New online store prospect: ‘Project Daisy’

A business acquaintance of ‘Max’* called and asked if I could redesign her online store. Max is the client I set up an online store for last year (the whole business is now for sale). The lady who called sells her products in a small store close to Max’s and wants to sell online as well. She said that she likes Max’s online store because it looks clean, neat and well organised.

I had to tell her that I am not a web designer and that the graphic designer I ‘usually work with’ is overseas.

However, Max’s online store doesn’t have a customised design anyway. I picked Max’s store front design from a selection of free templates which was part of the ecommerce hosting package. I customised it with photos and neat copy writing, a map for the contact form and so on.

A decent selection of neat design templates were one of the selection criteria when I chose the ecommerce host. Max didn’t want to spend a cent on the storefront design, and I don’t want to spend my time on an ugly online store that screams ‘We Are Unprofessional!’ to the visitors. The template was a decent compromise.

So I told the lady that if she is happy with a template design, I can help her set it up and we agreed on a time to have a chat about it.

 

I’ll nick name this prospect ‘Project Daisy’**

 
Yay! Does that mean I’ve got a new project? I am cautiously optimistic and trying to work out what to do.

To cure Telephobia with International freelance work

Curing Telephobia – Part 3

I started this serial declaring myself cured of Telephobia because although I still don’t like phone calls very much, I no longer fear or refuse to do them. That’s a declaration of great victory over a terrifying old enemy.

 

 
Through the last year I have worked to improve my phone manners and taken the opportunity to study what others do whenever I could; e.g. eaves dropped on the professional phone calls of my dear husband (with his permission) who runs his consultancy business from home.

I now feel fairly competent when I present myself on the phone. I think I sound normal or even professional, and that I can ‘get the job done’ whether I like it or not. So a phone call is a tool rather than a wall that hovers over my day and over-shadows its opportunities.

That is the victory. It materialised as a fact (or as close as it gets) after I undertook an International tele-freelance job in December:

 
International freelance tele-job

I was contracted to interview executives within a certain industry in my home country about their strategies regarding certain infrastructure and activities*. I was paid per interview and had to arrange the interviews myself, which implied an unpredictable amount of ‘cold calling’ to arrange the surveys – potentially unpaid.

Cold calling was the scary part of job – because of the uncertainty, lack of structure and potentially rude answers when interrupting busy executives to ask for their participation in a market survey.

What is said VS what is meant

The hilarious Anglo-EU Translation Guide outlines what the British mean VS what others think they mean (I suspect it applies to Australia as well).

Very funny – and elegant illustration of the fact that words often don’t mean what they appear to mean.

 

Anglo-EU Translation Guide

Re-blogged from Confusion with language by Missing Jigsaws & Excess Lego.

 

I’m back! / What’s in the pipe for 2012

My blog was gone for the last few days. It flashed a charming warning to visitors:

mados.wordpress.com is no longer available.

This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.

 
The dashboard greeted me:

This blog has been deactivated because we believe it does not comply with the WordPress.com Terms of Service or advertising policy.

If your blog is designed to promote affiliate links, get rich quick programs, banner ads, consists solely or mostly of duplicate or automatically generated material, or is part of a search engine marketing campaign, WordPress.com is not the place for you. Please use the Export feature to move your content to a more appropriate hosting service.

Occasionally we make mistakes. If you believe we have misclassified your blog, please click here to contact us as soon as possible so we can fix the problem.

 
Access to posts and other content was blocked. Shock! I now know how important this blog is to me; because it felt like I had been suddenly locked out of my house, or worse, that my house had disappeared. My virtual home.

Today WordPress emailed an apology and put me back online. I still feel a bit wary because I don’t know why it happened. Apparently WordPress employs an automatic TOS violator spider which relentlessly roams the WordPress blogosphere, chews through blogs and deactivates those it deems suspicious. That is: the ones it suspects sell stuff, spam, duplicate, exist to SEO other websites or act as camouflaged affiliate marketing programmes.

Maybe it just deactivates blogs at random. In any case, I’m back!

 
Posts under way

Below draft posts are in the pipe* – some nearly ready to go, others to come later:

• New Year’s Resolutions 2012. The presentation of this blog’s purpose under ‘About‘ indicates my key challenge and objective. The New Year’s Resolutions try to make it into a measurable and specific objective for 2012.

• 3rd and final post on Telephobia where I undertake telephone interviews for an international freelance project.

• Social anxiety, cognitive behaviour therapy and what ‘normal’ is**.

• The online store mentioned in To Wear Professional Hats and The Art of Being Paid is now up for sale… so the ecommerce soap opera of 2011 will soon come to an end. I’ll tell*** the story about the online store and recall how I prepared it, my experience with ecommerce hosts, why the store wasn’t a sales success (hint: marketing and SEO are essential factors), and how we’ll wrap it up. The last point isn’t clear at this stage, but the owner and I are thinking of it and have a meeting tonight.

  New idea: I contemplate to start my own online store in 2012, so it will be useful to think through and evaluate the old project.

• My dogs. We got 2 puppies in 2011 – an ex-camp dog from the Northern Territories and an ex-pound dog from PetRescue. I am fascinated by their backgrounds and the little pack they comprise in our flat (soon house). Dog-world neighbourhood pack-politics has become central in our daily walks since we got the second dog.

 

 
The next multi-post theme I plan to take up after social anxiety and ecommerce is productivity barriers with focus on procrastination and time management. Plus whatever else comes across as blogworthy.