And neglecting almost everything jewellery-related, unfortunately - although I have managed to catch up with things a little bit today.

What has been devouring my life over the last little while (and for much of this year, to be honest!) has been a very major web upgrade project I’ve been undertaking for St James Ethics Centre (which, despite its name, is not a religious organisation - although it is a non-profit).

Currently I’m working around the clock to get an interim version of the new site ready to go live - hopefully by the end of this week.

The interim website will feature none of the (rather amazingly good!) functionality that is to come - new forums, blogs, a wiki, a proper user accounts system and much more - but it will feature the new visual design and site organisation. And it will allow me to get back to doing my regular work (and hours!) while my friend the programmer (Hi Colin!) gets on with his part of the slaving away.

The interim version of the site upgrade was supposed to be a quick thing to do as the rest of the project has taken much longer than we’d hoped (as is always the way with these things!), however, even this has proven to be a very time-consuming task.

So I’ve spent much of the last couple of weeks wading through hundreds of pages to ensure the new formatting is correct, fixing any errors, doing some editing of content and writing new content.

I’m exhausted! And I’m very much missing my workbench and tools. However I do hope to get back to them soon.

But until then the only handmade thing I have to share with you is a very sneak preview of the new site design. Note that very few - if any - of the links will work at this point - and that in a week or so this interim link will most likely no longer function!

You can visit the creakingly old version of the website for a comparison (which I also designed and built, but several years ago when the organisation had a vastly smaller site and when web standards were only talked about by people who insisted that all links should be in blue and underlined … and we hate those people).

Edit: I’ve changed the links in this post as the new site is now live!