Sink or Swim

*grabbed from sharondrewmorgen.com

Seeing a lot of tech jobs online is making me wonder if I should go back to the corporate world. I do love working from home, having my own time with an occasional face-time with colleagues in the US. However, it’s just not the same as climbing up the corporate ladder, dealing with office politics, dressing up to impress coworkers and clients and simply brainstorming with a team personally. I know I will always change my mind but right now, I wouldn’t mind having a conference meeting in an actual conference room or a quick coffee fix just to catch up with project updates.

I received an email from a friend who’s having problems getting jobs in health care industry. I already told her plenty of times to submit her resumes to job hunting web sites but it seems she haven’t done that, seeing as she’s asking me the URLs again. I promised not to baby-sit her anymore so I’m leaving it to her to find a solution to her job situation. Besides, I got some job woes myself. For one, I need to get back into designing groove. My design skills and techniques need some updating really bad. My boss-client is visiting soon and I’m sure we’ll have tons of work to discuss, leaving me no time at all to learn new things. So for this week’s to-do, I’ll put “LEARN” on the top of my list and make sure that I cross it off before the week ends.

Started my day shopping for Velo binding machine. My brother’s need some replacing and asked for my help to get some quotes online. While researching for that, I also saw some great deals on color printer. I think it’s time for me to invest on a higher end since most of my clients are venturing into print projects. I’m tired of sending graphics back and forth just because I couldn’t check the colors myself.

Aside from that and this is totally off-topic, I just found the nicest pair of brogues. Thanks to an online friend who showed me Madewell’s Spring 2011 Lookbook.

We’ve thought of buying a franchise plenty of times but just never found the time to attend the seminar nor the budget it requires to put up one. A lot of entrepreneurs advised me to start with my own idea because it’s less expensive. But like I said, we want to tap into something that’s already selling like hotcakes. We have no time to re-invent something but we really want to put some of our savings into a lucrative business. As soon as first quarter is done, I’ll ask my husband to revisit this goal of ours so we can see if it’s possible to pursue it again this year.

The price quote that I sent to my new client seems to have gotten a dose of hydroxycut advanced. Seriously, the discount he was asking was so huge I better do the project for free. Some of my pro bono projects are actually way better since the people I do them for are very appreciative. Unlike this new client who seems to be displaying the traits of a typical client from hell, they don’t feel like their doing me a favor by having me design their sites. I think I better cut my losses this early. After all, a too-low price wouldn’t be fair with my co-designers. This is why client thinks they can dictate the budget hoping we’d get scared that we’ll accept it just so we won’t lose their business. Think again, however. Almost all of the time, you need to pay a lot of money to get top quality service.

After researching for the right document management system for hours, I am now ready to call it a day. I guess my mind isn’t really into working lately, what with party invitations, messages arriving at my inbox every hour. All my friends are in holiday mode already so why can’t I? Well, it’s because I really need to finish some of the projects so I can get paid before New Year. Knowing my clients’ penchant for sending urgent tasks at the last minute, I want to send them something that they can review early so they can get back to me as soon as possible. After December 29, I won’t be entertaining nor answer work emails anymore.

A new project landed on my lap so I’m now shopping for a very nice e-Commerce WordPress theme. Luckily, there are so many talented designers and developers out there so I have tons of options to choose from.What’s good about these themes  is that all the features that you need are already in place. You can use them as is or customize them, which is what I’m doing to do to fit my client’s design requirements.

All these are from Themeforest.net

The Jewelry Shop

The Furniture Store

Clothes Shop

It doesn’t matter what your going to sell. As long as you know your way around WordPress themes, you can create some very serious e-Commerce websites with these.

Talking about room heaters has never been my expertise since we live in a tropical country. So when my colleagues discussed about room heaters while in the middle of the meeting, I couldn’t help but tune out. Little I know they were talking about a big project that needed a lot of research. When they called my name and asked if I’m okay with the unknown task, I immediately said yes without understanding at all. So now I’m on my 4th hour of researching for ecommerce plugins and still not even close to filing out the top three list that we should try. Lesson learned – never space out no matter how boring the topic is.