I woke up this morning . . . so the song goes . . . and realised that we were entering our 15th year in business.

Phew! Quite a lot has changed over the past 14 years: I remember Simon and I discussing the internet back in the 1990s and how to prepare ourselves to take advantage of it. From taking an Adobe PageMill (remember that?) course, which turned into an html course, Simon built our first web site, which led to my then neighbours commissioning him to build a web site for their international travel magazine.

Now we use the internet and mobile communications without even thinking about what benefits we gain from them. They enabled me to move home and office from the densely populated and business-rich Thames Valley to beautiful and sparsely-populated North Devon. I still write, edit and proofread for clients across the UK and abroad too. It really doesn’t matter where we are located.

So we enter another year with great uncertainty in the economy. With governments nearly always causing more problems than they solve, it’s up to businesses to work our way out of the gloom they have inspired in the media.

Business is not always easy, but we’ve been here for 14 years and we’re preparing to be around for a while longer.

Visit www.z2z.com to see what we aim to be doing for clients in the years ahead.

In 1985, I spent 18 months with a colleague building a 7,000 page electronic brochure on BT’s Prestel Videotext system for my employer at that time, British Airways. Looking back, it was primitive, but little did we know that it was a forerunner to the sophisticated web sites of today. That experience was invaluable as it taught us how to present information effectively on a small screen

In 1997, after establishing Zarywacz, Simon and I went on a training course to learn Adobe PageMill, one of the first web site creation packages. The trainer spent a lot of time telling us what PageMill couldn’t do and teaching us html, and we left the course with an html reference book.

After that, we built our own www.z2z.com web site. On seeing this, my nextdoor neighbours, who published an international travel magazine, were so impressed that they asked us to build them a web site. Simon created the site and within weeks readers were subscribing to the magazine online.

Since then we have built, managed and written for a number of web sites. The latest is for JPM Property Maintenance, which offers domestic and commercial property maintenance, painting and decorating, and rubber and fibreglass roofing systems to customers in North Devon and the surrounding area.

Large or small, when we build or maintain web sites, we focus on the owner’s aims and the best way to achieve these. Although the technology has advanced considerably over two decades, there is still a need for expert communication skills in addition to technical web-building skills.

We’re always pleased to discuss any aspect of online communications from web site design to writing online content and web site management – call us on 0845 200 7830.

Robert Zarywacz