Visualize wanted Equal Design to produce them a website to showcase their newly formed company, tell people about the year 11 students that have got involved and also to inform potential customers about their products.

They have chosen to create 3 products.  A height chart which can be used by anyone to measure height through time, a DVD of what people can do in the local area (Ribble Valley) and also the annual year 11 leavers book which most of the students in the school purchase as a memento of their time at the school.

We have now had an initial meeting about the website for the company and the members of the board have decided on the domain name of myvisualize.co.uk.  We are now designing the site and hope to have it live soon.

The first, which is perhaps the fastest growing web browser out there at the moment would have to be Mozilla Firefox.  This has been a favourite with the Equal Design team for sometime now, primarly because of the extra features for web developers that it has.  Firefox is an open source piece of software and is currently running version 3.  The advantages of using Firefox are plentiful, however I won’t bore you with all the techy stuff here.  What I will tell you is that it is faster than Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), which makes you web browsing experience quicker.   It is also much safer when surfing the net, for a variety of reasons.  Last but not least is my favourite reason for using it, is that it doesn’t have all those annoying popup messages that IE7 has, constantly asking you questions that frankly to the everyday user, scares them more than just not warning them at all.  You can download Firefox for free.

As well as Firefox I suppose the other main player in the browser field is Apple’s Safari internet browser.  In a way this behaves in a simlar way to Firefox and even looks sort of the same.  Its great and is actually even faster that Firefox.  In fact the only reason why Equal Design tend to use Firefox instead of Safari is that Firefox has many more functions built in for web developers.  You can download Safari for free.

There are other browsers you could try to including the following:

• Opera
• Google’s Chrome (PC only)
• Camino (Mac only)

Being a technology geek I had wanted to try a mobile broadband when they first came out but never really got round to it.  However back in May when my mobile phone contract was due to come to an end I had the opportunity to do so.  Three mobile were offering half price mobile broadband if you already had a phone contract.  Therefore I took out a new phone contract and the broadband for an excellent value £17 per month.

Mobile broadband works in a similar way to a wireless network, but the network that you join when on your laptop out and about is the mobile phone network, rather than your home network.  Three supplied me with a small USB dongle, which looks just a like a USB flash drive.  It really was simple to install as all the software that is needed is on the dongle itself.  Therefore you insert the Sim card that came with it into the dongle and then you plug in to your computer.  Run the software installed on the USB dongle and then you are ready to just press connect and get on the net.

I have to say that I have been thoroughly impressed with the service.  Being new technology I suppose I expected it not to be that good really.  How wrong I was.  It has connected everytime and I am consistently getting a connection at just over 1MB/second, which although not rapid is ample for surfing the web without a noticable difference from landline broadband.

I opted for the cheapest package that 3 offered, which to non 3 customers was £10 per month for a 1GB download limit.  This seemed not very much at first but I have never used half of it yet and so I am sure that it will be an ample amount of downloading capabilities.

To sum up then, if you need to ability to get on the web anywhere and everywhere on your laptop, whether for work or pleasure, 3 mobile broadband gets the thumbs up from me.  A good price (and even better if you are an existing customer) and a (so far!) reliable service.

So how do you get a Gravatar then?  Well this is the great part.  It is really simple.  All you need to do is visit www.gravatar.com and sign up for a free account.  Once you have signed up you need to upload a photo in the add image section.  Then whenever you use that email address on Gravatar enabled sites, the image or photo that you upload will show next to your comments.  Try it out, its fun and free.

First of all Gmail is free and it is more than just another provider of email.  In fact it does all the things that the more common providers of email does, however it also adds a whole host of features to you email account than you are perhaps not used to.  These features really do provide for a wonderfule email experience.  So why is it so good?

Gmail is powered by Google, one of the largest companies on the net today.  In fact even Microsoft are worried about them so they are getting bigger and bigger all the time.  This means that they can offer more and more services to the user.  The first really good feature in Gmail is an excellent search facility allowing you to search your own mail with the power of Google.  Its quick and easier to use.

Gmail provides the user with a massive 7GB of mail space.  This is also growing all the time.  I started my gmail account about 18 months ago now and when I did it had 4.7GB of space.  Therefore it has grown by over 2GB in less than two years.  What this means is that you never need to throw email away.  In fact even those seemingly pointless messages that you tend to get you can keep.  They are also easy to keep because of the way that Gmail organises all of your emails.  You have your inbox and then an archive section which contains all your mail.  So instead of deleting you just click archive and then it disappears from your sight but it is still there to search.  You can also create folders to store certain mails in, but Gmail calls them labels - they work in the same way though.

Gmail also has some other really handy features that are not provided by anyone else.  The best in my opinion is that you can send mails from other accounts.  So if you have a work email and a home email, you can have then delivered to the same account (your Gmail account).  Then when you send mail you choose which email account to send it from, so that the mail has the correct ”From Address’.  What this means is that you only ever need to check one email account.  A really good time saver.

One of the other great things is Gmail’s built in chat. This means that you can instant message your contacts right from within your mail account.  You don’t have to install additional software on your computer to do your instant messaging.

To find out more about Gmail your can visit the Gmail About Page.  Trust us, we really do feel that Gmail is worth moving to as it is a much better, easier and more reliable way of managing your email anywhere on the Internet.