Last week I spent five wonderful days in Peel, Isle of Man, photographing all the shops, businesses, organisations and their workers. The criteria for inclusion was simply that there was a “shop front” that is visible to the public, and that it lay within the town of Peel. I did this ten years ago too, so now we have a ten years on comparison and can see which businesses have closed or left, which are new, and who has simply moved along the street or around the corner (a surprising number!). I’ve yet to count the businesses I captured, but in 2011 there were over 130 and it will be similar this time. Although I’d allowed five days for the photography, compared to only three in 2011, I knew at the beginning of the week that stormy weather was on its way and so I made maximum use of the daylight hours on the first two days, capturing around 80 premises. Many high street shops were closed on Monday, some also on the next two days, and I walked up to 10 miles a day until I captured them all during opening hours. Many restaurants, and one or two others, were unfortunately closed the whole week for refurbishment and staff holidays, but I’m happy to say the whole town was captured in its true state, just as it was in the last week of October 2021, and complete with Hop tu Naa displays in many cases, which really brightened up an otherwise dark autumnal week.

So what’s changed in the ten years? I’m grateful to more than a handful of brave people who allowed me to photograph them again ten years older! Many other businesses remained the same, but with new staff members, and many businesses were new to the town. There has a been a notable shift towards service-related businesses: there are around five new beauty salons since 2011, and two new gyms and a Pilates venue. Other new leisure facilities included an art studio and two bicycle repair shops. Notable businesses to disappear however from the high street were two banks, and an opticians, pet shop, a dressmaker, and a launderette amongst others.

I now continue the big task of selecting, tweaking, and uploading over 300 photographs to the website manxshopfronts.com, and I’m looking forward to sharing it all with you in a few weeks’ time. I am indebted to the generosity of Culture Vannin, Corlett Bolton & Co., and Peel Heritage Trust for supporting the work, and to the good humour of over 100 Peel workers who stood, often in the rain, and nearly always in the wind, to be photographed. Thank you!

I’m very excited to be starting work on a project that has been a long time in the initiation stage. I have secured funding from Culture Vannin and other sponsors to repeat the work I did in Peel ten years ago to photograph and interview all businesses in the town that have a visible presence on the high street. It’s such valuable work to document social and economic trends in image format and will be of great interest to future generations. The outputs will be displayed on the new website manxshopfronts.com, and submitted to Manx National Heritage for long term safe keeping.

I was doing a little reminiscing as I hurtle towards 20 years as a website designer, thinking of some of the lovely projects I’ve been involved in, and I wondered how many different types of people and groups I have designed websites for.

It’s possible some have slipped my memory, but so far I have helped:

Holiday cottages (lots) and their professional body, local authorities (several), a roofing company, a garden office builder, a music teacher, a language teacher, a campervan converter and rental agency, B&Bs (lots), a farmer and a long distance walking farmer, a truck driver, a dentist, a quilt maker, a plumber, music festivals (two), a house builder, an estate agent, local communities, charities, a museum, a library, GP surgeries, a poet, a walking tour guide, a driving tour guide and their professional body, a piano tuner, a yoga teacher, a genealogist, Buddhist meditation groups (two), politicians (three), outdoor theatre, a marquee hire company, a carpenter, an author, a group campaigning for EU membership, campsites, artists (three), a photographer, a carpet fitter, an Alexander teacher, a counsellor, a blacksmith, a cosmetic treatment company, a craniosacral therapist, a reflexologist, a fish supplier, a catering company, a personal trainer, a solar panel installer, a Manx language playgroup, a vodka bar, a chamber of trade, local heritage groups (two), friends of a church, a map maker, an accountant, an orienteering group, a business coach, a singer songwriter, a Viking festival, a religious walking group, and a website designer.

Phew!

The new year has brought a flurry of activity to complete four projects that were initiated some time ago, ranging from 6 months, to 7 years! We have a new website for The Camper Company, a new business for an old client in the Isle of Man which will be hiring and converting campervans for people to enjoy the Manx countryside to the fullest. A new holiday cottage website for Wyndell Cruck Cottage on the northern tip of Peak District near Stocksbridge. And completing soon will be a site revamp for Visit Port Erin, and the Oxford Insight Meditation group. A lovely wide variety of work.

Congratulations to Andrew Foxon and Go-Mann Adventures for winning the award of Isle of Man’s Leading Tour Operator 2020, from “World Travel Awards”.

My partner, Victoria, is starting a new venture for her Spanish language business. Moving from face to face to online teaching means now that the whole world is her oyster, not just local people in Sheffield. It’s been an exciting challenge to develop a new website to promote Spanish with Victoria alongside the development of the business model. We are launching the site early to capture some business before the Christmas period ready for an intensive online course to begin in January, and the website will develop enormously over the next couple of months.

Many of us are finding news ways of working in the Covid-19 environment and having to think a little differently about how to reach new clients. This has been the case for the owner of my latest website. Fiona Robinson is a music tutor specialising in flute, piano, recorder and music theory lessons. Pre-Covid all this work was done in face to face lessons; more recently she has moved to online teaching, and now, going forwards, it will be a combination of the two. Fiona’s new website, only days old, has already shown up in search results and yielded its first new enquiry, which is very reassuring!

Many of my clients have suffered big, or complete, losses of business over the last few months. I’m happy to have been able to work with one of them, Go-Mann Adventures, during this period to carry out a complete overhaul of their website in time for the coming weeks when they are able to resume their business. For Manx residents I can highly recommend their offering – do go to the new website for Go-Mann Adventures and choose a guided walk or skills course from the great selection on offer. UK residents will need to wait a little longer until it’s possible to visit the Island!

Starting in 2011 I began a series of photography projects involving documenting the whole retail areas of towns and villages in the Isle of Man. They were fun and fascinating, even at the time. But of course the real value of such projects is revealed years down the line when you can look back and see the changes. So I’m looking forward to repeating the first of the projects next year in Peel and revealing just how much has moved on. If you’d like to get involved, and, in particular, can suggest sources of funding for the work, please get in touch. >> Peel 2011

My work is generally quite a solitary affair, but you can’t beat face to face to meetings at least once for every project to really to get to grips with the issues and ensure the best outcomes. In steps Covid-19 and turns all upside down. So now for the foreseeable, I’m proposing to use online methods for meetings, with Zoom being my preferred option, but I can accommodate clients’ own preferred methods, including Skype, Facetime, Whatsapp etc.

As I look out of my office window (into my back garden) I see nature springing wonderfully back into life, and it feels like my work life is mirroring that at the moment with some new and vary varied projects coming on stream. I’m in the early stages of developing new websites for Sheffield For Europe, a genealogist, a poet, and a music teacher.

One of the highlights of the beginning of the year is to publish the shortlist of the best photographs of the year in the annual competition for Peel in the Isle of Man. I’ve been running the competition for about 15 years and am never disappointed by the beauty of the town as displayed in the photos. You can can see the shortlist on the Peel Online website, or head over to Facebook where you can more easily share the images with friends.

The way I work is important to me, and my job satisfaction depends on it. I believe that a sound working relationship with my clients benefits both of us.

Firstly, I keep prices low by working efficiently with you to get the job done quickly, but without cutting corners. I assess all projects for value for money and specify the project such that spending more would not be justified by the benefits, and spending less would lose too much.

After site completion I offer complete flexibility over methods of keeping your site up to date. I can train you to do some or all of the updating yourself, or, if you prefer a hands off approach, I can do it all for you. And importantly, I only charge for the time taken to do your updates, often only a few minutes – there are no minimum fees.

Throughout all the work the advice you receive is impartial, and if I think someone else is better placed to do your work I’ll tell you. Or if I think your proposal would not give you value for money I’ll discuss it with you and see if we can find a way to ensure your money is well spent.

Overall I hope you’ll then be very happy with my service and happy to recommend me to your contacts. Almost all my business comes from word of mouth, although a recent customer found me on a Google search for “ethical web design”, which was very nice to hear!

After a long summer break with lots of travelling with the family, it’s now back to school time, and back into a busy period of work for me throughout the autumn. I’ve just set up a quick blog for clients and friends, the Andersons, who are about to embark on a gruelling walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Good luck to them, and you can follow progress at John’s Walk for Freedom. I’m now looking forward to meeting up with various clients, new and old, in the Isle of Man in a couple of weeks’ time.

My partner, Victoria Munguia, has a business that provides private tuition to learn Spanish. She gets most of her students through the website I set up a few years ago, and it achieves top rankings on a number of relevant search terms. It was time however to bring the site up to date with a new responsive design and an SSL certificate to keep those good rankings in places. Spanish Tuition Sheffield

This job is a little different from the usual. Sheffield for Europe, a non-party political group campaigning for a people’s vote on leaving the EU, have a new website very capably set up by another volunteer, but more manpower is needed to maintain it. I have stepped in to do my bit to help ensure there is democratic solution to this issue, this time based on fuller knowledge of the options on the table.

Much of my work these days is with existing clients. Some of them need regular SEO and promotion work through social media, which is usually carried out each month. But a big part of my current work is in redeveloping old HTML websites to bring them up to date with fully responsive designs, and an easy to use content management system. The latest is example is a new site for Malden Roofing in Sheffield, whose previous website had been serving them for a whole decade!

I have become a business partner of the Unesco Isle of Man Biosphere. For me, this particularly signifies that, in my work with clients on the Isle of Man, I am aiming to:

• Protect our natural resources – I work from a paper-free office and have a zero commute time to my office in the back garden. I encourage clients to make the best of paper-free marketing by using websites and social media;
• Develop our economy in a sustainable way – I’m proud to work in a very ethical way, supporting other small businesses like my own through provision of effective websites, that are also very good value for money.
• Support and promote our cultural heritage – for example through my involvement with many cultural and community based organisations over the years, notably Peel Heritage Trust, and Peel Online on behalf of Peel Commissioners; Peel Carnival and I did a website for the Manx Energy Advice Centre in its early days.
• Engage with the local community – in my projects to photograph the retail sectors of 4 Manx villages and towns I touched upon almost the whole working community in these places, recording a key aspect of life to be preserved for future generations. Through Peel Online and other local authority websites I aim to engage with the local communities through provision of information on local life, events, and places to visit.