One of the fun things about summer is having more downtime. A lot of my steady clients are on vacation much of the summer, and few people launch ambitious new projects this time of year. It’s the perfect excuse for me to get outside and enjoy some nature, sunshine, and fresh air.
But I don’t do that.
I’m a Virgo, type-A, self-employed freelance writer, so downtime is anathema to my constitution. Instead, I use this time to take care of all those little marketing ideas I never have a chance to get around to, including updating my website.
I love my website. It was designed by a peer in the San Francisco freelance world named Sarah Davis who is so talented that she doesn’t even have a website of her own. She doesn’t need one. A few years ago, Sarah helped me redesign my tired old site, and with very little direction, she came up with something that is exactly me. She’s a savant and also a really fun lady.
Then, she handed it over to Kumar Desai, a brilliant web programmer and ex-neighbor of mine in Mill Valley, California. He turned Sarah’s gorgeous design into a functioning WordPress website that I can easily update on my own. They are the best.
(Sidebar: I particularly appreciate Sarah and Kumar after recently helping a longtime client attempt to unf*ck her own website redesign. On good faith she hired a local web design company to build a new site for her coaching business, and paid them $1500 up front. Many months later, they left her with the mere outline of a site and a shoulder shrug. The navigation didn’t work, the images were all subpar placeholders, and the text itself had never been finalized. Now, she is paying me extra to fix it. There are a lot of amateurs out there. I can point you to the pros!)
I recently added an Areas of Expertise page to my website to clarify the types of clients I typically work with: mainly B2B technology companies, health and wellness brands, and indie authors. Right now, my client roster includes Google for Work (Google’s enterprise tools), Eventbrite (cloud-based event marketing software), Marin Clean Energy (an alternative to PG&E in Northern California), and Paragon Real Estate (in San Francisco). I’m also working on a few book projects with indie authors, and have a couple of clients that are hush hush.
If you’d like to chat about a project idea, or just need some help writing or editing something, I’m all ears!
