You want a website. Or you have a website, and there are some things you want to change.
Either way, and whether you are doing it yourself, or paying someone else to do it for you, it’s a good idea to do some planning. The more decisions you make upfront, the more efficient the build process or rebuild process will be.
At the end of November 2022, I will have been running my own business for six years.
When I started at the beginning of December in 2016, I had some idea of what I was doing – I had been a freelancer years before. So I made my plans and set forth.
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A writer, editor and a website designer walk into a bar. And once they have ordered their drinks, they fall to complaining about their clients.
The non-payers. The scope creepers. The ghosters. The ones who say “that’s not what I wanted” even though they never did say what they wanted. The ones who want you to work for free in return for “exposure.” The ditherers. The ones who said the work would be with you by a particular date and then only deliver it three months later.
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In 2002 I was at last pregnant.
After two years of fertility treatment, we had done it. Things were going well. We owned our own house, our relationship was strong, I had a good job. I was worried about how I was going to manage a baby and a career but I thought I would figure it out.
That was not how it was going to pan out, though.
At about the six or seven months mark of my pregnancy, I found myself in the boss’s office being told that my job was being made redundant. I was given a good package and a generous baby shower, and shown the door.
My therapist was a little unsympathetic, pointing out that being retrenched was not as bad as, say, losing a baby. With hindsight, she was of course right.
But retrenchment is not nothing, either. Continue reading
If you run a business and have been persuaded by everything you see on social media and the Internet generally that your marketing efforts should include “content”, then please sit down and think again.
The question to consider: what does “content” actually mean?
The Oxford dictionary definition (in my premium version) has four possibilities:
I was recently asked to write a series of articles about the metaverse for a client. I didn’t know much about the metaverse when I started out, but a bunch of research soon fixed that.
As I was doing that research (which looked at the role of the metaverse in a particular industry) I found myself wondering how this Shiny New Thing applied to my own world of work. Were there trends that I needed to know about? What skillsets might I need to get? This article is the result of my own research into the issue.
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A friend who lives in Melbourne, Australia complained on Facebook that he had been without electricity for several hours, in a curfew. His laptop died on him, and there he was in the dark with only his thoughts for company.
I smiled slightly but did not comment.
And recent news from Sydney that residents had been asked to conserve power in the evening as much as possible to avert blackouts prompted the same wry smile.
After all, there is no real joy in claiming the high ground on the question of being without power. All the tips I could give Australians are not really needed: sitting in the dark probably won’t happen to them again for months or even years.
Here in South Africa of course we all know what it is to be without power – that state of being for which we all grudgingly use the Eskom term: load shedding. Continue reading
