of knitting enthusiasts who had booked a holiday on Fair Isle without realising there was a party going on. Ann and fiddler Chris Stout reprised the presentation they have created together, which they had performed the previous week in Lerwick (we later read an account in the Shetland Times). And there was food and drink and music. Local photographer Dave Wheeler took photographs which capture some of the atmosphere.

Back on Shetland Mainland, we were amused to see that Ann was not our only client to feature in the Shetland Times that week: the New Rope String Band had been in town for the Folk Festival, and had received a glowing review – that doesn’t seem to have made it onto the web site, but The Scotsman described them as "hilariously deranged".

Yesterday’s Guardian film & music section carries an interesting article about website design. It begins:

In the mid-noughties, Northern Irish power-poppers Ash were signed to a major label and had the website to prove it. "We had a fancy flash site that looked great," says singer/guitarist Tim Wheeler. "It was set up to launch an album, but there was no way of maintaining it or updating it regularly ourselves. It was frustrating because we had to go through webmasters. It was one of those sites you look at once and think, ‘Oh, very good, but why am I here?"

The writer argues that bands need web sites (and, interestingly, that MySpace and Facebook don’t meet this need) and that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Regularly changing content is essential ("The worst thing a fan can see when they visit a website is the same thing they saw last time"). Beyond this, go for a style that suits you: don’t feel pressured to be more formal – or more informal! – than is comfortable. A site that reflects your personality is more likely to appeal to your fans.

Within the past week two customers have received remarkably similar emails from Asian companies which say that they have received an application to register a domain name which is the same as the main part of your domain name (eg, in our case it would be cornwellinternet). They may mention trademark and anti-cybersquatting issues. They ask you to get in touch quickly or they will go ahead and register this domain name which is similar to yours.

This is a scam and you can safely ignore these emails should you receive one. That’s the short version. There is more information here.

And while I’m on the topic of scams, people with international domains (.com, .org) are still receiving letters from Domain Registry of America, Domain Registry of Europe and similarly named enterprises, usually just less than six months before the domain they mention expires and offering to renew it. These too are a scam, see this article. The main give-away here is the 4½pt small print on the back of the letter. Most of our customers let us handle the domain renewal and this is something we do in the three months before expiry (unfortunately we cannot do it any earlier than that). The cost in included in the annual fee.

…to Valerie Laws on her Commendation in the Poetry Society National Poetry Competition.

The commended poem, Lifting the Lid, is published on the Poetry Society’s web site.

I said in my previous post here that I don’t actually buy e-books myself. But more and more people do, and as a result more books are being made available as e-books, and people are having all sorts of creative ideas about what e-books can do, and how they can do it.

Take Book View Café, for example, of which Chaz Brenchley has recently become a member. Book View Café is a consortium of authors in all genres who have come together to promote their work – and in particular to bring lost or neglected works to a new audience – using internet technology to offer both free and paid-for content.

As I said, I’m more comfortable reading print on paper. But if a book isn’t available, if it’s gone out of print and the available copies command silly prices, what then? Better an e-book than no book at all. And if there’s enough demand for an e-book, perhaps publishers will take note, and produce a paper edition. So I shall be watching the progress of Book View Café with interest.

While I was updating Chaz’z site with this information, I followed a link to this article by Sarah Zettel in the Examiner: she asks, "How do you get your e-book signed by its author?" – and she answers the question, too, though you’ll have to read the article to find out how.

Which set me thinking. I’m currently working on a facelift for My Home Library, an organisation set up to encourage children to read by offering free bookplates with which they can personalise their books. It has a wonderful selection of original bookplates created by many of the best of today’s illustrators, all ready to be printed off and pasted into books. But what if your home library consists of e-books on a reader? Can those be personalised by adding a bookplate? After all, the plates are just electronic files until you download them. I’m sure it must be possible…

One of the reasons why authors have web sites is to encourage people to buy their books; and one of the ways of encouraging them is to make it easy for them.

That’s why so many of the web sites I manage have links to Amazon. It’s not the only place you can buy books: and Cornwell Internet run on-line sales for small publishers, encourage people to buy through independent bookshops (and provide ISBN identifying numbers to make it easier for those shops to order books they might not have stocked) and link to alternative suppliers. But Amazon is big, reasonably efficient, has an Affiliates scheme which actually pays a small percentage back to the author on books ordered through their site – and, the deciding factor for me, at any rate, they stock an enormous number of books. They make it easy for me to use them to make it easy for my clients to sell books.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway.

Nine months ago I blogged here about AmazonFail, a storm in a teacup in which Amazon had – apparently accidentally – removed the sales rankings from a number of books on their site. I commented then that Amazon was a large operation that seemed to find it easier to make mistakes than to correct them, and that they had completely failed at public relations in their response to complaints.

Once is happenstance; twice is…

Last week Amazon.com removed their sales links from books published by Macmillans and their subsidiaries. If you followed a link to one of those books, you would find it, but you couldn’t buy it from Amazon themselves, only from their Marketplace sellers (who sell secondhand as well as new). This was part of a dispute between Amazon and Macmillan about the pricing of e-books.

Personally, I don’t buy e-books. I like ‘real’ books, made out of paper, and while I’m happy to read an extract or a short story online, to decide whether I’m going to buy a particular book, I don’t like the idea of paying for electronic text which only exists on the reader. But that’s just me. There is a market for e-books, Macmillan sell them, and while they can’t force Amazon, as a retailer, to sell their books (e-books or otherwise) at a particular price, they can say that they won’t supply them below a particular price, and if that doesn’t suit the retailer, well, you don’t need to sell that particular item. Amazon not only sell books, they sell the Kindle e-book reader as well; they have a vested interest in keeping the price of e-books down, because the cheaper the books, the better value the reader looks. (I think they also have a vested interest in new books continuing to be written and published, which means keeping the price at a level where that is financially viable, but this isn’t about the merits of the dispute, it’s about the way it was conducted). If they think Macmillan’s price for e-books is too high, they could decline to sell them.

But they didn’t do that, they pulled the plug on all Macmillan’s books.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve started receiving messages from the publishers, particularly the US publishers, of authors whose site I look after. Please, they say, would we link to some other bookshops as well as Amazon? They want to persuade as many shops as possible to stock and to promote their books, and how can they do that if we only encourage people to buy from Amazon? This involves extra work, and takes thought if the page isn’t to look so complicated that people are deterred from purchasing through it; but it’s a fair request, and I sigh, and do it. Since AmazonFail, I sometimes do it even without being asked. And this last week, I’ve been very glad I did, because it made it so much easier to go through and remove the links which – because of Amazon’s action – weren’t actually encouraging people to buy from Amazon anyway.

Today, a week after Amazon’s links vanished without a word of explanation, I was looking at something else on Amazon and – hooray! – the links are back. You can once more buy Macmillan (and Tor and St Martin’s Minotaur and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux…) books from Amazon.

I suppose I should restore my links to Amazon.com. I’ll probably get round to it, but I’m in no hurry – who knows how long the entente will last, or what stunt Amazon will pull next?

Cornwell Internet spend a lot of time on publishers’ web sites, whether we are looking for information about our clients’ publications, or for some other reason – we even buy books ourselves, occasionally. On the whole, unless the site is one we built ourselves, we are not impressed by what we see. Roger’s favourite example is the site on which you could not find a book unless you knew in which month it had been published.

Ungratefully, we are also prone to complain when publishers renew their web sites: they have been known to delete the whole site and replace it with a page promising ‘new site coming soon’ (often with a completion date which they overrun). Then, when the new site appears, we have to change all our links because material has been moved – or deleted!

So here’s double congratulations on your new site to ISIS Publishing, the audiobook specialists. It isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s a huge improvement on the previous version. The search feature now works with Firefox! Eack book groups under one title the different formats in which it is available (tape cassette, audio CD, MP3 CD…) so I can link to a title and allow the visitor to choose which format they want. Better still, I can now link to a title full stop – the old site was so constructed that you could only link to the front page.

One result is that where previously I would link to ISIS titles on Amazon, because their site allows me to link to individual items, now it is actually easier for me to link to ISIS’s own site, encouraging potential customers to go to them direct. This has to be good news for them, doesn’t it?