I recently learned how cold it had to be before I froze my toes off.

Last weekend's storm left my household without power for more than a day. I often wonder what people with children do when there is no tv or video games to entertain?

We entertained ourselves by watching the frozen smoke billow from our lips every time we opened our mouths. It was minus twenty one in the living room, and it seemed as if my feet would never be warm again. 

At one point, just before the last candle blew out, we attempted hudling on the couch; three big people together in one giant pod. That, thank God, only lasted a minute. I'm clostrophobic. 

Bottom line was we were freezing, and the only thing that we could really do is go to our respective bedrooms and huddle up with as much blanketing that could be found. I found a really ugly grey, wool fabric blanket amongst the throng of blankets on my bed and wrapped up. 

We endured that for just over a day. I know. That's not a very long time. But let me tell you, living without electricity in the country means that you also lose the water. Gross. That means you have to fill up the tub before weather starts so that you can flush the freaking toilet. 

The cold weather was an experience, but all in all, I'd say we made it through pretty good. Our experience proves one thing; it pays to be prepared.

Want a Website?

These days, everybody wants to build a website. Not just a good website; a custom website with all the bells and whistles. Thank goodness, you can do it yourself with no coding experience at all. Have the best site on the net, maximized for SEO, all with a couple of keystrokes and well placed text.

Well, if you're any kind of a web person, you can see how these claims are just a bit over the top, no matter how good the authoring tool is.

Lets consider the off the shelf kits. For the most part, these kits make their money with extended hosting packages and email sales. It's been my experience that, not only are these kits inadequate when it comes to authoring, but they leave much to be desired when considering SEO for your website due to a total lack of access to the back end of the sites they produce.

Other, web based authoring tools are clumsy, and again don't allow for back end access in order to tweak for SEO. It's not an ideal situation. In any case, putting a website up takes thought, determination and some idea of architecture in mind prior to the building process.

A good site is aptly planned out on paper before ever hitting the production stage. Recent experience has proven to me that people really have no idea what's involved with making a site work properly; nor do they care. They just want what they want when they want it and  that's it.

If you're after a personalized website without doing any code, the best advice that I can say to you is to purchase a copy of Adobe Dreamweaver and dive in. A manual comes with the software, and for the sake of a reality check, it might be good for you to see what actually goes into web development. For those of you humming and hawing about all of the "free" options available online, go ahead, try them out. Let's see how far that takes you before you hit dirt.

There's a reason why real web development costs money. It's because any decent developer has put the time in to actually know what he/she is doing.

If you're a small business and you need a web presence, I would suggest either Telus or Web.com. either will produce a professionally landscaped website for you for under $125 per month. Balking at the price tag? Maybe you should reconsider your marketing strategy to include web property before you ask Jimmy down the road to do it for you. Remember, you get what you pay for.