graham at home

I’ve been very busy lately with my various web activities.

Firstly I have been making progress with my professional site. I have set up the domain names (two actually) and have chosen to continue with my Web Host Siteground because I have had nothing but good experiences with them since hosting my first site a few years ago. I have chosen and modified a theme and worked with my personal graphist (my daughter) on the artwork. I’ve added some content on what the business is all about and layed down the foundations for the rest of the site. The hardest part is defining the details of what I am offering and laying the groundwork for what I will charge for doing it. It’s not a get rich quick scheme but I don’t want to lose money either. I also have to decide and give limits to the time I am willing to devote to these activities so that my employer (of my real job) gets what he is paying for.

Secondly I have been working, once again, with my daughter, on a website for some clients. They want a website and wish to manage the content themselves. I’ve arranged the domain and the hosting, installed the software (WordPress) and I am currently adapting it for a non-blogging website. In doing so I am using a theme that lends itself to using pages in preference to posts and that can accomodate different headers, footers, widths and lengths. I’ll write more on this later.

Lastly I continually find new andf exciting stuff on my travels around the web. First you might have noticed the new badge for utterz which is a great service that even has a local number here in Switzerland. The base activity is phoning the number and leaving a message which is automatically added to the website but also to various blogs and social media depending on configuration. Any image, text or video sent 10 minutes before or after the call is mashed into the resulting post. I should perhaps have said “maybe” because I sent some images to calls I made early this morning but I had to add them manually afterwards. Perhaps I did something wrong?

The other service I subscribed to this morning is Issuu which transforms pdf files to “books” on a public timeline and viewable a lot like the previews to Amazon books (You flick through the pages). It’s rather neat although most of my PDF files aren’t that interesting at first sight.

Over to you. What’s up and happening around you?

I’ve been working with my daughter on the artwork for my new “enterprise” and it’s coming along nicely. I’m so lucky to have such a talented daughter and we’ve been using the screen sharing capabilities of our Macs (iChat) to brainstorm ideas without having to email files. Being able to have a conversation while working on something turns out to be a very creative experience.

I don’t want to get into trouble with the taxman so I’m having to hold up while I investigate what form my new part-time self-employed job will take.

I could of course just do things discretely but the whole idea here is to have a second professional identity during my free-time and time left over by working fewer hours in my full-time job. I don’t want to get into trouble but I do want to have fun and learn what it’s like to have my own little business. It’s not a get rich quick scheme. It’s more of a learning and sharing experience.

More of this later.