Here’s to NH Wines, importers of very special wines from France, whose new website, designed and built by Cornwell Internet, has just opened for business.

NH Wines is a collaboration between wine enthusiast Nick Lowe and wine expert Helen Savage. Its wines come from small scale, individual (sometimes very individual!) vineyards, and are not otherwise available in Britain.

And in complete contrast, Cornwell Internet’s other recently completed project is a makeover for the website of St. Mary the Boltons, a church in London’s South Kensington.

It’s very satisfying to start from scratch, from a visual clue provided by the client (in the case of NH Wines, a photograph, but it might have been a book cover, or a preference for a particular colour or style), and build a new site with its own look; but it’s also satisfying to take an existing site, as we did with St Mary the Boltons, and tidy it up. It’s amazing how the smallest changes can make a site look fresh and new.

We spent Thursday evening at the Northern Poetry Library in Morpeth – the largest collection of contemporary poetry in England outside London (where the National Poetry Library is about to reopen). The Library has 15,000 books: anthologies, collections, poetry for children…

We were not there to borrow a book, however, but to celebrate a web site: the second issue of Acknowledged Land, the online literary magazine for Northumberland. (The title plays on the medieval description of the much-disputed border between England and Scotland as "the debatable lands"). We’ve been trying to promote the alliance of literature and the internet since 2001, and we’re always delighted to see that alliance strengthened.

Acknowledged Land contains some first-rate material, too: I can’t give direct links, because the site design prevents it, but I particularly enjoyed the interview and poems from Gillian Allnutt in the current issue, and the Peter Bennet interview and poems in the first issue (now archived).

The Poetry Library had taken the trouble to keep computers switched on, so that we could look at the new issue, and it looked wonderful: each issue is laid across a strong background image; the first was waving grass the second a twig, all green leaves and red berries against a blue, blue sky. It doesn’t look quite as wonderful on my screen at home, because I am one of those web surfers (I think we are still about 20% of users) whose screen is only 800X600. I have been resisting upgrading, because designing for a smaller screen (and then looking at the result on Roger’s larger screen) enables us to make sites which work for all visitors, regardless of screen size: Acknowledged Land produces a number of ugly and inconvenient scroll bars on my monitor.

This is annoying, but it doesn’t stop me enjoying the magazine: a blind visitor, though, would have trouble using the menu buttons, which are graphics with no text for a voice browser to read; and the text size has been fixed, so that a partially sighted surfer couldn’t increase the print size. I hate to see a site made inaccessible by such easily-fixed mistakes. Still, it gave us an opportunity to give New Writing North‘s Claire Malcolm a quick tutorial in accessible web sites!

The New Rope String Band asked us to update their web site with the news that one of the group – Vera – will be taking a break for maternity leave. The announcement takes the form of a short video clip, used in the New Rope String Band’s performance at The Sage Gateshead 28/4/07.

A different kind of ultrasound from Steve Holmes on Vimeo.

Another success for a client of ours: Michael Jecks has been long-listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, for his book The Death Ship of Dartmouth. There’s a page here where you can vote and, we hope, propel him onto the shortlist and the prize itself!

Given that publishing is all about disseminating information, you’d think that publishers would love the internet. Book publishers produce easily-posted items for a niche market which is scattered worldwide: a web site is the perfect way of selling to that market. And many small publishers know this, and make use of it (and I’m not just talking about our clients!).

So why do the big publishers so often have terrible sites? The design may be attractive enough, but they are so often a nightmare to navigate, and months (at least) out of date.

I was looking for information about a forthcoming publication from the French publisher Belfond: I didn’t find it…

1. Roger Says:
   May 18th, 2007 at 11:14 am Belfond have repaired their site now, though the information on it is still woefully out of date.

Two of our clients have been to the London Book Fair and have blogged about it, so follow the links to read what Ellen Phethean of Diamond Twig and Ann Cleeves made of it all.

Michael Jecks has a guilty secret.

One of the great things about this job is that the material I deal with is so very varied, and yet from time to time things link up in entirely unexpected ways… Over the last couple of days I have been editing the latest newsletter from Deryn Lake – the Queen of the Georgian Mystery – and posting it on her web site. She describes a cruise on which she sailed as visiting lecturer, and it sounds as if she had a wonderful time. How’s this for the life of luxury, for example?

I just want to recount the story of John’s birthday, which was on 12th March. He answered the door of the cabin at eight o’clock in the morning – very scantily clad, I might add – to find a waiter bearing a bottle of champagne, a half lobster each, poached eggs, a card and a present. He was both delighted and surprised I can assure you.

Which has the added charm for me that John (that is, actor John Elnaugh) apparently shares his birthday with Roger, whose “end of the 50s” celebrations have appeared in previous posts.

Deryn’s cruise took her – among other places – to the Canaries, whose over-development she deplored: And I was able to nod wisely, because another site I manage is that of artist Alan Mann, who lived at Los Cristianos in Tenerife between 1985 and 1996, and has been writing a fascinating series of reminiscences of life in the Canaries at what was very obviously a time of great change.

We had a phone call yesterday from a friend – not a client, because although he runs his own business, he does not yet have a web site; that’s part of the story. He had been telephoned by a woman claiming to be from an organisation called "the Internet Verification Agency", or something along those lines. There was a new piece of legislation, she told him, which meant that if someone tried to register a domain with the name of your business, you had the right to get in before them. And someone had just tried to register the name of his company, so he had two hours to register it first. Fortunately, she could do this for him, and she recommended registering for five years at £30 per year. And why not also register the .com domain at the same time? And .net, .info… Needless to say, there is no such legislation, there is no point in registering every possible variant of your chosen domain, and £30 per year is well above the going rate.

We suggested our friend contact the Trading Standards Service.

Our client Anne Fine has just been shortlisted for the 2007 Carnegie Medal, for her book Road of Bones. Anne has won this award twice before, in 1993 for Flour Babies and in 1990 for Goggle-Eyes. The judges said:

Set in a totalitarian state this is a brave and uncompromising novel. In spite of dealing with brutality in society, it is never negative and it will have political resonance for young people. Incredibly well written, the author stands back enough to allow her characters space to reflect on their actions.

We’re naturally pleased, particularly as this follows so closely on the news about David Almond’s short story Slog’s Dad being in the running for the National Short Story Prize.