Merry Christmas to everyone who has been reading my posts and looking at my photo galleries, thanks for your support I appreciate it all!

This snow leopard has nothing to with anything really, but I thought it was funny how the baby one did a superman onto the mum.

I will be doing a mega post before the new year to summarise my first year of blogging!

Today I completed uploaded the new site design for the project I’ve been working on, the RSPCA World for pets online store. There were a number of issues with the original site which meant we weren’t converting enough of our customers. Whilst we thought the site was ok, we really needed to take it up a level in terms of visual design, and in particular, front page accessibility. If, for example, you just want to browse for products suited to your type of pet, in the past you would have to just browse though each of the categories of the products to get to where you want. Now you have the option of clicking on direct links to your pet type, RSPCA merchandise and the search bar is now nice and big to make it more user friendly. I’ve increased the size of all the text in the stylesheet to be at least double in size. Also, the colours are now more RSPCA oriented instead of the orange and green look of the old.

As before, our resources on this project are extremely limited, but we are all working hard to make the site of a high standard and we always appreciate any feedback to help our endeavours.

This might sound weird, but I actually feel like I’m more interested to buy from the site now even though I’ve been working on this for so long. Neo (my cat), has a lot to look forward to this Christmas.

This is the last weekend before christmas that we can guarantee delivery in time to be wrapped and put under the Christmas tree. If there are products that you may have seen elsewhere and really want, please contact us via the site and we can help you out with any enquiry.

Oh, I’ve updated a lot of the photos on the site, in particular the large one of Dan’s Golden Retriever ( Link) on the front page and Cass’ Manx kitten (Napoleon) on the Cat page, which have some tag lines I came up with. I actually have to credit Paul Cherry from Poker.com for the one for Link on the dog page, the others are mine. I wanted the taglines to highlight the fact that customers are not just buying products from a pet store, but instead from an animal welfare organisation. I wanted to make it known that ALL of it is for the animals, it is they who benefit from all our efforts at RSPCA.

Feel free to email me at cbowman@rspcaqld.org.au if you have any enquiries regarding the RSPCA World for Pets online store.

Today was the fifth anniversary of the passing of my Dad (Robert G Bowman) who died at age 51 losing a fight against cancer. It is also 1 week after my mum sold our house at Cornubia, our home for over 12 years.

Photo taken at my 21st birthday, June 2001.

I have so many memories about my Dad that I obviously can’t say all of here. What I will say about my Dad, and about my parents in general, is that they always helped me with every opportunity in life. Regardless of what I wanted to do, they always supported me.

After years of being in the Greyhound racing industry in Australia as a trainer, steward, radio announcer and grader, he left a life which would have made his father before him extremely proud, to pursue his own dreams of starting his own business (Bowman Video Productions)

Just to give you a run down of some of Dad’s other achievements:

* Was a Journalist with Melbourne newspaper The Age
* Was a Newsreader/Sports Announcer with Gold Coast radio 97.2MW
* Sports (VFL & QAFL Football, Greyhound) Column writer for Gold Coast Bulletin & Brisbane’s Courier Mail
* Level 2 Australian Rules football coach - Coached juniors between 1988-1993 at Logan City Cobras & Mt Gravatt Vultures.