Apart from a small handful of pulpit supply dates, I have, once again, struggled to find gainful employment this summer. So I’ve decided to take a small gamble (am I allowed to do that?) and I am going to try to turn my hobby of web design into a way of getting some extra pocket money. The gamble is in ordering a reseller hosting account so that, as well as offering web design, I can also offer web hosting. I’ve been involved in using and sourcing web hosting for about 10 years now and I’ve experienced the good, the bad and the seriously ugly. My reseller account is with a company I’ve been with for a number of years now. It’s not the cheapest or the most generous, but it’s solid and reliable and the tech support is first rate.

I’ve had a look through the list of churches in our local presbytery and there’s only a handful with any sort of website. So, even locally, there’s scope for some business. The good thing is that the Church of Scotland are offering grants to congregations who want to establish a website. I can help them spend some of that money.

I also decided to see if any local tech support/web design companies might want to sub-contract work to me. Well, I have to say that I was absolutely appalled at some some of the websites done by so-called professionals – missing links, email addresses that don’t work, badly formatted pages, out-of-date information. It’s a sad reflection, I think, when an amateur like me can do better than the professionals. And the thing is, they’ve no real excuse. Many of them are using the same webscripts I use – Joomla! and WordPress.

So, if anyone out there has a website they need designed and hosted, give me a shout. It’ll be a week until I have my reseller account, but after that it’s all systems go.