The freelance writing blog here at ArcticLlama is probably due for a makeover as well, but for now, the old girl will just have to wait. (I like referring to my sites like they were boats, or classic cars. I think it offers both the proper amount of respect and affection to something that is too often given too little, or too much, of both.) The big news is that the official freelance writing business website of ArcticLlama is getting a facelift.
Ok, that’s not weighty enough.
How about, ArcticLlama.com, the official website of top professional freelance writers will be undergoing a major site redesign starting today? I think that sounds solemn enough.
Back when we first launched Arctic Llama we had a vision, a vision of a large freelance writing firm staffed by high-level professionals with years of experience in virtually any field or subject matter. Businesses and corporations ranging from IBM and GE all the way to the small mom-and-pop business run out of a home office would come to us and find exactly what they were looking for, for all of their copywriting and publishing needs. (AP Stylebook, where were you on mom-and-pop? I think we could use some clarification on that one.)
It was a bold vision and one we took very seriously. The original Arctic Llama home page was crafted around that grand business plan, but then something happened.
Freelancing Experience Gives Life Lessons
While the original business plan for a grand ArcticLlama freelancing conglomerate remains a valid concept, and one that could be pulled off quite profitably for the right entrepreneurial writers, it is no longer our vision.
What happened?
It turns out that we love what we do; what we do, right now. Not what we might do if we grew the business in this direction, and what we would do if laid out a strategy for expansion, and certainly not what we would do if a dozen Fortune 500 Companies were banging down our doors looking for writing from our two-dozen writers. In other words, we don’t want to be businessmen, managers, and CEOs, and contractors with sub-contractors. We want to be writers, plain and simple. Writing is what we love, and it is what we do. Add in the joys of family, friends, and each other, and you’ve got a recipe that you don’t want to take away from to build another segment of a business.
Don’t get me wrong, I still relish the idea of consulting with small business and large corporations while standing on the back of solid ground-breaking research and analysis that we provide, but I don’t have any interest in building up that business. I don’t want to schmooze, and take executives out to dinner, and worry about whether or not kids play on soccer teams with kids whose parents might be useful connections to have.
What we do want, is to sit in our home offices, brew up our coffee, take turns writing and playing with our two kids, and then shutting down for the day at 3:00 PM to go to the zoo, or on a bike ride, or just to the nearby playground. In other words, we want the sweet life, not the power life.
New Web Design New SEO New Mobile Website
When we first built the ArcticLlama website, we did so with a keen eye for search engine optimization AND user readability. We must have done something right, the ArcticLlama homepage carries a PageRank 4, and we have never asked anyone for a single link. In fact, most of the links come from us. I guess content does matter.
What we did not design for were mobile users. The ArcticLlama header graphic is deliberately long and repeating, so as to fill up the widest computer monitor screen. Of course, this makes it nearly useless to anyone on a mobile device. At the time, we weren’t really concerned about it. I, myself, am an unreformed techie who was once a high-level systems engineer with a handful of computer certifications including an MCSE (before there were more than 50,000 of them) and some Netware certs as well. The point is not what my computing credentials were, but rather that I am not someone who shies away from technology, indeed, quite the opposite. Yet, it was my opinion at the time that the only people looking at websites on tiny little mobile phone screens were bit-twiddlers who preferred computer screens to sunshine.
Today, I can’t get enough of the Internet on my cellphone, and I dread the day my $30 a month employee referral unlimited Internet data plan with 500 minutes included from Sprint expires, because there is no way I’m going to pay $100, $70, or even $60 per month just for a data plan. Hopefully, sometime in the next year a serious competitor emerges (Google?) or government regulators get tired of the most powerful country in the world lagging seriously behind every other first-world nation in mobile technology and networks (as well as broadband deployment).
The new site will obviously be more mobile friendly. It will also make better use of newer developments technologies including CSS and HTML
In other words, the new writing business website will be different, but really great. We’ll keep you posted on the progress and any snags, gotchas, or hiccups we stumble upon along the way, as well as all the great tips and advice we learn about while making the move.
To all of our great clients, rest assured that we will always be here for anything you need, including the services that will be disappearing from our website. To all of our future clients, never hesitate to ask if there is something else we can do for you. The inside look we continuously get at businesses big and small gives us a constant stream of ideas that we’d love to put to work for you. We just won’t be aggressively marketing those additional services.
I often sign off my posts by wishing you luck. Perhaps this time, you can do the same for us.
– Brian Nelson – Co-founder ArcticLlama, LLC – a.k.a. Brian Llama
Hmm it appears like your website ate my first comment (it was super long) so I
guess I’ll just sum it up what I had written and say,
I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog. I as well am an aspiring blog writer but I’m still new to everything.
Do you have any tips and hints for novice blog writers?
I’d genuinely appreciate it.
Great post. I’m going through some of these issues as well..