Hiring Yourself: Website design made easy still sucks

This makes the 3rd installment in my little series here about this stupid idea I had that is slowly but surely becoming a pain in the ass. 

After looking over all of my coding platform options and discussing it with my tech consiglieri (again, props to AJ), I've decided to go with Drupal as my platform of choice. This beat out Wordpress, Joomla, and Soapblox for the right to serve my needs. Integral to this choice was the ability to customize the layout and content. A huge plus to this is Drupal's modular design and the amount of support that is out there for it. Drupal developers have created thousands of modules that you can easily integrate into your website. There are hundreds of themes/layouts out there as well, you just have to put it together, customize, and configure. 

Sounds easy right? Well, it was thanks to a great website called Learn by the drop.com. Learn by the drop features some great video tutorials that make it pretty easy to get a quick site going, and I've been using this to slap together a test site that I'm going to use on the 2nd domain that I bought for a resume site. 

This is fantastic until you need to do something outside of what's discussed there. Then its all trial and error and constantly fucking shit up. Which is expected, but when you're fumbling around trying to get a browse button for image upload and you end up breaking things, that's not so fun. This is complicated by a round about administrator interface that seems straight forward but actually isn't. Supposedly, this is being addressed with version 7 of Drupal that is currently in development.

Drupal has a lot of potential for what I want to do. It seems I've lost my ability to pick up new computer things with ease. I'm gonna stick with it though, and try to make progress. More updates to come.

Hiring Yourself: Moving forward

I'm moving forward with my plans for my new cyber-empire. I've purchased 2 domain names now and I've got my book mind mapped for all but 2 chapters and an appendix. My next step is going to be mapping out the site so I know what content I need to generate ahead of time for launch, and so I can get an idea for what I want the layout to resemble. I'm very lucky to have knowledgable friends that I can consult on graphic design (shout out to Kate), and all things technical (shout out to AJ). 

My plan is to use the site as a lead in for the book. The site will generate income via advertising and be aimed at small campaigns that don't have money for big consultants or very experienced staff members, non-profits looking to expand their ground game/volunteer numbers, and local committees looking to become/stay relevant and useful, which is rarely the case, but if they were useful and every town had them, that would be a major benefit to campaigns big and small. The city of Chesapeake, VA has a Democratic Committee that was so well prepared we were able to let them run their own operation to an extent. Ultimately we were aiming bigger, but it gave us a huge advantage. Props to Dr. Ward for running that. 

Expenses so far are at a total of $20 for the two domains that I purchased. Currently, I'm looking at hosting options. More updates as things move forward!

Hiring Yourself

My fall semester of Senior year at Clark was supposed to be spent entirely on courses for a minor in Entreprenuership and business courses. I've always wanted to be my own boss to some extent and I figured if it were to ever happen I should probably know how to write a business plan and navigate a startup. Unfortunately, that summer I took an internship on the campaign in NH and got sucked in for the entire semester and took the Fall off from school. I learned a lot but not about starting a business. 

Lately, this job hunting business has me looking at all my options, including going into business for myself. One thing that I've been reading about is passive income. Basically, work you do once that grows as an investment. One of these is writing a book. Costs nothing to write, and I have a lot of free time, so why not? They say that you should write what you know so I've begun doing some mind mapping for a book about volunteer recruiting, refining techniques, and building a self sustaining organization of volunteers for non-profits, small campaigns, and local committees. 

My opposition research has shown that there is a bit of a gap in this area of literature. There hasn't been a book written on volunteer recruiting since 2004. What this means is that there's a big opening for someone like myself to write about the techniques used on the various campaigns in 2007-2008. 

The various incarnations of this idea that I've been toying with for the past couple days has brought me to the conclusion that a website on this topic is both viable, but with back up tools such as a book/ebook, and seminars/workshops I could turn this into a real business or consulting firm. I'll probably be using this as a sounding board as I flesh out my ideas and move forward on this project. At the very least it is giving me a chance to expand my portfolio and develop some skills that I can bring to a job once I get hired if this doesn't fully pan out.