Whenever I go to the bank to reorder my finances the subject of loans comes up. If I am in good credit with the bank (ie not running on the overdraft at the time) then I am offered large loans. If I am into the overdraft then I am offered smaller loans with significantly higher interest.

The last time I had the distinct lack of pleasure to visit my bank (now inconveniently relocated to Westwood Cross) I wanted to rework several arrangements to free me to make a vital purchase that a system error had made ten times harder than it needed to be. Given I was actually only trying to spend £200 this was all a bit much. The options were:

(a) Have the bank admit they were at fault (never going to happen).
(b) A small loan (just £1,500 over a year - the smallest on offer)
(c) Redistribution of credit - so that the credit that already existed was all in one place.

As soon as I said the magic word "loan" the bank manager did everything short of pull a gun on me to try and make me consolidate everything into a massive single loan. Now quite aside from the fact that I would have had to pay an arrangement fee for this was the fact that the interest rates were higher than my current arrangements.

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» Continue Reading: Is debt consolidation the best bet?

For all the many different people I have done consultation work for there have only been two distinct barriers preventing the person or the company running a profitable and popular website. It does not seem to matter what the aim or scope of the site will be - one or both of these two barriers come up every time. They are both, in their own way, issues of perception.

1. Lack of understanding of what a web site is and can do
2. Lack of skills or understanding of the technology that can make things easier

Now the first issue usually results in people requesting fancy, yet pointless, interactive media be embedded on a single page. This might seem great but unless this bit of media is so hot, so fantastic, so astounding that everyone that sees it is filled with a religious zeal that motivates them to make every one they know look at it, then you site just died in the starting blocks. The reason being is that your website has just one page with an interactive movie on it.

When search engines index the site they will ignore the movie and look for text. When real people do, somehow, find their way to such a site they will (if you are very lucky) give you as many as 25 second for the movie to load and then they will go away again. Amazingly companies will pay more than £5,000 for such sites (I can name at least two that are no longer in business because of this) and yet what they get does little more than tickle the managing director's ego and appeal to his or her inner artist.

Art is fine but the right art for the right medium.

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» Continue Reading: Setting up a personal or business website

This last week I have had one or two minor issues with my adverts and I was hoping that it had gone unnoticed. However, after Mrs Tara Plumbing sent me a message to mention it I knew this had not been the case.

I use a number of different agencies to help monetise this blog (that's a posh way of saying pay for it's costs and my time) and the prime network I use is bidvertiser and therein lies a short story. Bidvertiser are a good network for those of us bloggers that might use more than one source of adverts and might wish to sell our own (you can buy space in the bidvertiser slots on this site through their site).

Bidvertiser will provide a starter selection of adverts for which clicks or impressions result in payments and generally match reasonably well even if they don't pay huge amounts (compared to the advertisers that will generally put in bids once you have some statistics to show off). The option I use more than any other for filtering adverts is the setting for the most family friendly adverts only. However, a dating agency seems to feel that scantily clad ladies counted in this category.

Quite aside from sending a number of stiff messages to the bidvertiser team I have taken the further option of running adverts from my own server when the advert price was lower than a value I specified. The challenge was, of course, to out price the naughty dating agency and this took a little while. During this time the not-at-all suitable adverts were shown on item pages.

I apologise for this, especially if anyone felt offended or put off as a result. When I set out to write this blog I intended to present a balanced point of view (where possible) and family friendly content at all times. The sort of things I would not feel uncomfortable if my Nan, mum or sisters looked at. This time around this did not quite work out.

I hope you can forgive this.

I know that some bloggers from Thanet are using adsense to earn an income from their blogs. I doubt that anyone is getting a fortune from it at the moment but then earning from blogging is hard work. However, the terms of service are changing. All referral traffic will no longer count as of the later end of this month.

It is covered in more detail in "Adsense Slaps Foreign WebMasters in the Face" by noted professional blogger Shoemoney.

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» Continue Reading: Some industry news

No, this is not some unreleased episode of Star Trek but a different way of doing business. A social enterprise is one that has been established with the aim of improving society. We have such things within Thanet if only you look in the right place.

SureStart Millmead is a Community Mutual and a social enterprise. It started trading as an independent organisation in April 2006. In this article I will be taking a brief look at the Millmead SureStart community mutual and how it is different to other forms of business.

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» Continue Reading: Social Enterprise in Thanet