Website update

I set up my website - www.juleswords.co.uk - 5 years ago now to act as a kind of online CV; an easy way for people to get an idea of the range of different things I work on. I built it myself after going on a couple of web design courses and overall, I’ve been pretty pleased with it. I keep it updated every now and again, adding new projects I’ve worked on. Annoyingly though, a while ago, I discovered that the links in the main menu along the top of the page don’t work in some browsers (they’re okay in IE, but not Firefox). Having completely forgotten how I set them up in the first place, despite numerous attempts to fiddle, I haven’t been able to fix them. I know I should get a professional to look at it, but I have a bit of a fear that the whole thing will unravel if anyone looks too closely at it, so I keep putting it off. Thankfully, the links in the rest of the site still work, so it’s still possible to navigate around, if rather clunkily.

As often happens in such cases, because of the big things that needed fixing, I’d been putting off updating too - arguing to myself that I should do it all at the same time. The other day though, I realised that the big overhaul wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so just got on with some simple updating. I finally changed the picture of myself on the home page. Although it was quite a classy black and white shot, it was taken quite some years ago when I still had long hair. Having had short hair for over two years now, I figured it was time to go for something more representative. I’m not sure I’m that keen on the picture I’ve chosen, but I guess I can always change it again if I can find something better.

I also trawled back over the projects I’ve worked on in the past couple of years to see what’s now been published so can go on the website. Especially a lot of the corpus research work I do tends to happen right at the start of a project, so it can be a year or more before it gets as far as publication. Working through old invoices, I made a list of titles, then went through the publishers’ websites to see which ones had appeared in the catalogue. I was quite pleased to have new stuff to add under corpus research, editing and writing. So I added some new bits of text, some new pictures and links and clicked on “update”, feeling satisfied to be finally up-to-date.

Then yesterday, a shiny, new-smelling copy of Objective First (CUP) arrived in the post.

I’d done some learner corpus research for it a while ago and was pleased to see how it's slotted into new Corpus Spot boxes warning about common exam errors. However, whilst it’s nice to see how my research gets used and to have a shiny new book for my shelves, it is going to mean another website update!