Are we nearly there yet?
The view of the summit of Catbells, in the Lake District, from not-quite-the-summit. IYKYK.
I’ve been trying to arrange a catchup with Emily (Webfooted Designs) for a little while now – attempt one failed because I forgot to write it in my calendar, and had gone out Netwalking (Oops!) Attempt two was thwarted by Emily’s car, which needed more work than a simple MOT, and detained her unexpectedly in the garage. We finally managed to meet yesterday.
Emily came with a list, and we both left with lists. We have reached the point of ‘snagging’, tying up loose ends, answering odd questions, and working out the finer details of making this thing live.
I’d gone through and assigned categories and tags to all my historical blogs –or so I thought. Emily had used her initiative with some that I’d missed, but there were still a couple that she couldn’t pigeonhole. We agreed that a blog from 2015, that didn’t fit my current work by a big enough margin that it didn’t fit a new category, was probably not worth keeping. This whole thing has been an interesting reminisce through the twists and turns of my business over the last decade. There are whole chunks about product descriptions, for instance, which are not something I want to concentrate on any more.
Emily also helpfully explained to me that I can’t just rename a blog that I’m recycling, if the old name doesn’t fit any more. I’ll lose the Google page views associated with the old name, as well as mucking up any links to it. She’s going to set up a plugin so that if I want to do it again, then I can have the old name redirect to the new place. Hadn’t even occurred to me that it might be a problem – which is why I’m paying an expert!
I managed to send Emily some information in a format that makes sense to me, and is derived from where I sourced it but is completely the wrong shape for a) Emily to easily comprehend, and b) the purpose for which she needs it. So I’ll be reworking that. If she can’t understand what I’m trying to tell her, then I need to find another way to tell her it. And it’s good that she feels comfortable enough with me to ask me for that, rather than pushing through, and grumbling at me under her breath the whole time.
We’ve also widened the net of collaborators once more, bringing Matt French in of Retina Digital. He will be hosting my website, once it goes live. It turns out that I really don’t know any of the technical stuff that he was asking me about, so I’ve just given him some logins and introduced him to Emily and my current web host, and left them to talk. The conversations around exporting and plugins and backups and spam filters are very important, but I can’t add to them in any meaningful way, other than to say ‘yes’ to good advice I’m given.
Another potential collaborator is my sister, Steph. She’s written two blogs for me before, a few years back, and might be in a position to do so again. She has a first class English degree, which I don’t, and knows things about the origins of language, and structure, where I know more about communicating with different groups of people. She can definitely write more interesting blogs on words than me!
My tasks before Emily and I meet next week are small, and shouldn’t take me long. Emily has much more to do than me, and a few things that will need to wait till after the new site is live. However, we’re closing in on being able to finish it. It’s exciting, and somewhat scary, given that this began as an idea very early on this year. I’m really pleased with how everything has been going, and looking forward to sharing it with my clients and contacts. Not long now…
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