The Reds are back

We've been waiting a while to get them back in, but our Mountain Equipment red pro-team T-shirts are back in stock again this morning. A lot of you were emailing to ask when we'd have them in again, so I thought I'd let y'all know. Thanks also for sending in your tales of miraculous grade increases while wearing them. It's still working for me too! But rememeber only bring them out for proper redpoints otherwise the effect wears off...

Other Christmas beta - We are delivering orders from the shop right up until the 23rd of December. UK orders before 2pm on the 19th will arrive before Christmas day if Royal Mail keep their promise. If you want to get something in after that, drop us an email - we'll give you a price to send it next day special delivery right up to the 23rd.

Something else that has come up a lot recently (esp. with our Echo Wall film) is that many of you said you wished you'd asked to get the DVD signed but. Just as some folk are too shy to ask, we've been too shy to offer! So here goes; if you would like a DVD signed or a message for whoever you are buying for, just ask in the 'special instructions' box on the paypal checkout page.

Over on Velvet Antlers, Claire is having a bit of a last minute sale with 20% off all her hampers until the 19th.

Velvet Antlers day (again)

Today was a day of watching blizzards outside while bashing the keyboard doing shed loads of work on Claire's Velvet Antlers site. Fourteen hours later and I got all the Valentines and Easter hampers uploaded and hopefully sorted the site out for ranking in google better. It's weird to think just how much Google matters in so many aspects of life these days. Scary, I suppose, too.

Still, It's been exciting to see my tweaks on Velvet Antlers give a steady climb up the rankings. Early days yet. Come on googlebot, hurry up!!!

The next two days I'm at the Ice Factor coaching, and then hopefully out for a play in the snow??

Claire's icy pics

Claire took some nice pictures of the deep frost that kept us somewhat chilly last week in Lochaber. There are some ore nice pics of the river Nevis frozen over on her blog.

Christmas last minute

Two more days for getting in orders in time for Christmas from my webshop. Any orders placed before about lunchtime on Thursday will make the last posting to arrive by Christmas.

Thanks to everyone who's ordered so far : )

Velvet Antlers is online!!

For the last couple of months I’ve been working silly hours helping Claire prepare to launch her new venture Velvet Antlers. The business is Claire’s and she’s been working mega hard on it herself. My part in the effort has been to build her site and try and kick off a bit of marketing.

So what is she selling then? Hampers! (pretty cool ones at that). Claire has been really into food for years and more so all the time. Last Christmas Claire and I were wandering around the shops and happened to be looking at some really nice looking food. At the time we were stuck for what to get some folks in our families for their Xmas, and Claire hit on the idea of choosing some of the different lovely looking foods and making up a hamper full of cool and very luxurious looking stuff. Problem solved! Claire really enjoyed choosing and buying all the nice food and putting together, and our recipients seemed pretty psyched to get something they would really like.

Lets face it, these days getting people gifts can be pretty hard going. Why? Everyone has everything they need! We’re all just looking for something kinda nice and stylish to give people. And it’s way more satisfying if you know they will definitely like it and use it.

So, naturally the pleasure for Claire, turned into business idea, and now turned into a business, just launched yesterday! You’ve got to admit hampers are a stonking good idea if you’re getting someone a gift. But it’s not so often thought of because they are mostly jam packed full of old school twee style (Tartan and shortbread overload for the Scottish ones). Claire’s tried to make them cool again…

And succeeded (I reckon)!

Take a look at the site. The roof o’er our heeds depends on this new venture working out, so we’d really appreciate if you could tell us what you think of the hampers. Would you part with cash to buy one for your mate/mum/girlfriend etc xmas, birthday or new sprog? If so, why? Please tell us. If not, why not? Do they need changed in some way d’ya reckon?

I built the site myself – it was my first effort at building a site and my starting point was “what’s HTML?”. I’d really appreciate if any of you web designers, SEO gurus and the like can find any obvious holes in it or just something obvious we haven’t done.

Claire’s been getting into her blogging on the site as well, mostly about style and highland life in general, but there’s also some wee posts in there about extreme belaying (while spouse sketches up an E10) and Claire’s own climbing adventures.

Claire’s site is here

Novice web design hell

Lovely autumnal woods here in Glen Nevis right now. I took this shot from my living room window!

I’ve not been posting here for a wee bit because I’ve been on a work mission, 16/17hours a day since I got back from my lecture tour in front of the screen trying to build Claire’s new website for her new business that we’ll be launching shortly (more on that very soon).

Although I’ve built my own sites up into much bigger animals than they were when they started out, at least I had a basic site to start with. This time it’s my first effort building a site from scratch. I’m getting there, but with much abuse of caffeine, less than perfect mood state and depressing loss of fitness.

Apologies if you’ve tried to get in touch with me over the past few days, I’ll get round to replying to all my messages shortly.

From my little perch behind my laptop I saw the first ‘proper’ snows of the autumn hit the Ben yesterday which lifted my spirits. Thankfully, a climbing trip is impending, although I’ll have my work cut out to gain my fitness back…