For this blog post, I thought I’d do something a little more unusual and provide some insight into what an average day looks like at JCHQ!
My days are often quite varied but always begin with an email catch up. I try not to get sucked into answering emails outside of business hours unless it is an emergency in order to maintain a good work/life balance. As I work from home, I find it important to try and keep boundaries so that my office based work doesn’t creep into my family time. Helps to keep me more focused on the task at hand!
Usually I book in two full website design projects a week plus I have a number of smaller tasks to manage in addition. A standard information based website of around 10 pages takes 1-2 weeks to complete in the first instance. And websites that are more complicated eg shops, or have more specific functionality required, can take a bit longer. I don’t like to rush the project based work as sometimes I find it helps to leave a project overnight and revisit again with fresh eyes in the morning.
Usually I have a few quotes to send out each week plus a few to catch up with and contact potential customers. Plus some phone calls to book in and also nowadays my online training via Zoom for customers who want to manage their own websites.
The smaller tasks that I fit in could be from a range of work such as adding a gallery to an existing website, updating WordPress to ensure it is running the latest version available, preparing a training manual, adding a contact form, liaising with my SEO specialist or graphic designer about any work we have on the go, and any other ad hoc work that clients request that will just take a bit of time rather than days. I always like to try and squeeze in the smaller work as it seems unreasonable to make customers wait too long for something that takes 1-3 hours for example. Anything more significant gets booked in in advance and customers are notified of the timescales involved so we can all manage things between us.
Plus there is my own website to keep active and so I often add my completed projects to the portfolio, update any testimonials and add a new blog post like this one. Don’t forget that Google likes websites that are updated regularly.
So that’s an idea of what happens here and what you can expect if you’d like to work with me on a project – small or large! And there may be the odd coffee along the way too of course!
