Writing an attention-grabbing headline is one thing; designing a website is quite another. The latter requires more skill, dedication and patience than you can possibly imagine. Yes, my IT man’s doing it.
Eschewing the wanton women that line Amsterdam’s canals, we’re spending five hours incarcerated in a Novotel hotel room, staring at a screen. ‘HTML? Or templates straight off the net?’ asks Fat Paul. Ooh, he’s caught me on the hop again. What on earth is he on about? At least I don’t seem to need “de-fragging” this time.
Big Font
As Fat Paul clicks and drags, I cling grimly to his meandering expo
sition on software and font sizes. I forget his exact words, but Size 14 sounds big enough for me. Truly, though, there are only so many cups of tea – partly because we run out of creamer sachets – that one can drink while designing a website before the eyes droop and the head begins to loll.
A temporary reprieve is needed. So while he taps merrily at the keyboard, stretching photographs and adding something called a hyperlink, I go for sandwiches.
Cor, there are some ghastly men at reception – covered in gold chains. They have shaved scalps, unabashedly wearing T-shirts (several sizes too large) that say “Money over Bitches”. Slogans like this don’t encourage debate, I find.
It’s no good telling these chaps that, actually, I’d take a “bitch” over money, and perhaps if we looked deeper into their psyche we would discover latent homosexuality. One learns to recognise hostility. My T-shirt is far more tasteful: “If it has tits or wheels it will give you problems”.
The Votes Are In
Back upstairs Fat Paul i
s still studiously battling with fiddly editing tools. ‘You’ve got 25 votes,’ he says. ‘But the Portuguese guy’s got 1880’. Woohoo, it’s neck and neck, then. Johnny Foreigner is barely in the lead, just pipping me at the post.
If I can get everybody I know to visit www.barnabysadventures.sitebones.com and get ten other people to vote, I’ve already won, I think naively. The euphoria soon subsides..