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?

Regular visitors will know that I have “borrowed” a lot of inspiration from Stephanie Booth over at Climb to the Stars. She is probably Switzerland’s first real blogger and the local blogging scene is largely due to her untiring efforts for many years now. Although she was teaching when I first met her in Lausanne during a Bloggy Friday event some time ago, she is now freelancing and a full time net personality.

Recently she established her own company and is launching her first event “Going Solo” here in Switzerland. In Lausanne to be precise, on May the 16th. The venue is yet to announced but if I were you, I would reserve the date so as to be sure to attend. Knowing Stephanie, I can assure you that you really don’t want to miss out. Her bilingualism is even more well managed than mine so you don’t have to worry about any language difficulties.

Unfortunately my French speaking visitors rarely leave a comment in French so I continue to blog in English with the occasional splurge in French. I have periods where I try, just check it out. It’s one of those chicken and egg things that I haven’t worked out yet. If I had a French speaking following however, I would surely install the WordPress plugins that Stephanie has created to facilitate blogs in two or more languages. As you know, or will discover, she has many talents and one of those is in web development.

In order to organize an event you need to have a company and her company is called Going Far. Once she gets the graphical identity for Going Solo I will of course be hosting a banner.

As usual she is as thought provoking as she is inspiring and as I now work at 90% I have some time on my hands. If I had a bit more (and I’m working on that too) I might do a bit of freelancing myself to fill up that time agreably rather than just do nothing but relaxing.

So summing up, Stephanie is inspiring, Graham is aspiring and we will all meet up at Going Solo in May. Right?