Website Development

The husband’s new website is about 80% done. My grasp of concrete and framing is limited to what I’ve gleaned from running the business side of things, so I completely understand the frustration of web designers who have trouble getting their clients to provide the content. Fortunately, I don’t have that problem. The husband looked over the first iteration and added and changed a few things. Now I need him to look it over again with those changes in place. He is also better at “big picture” stuff. I had made a list of services—including, of course, of all the specific tasks he does—and he added “consulting” to it. That never occurred to me, but it is an important part of what he does.

He has often said that if I weren’t running the business end of things, which he doesn’t enjoy, he’d be part of the underground economy. I depend on him, though, to keep me from getting bogged down in the details. When I start obsessing about minutiae, he manages to distill everything down into something much less overwhelming. He is the keeper of the five-year plan and the overall vision. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have input—we do have an Architectural Review Committee, after all—but projects go far more smoothly when he says, “Let’s do XYZ,” and I figure out how to pay for it. The division of labor works well for us because each of us is playing to our strengths.

However, I do have days when my job would be much easier if I could get inside his head. When I do the monthly billing, I organize all the invoices according to supplier, then he goes through each invoice and writes the job it pertains to on it. That is so I can track expenses in Quickbooks according to specific jobs. In theory, it works; in practice, sometimes not so much. Each job has a general contractor, a physical address, and a homeowner name. Sometimes he does more than one job for the same contractor at the same time. Sometimes the homeowner is acting as the general contractor. Sometimes he knows the general contractor and physical location of the job, but not the homeowner’s name. He has all of this stuff arranged in his head so he knows what jobs he is working on at what time for which person—i.e., the big picture—but the details don’t always sift down to me. I might get the general contractor’s name and a vague location of the job, but it turns out that the job he’s doing for that GC at Eagle Bend (the golf course) is different than the job he did for that GC at Eagle Bend last spring. If all I get is the contractor name and “Eagle Bend,” chaos ensues. It also happens that he might do part of the work, like the foundation, at the beginning of the project and the remainder—a driveway—at the end of the project several months later, so sometimes it is the same GC on the same jobsite.

I ask a lot of questions.

I used a Squarespace template for his website. The irony is not lost on me that his website looks far more artistic than mine do, but that’s just how it worked out. His website template is based on a handyman/craftsman site, and it worked well to incorporate those artistic touches even though one doesn’t normally think of a house foundation as being artistic. (The husband does not do stamped or other decorative forms of concrete.) Building a house for someone tweaks specific emotional strings, though, that buying a knitting pattern doesn’t, and I think the site needs to reflect that. But we’ll see—some of those template features may find their way over to my websites.

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This came in the mail the other day:

I want to plant ALL THE THINGS. (It’s snowing this morning; nothing like a big dose of reality to squelch those plans.) I will make a big wish list and then whittle it down to something realistic. I do know that I want to incorporate more herbs and flowers into the big garden. Some of them will get moved from the existing herb garden, but I’ll likely add some new varieties, too.

I can’t get distracted by gardening just yet. This week has been a bust thus far, productivity-wise, for a variety of reasons. I did get some Christmas gifts mailed yesterday. I have a few more to make today so they can be shipped tomorrow. Once the Christmas sewing is done, I am going to get back to making inventory for 2020. I would like to try at least a couple of craft show/farmer’s markets in the spring to see how that goes. If it works, it works; if not, it doesn’t, but I can’t do those events if I don’t have anything to sell.