Just yesterday, in a supermarket, I witnessed something I’ve seen dozens of times, but which never fails to astonish me.
A man, of about my own age, needed to pass through a queue. “Excuse me,†he said.
If I’d been in Basingstoke or Hull, nothing could have been more normal. But I wasn’t. I was here on the Costa Blanca. This was a Spanish supermarket, and the queue was made up of the usual motley group of Spaniards and expatriates. The man had absolutely no reason for supposing that any of them were English.
I’ve also heard expatriates—German and French as well as English—reply in their own language when the long-suffering girl on the till spoke to them in Spanish. I don’t know what makes these monolinguists tick. From the looks on their faces, it’s as though they can’t really believe that there really are foreign languages. Their own language is so natural to them, they can’t face the fact that it’s just one among many. Surely, their faces seem to say, everyone must understand the only language I speak.
I’m not talking about casual holiday-makers. I’m talking about the expatriate population.
Ah well, let’s end on a positive note. If you want to know the politest way to say “Excuse me†in Spanish, it’s “¿Con permiso?†It’s a question, and you say it the same way you’d say “May I?†in English. So you wait for an answer. A polite Spaniard will immediately say, “Siâ€, and move aside for you.
Of course, if you say it to another monolingual expat… Sigh.
More about this later (I hope). In the meantime, I’d like to recommend a free tool that I find very useful. This is Sam Francke’s CPick. In return for downloading the program, Sam used to ask only that you’d send him a postcard from where you were. (I don’t know if he still does this.)
A Web site needs a domain name, so that human visitors can tell their browser where to go.
In my last post I mentioned ways you might wake up your creative unconscious. Another way is to let it wander round 
After a couple of negative posts, I feel it’s time to accentuate the positive. So: back to the absolute fundamentals of Web design.
The page design deals with the problem of varying screen resolutions by opting for a fixed-size, central position. (Nothing wrong with that—so does this blog!) Given that this makes for an easy life, why is their left-hand menu too big for its column, so that it obliterates the neat red borders with grey spillage? Why, if a visitor increases text size in their browser, does the big text get bigger and the small text stay the same size? Why is the page design just a set of four blocks? Why does the text run into the borders?