If you come to a fork in the road, take it. - Yogi Berra

A friend of mine called me the other day asking advice about setting up a web site for his business. His is a long-existing and successful business; but he's never had a web site. He was wondering whether he should create one.

That took a bit of work. I'm happy to report all sites are up to date running the latest software releases.

Every once in a while - on average I'd say about once every couple of months - I'll get a notice that some new security exploit has been discovered and that a new version of Drupal or one of the contributed modules I use to run sites is available.

Well here it is, the new site.

I wonder how long I'll keep it this way.

Every time I looked at the old site I'd cringe a little bit. The layout and design was based on a packaged theme created by a fellow Drupal theme designer / developer. I really liked it at first but over time ... Well it just started to grate on me.

Well, harder for me anyway.

I really enjoy just about every aspect of putting a new site together or relaunching an old one. But there's one activity I always get stuck on - creating the favicon.

Todd Parker, the promoter and race director for the Tour de Ste. Genevieve Road Race, sent me a nervous-sounding email this morning. Over the weekend he had over 250 competitors, 65 volunteers, 8 officials, and an unknown number of spectators attend the race. An event of this size simply does not happen in a community without the blessing of that community.

This what thousands and thousands of visitors to one particular web site I frequent are seeing today. With less than a week to go in the month, these guys have run through their quota of hosting bandwidth with their service provider.

One of the things the CHAMP guys really wanted out of their site redesign was a way to get people signed up for their electronic newsletter.

Oh, and they also wanted to start up an electronic newsletter.

I just launched a new site for a friend of mine. Todd's a fellow bike racer. He called me a few weeks ago and said he'd been awarded the state championship race this year. That's a big deal, especially for a race in only it's third year.

I wasn't surprised to hear that news though. Todd had done a great job running Le Tour de Ste. Genevieve Road Race its first two years.

Those of you who know me personally know I work in marketing, but that I have an engineering and technical background.

That probably explains why I enjoy putting all these sites together for people and watching them grow - or to see if they grow. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't; and that's where analytics come in.