From Blog to Business.

Welcome to my first post since December 2007. I missed an entire year of blogging!

Its been a crazy 2008 for me. highly visible went from being a Web Development/SEO blog (which I maintained in my spare time) to the Limited Company that is now the sole provider of my income. I left my full time job at dabs.com in February to see if I could make it on my own. If the first 11 months are anything to go by, it would appear I can. The blog fell by the wayside a little bit as I concentrated on getting the money in and establishing my business - now I’m hoping to dedicate a little time each week to keeping the blog up to date.

Something that happened as a consequence of turning my back on this website was that my WordPress installation went out of date and, sure enough, I was hacked. Every page of this site had spammy links hidden at the bottom and soon I was blacklisted by Google. This is not a great position to be in, particularly when I’m supposed to be good at SEO and my company name is highly visible! I like a challenge though and have recovered my rankings in Google over the last month or so (tip: changing the primary domain that points to your site for a couple of weeks and 301 redirecting the orignal seems to work wonders). I now keep my WP installation more up to date and have in fact upgraded to version 2.7 just today. The new WordPress Dashboard is a joy to use and anyone tasked with developing admin/control panel type web apps could do worse than plagiarise it.

The things I’ve been working on over the last year or so have been a real mix, from web app development for e-commerce websites to css/clientside coding and even some html email building (damn Outlook 2007 to hell).

I have the rest of January and February booked out to myself as I’m doing some much needed admin/company tasks and am starting to look into phase 2 of my business plan.

I’m likely to be on the lookout for work again in mid March so if you’ve got anything you think I can help out with, please get in touch and we can talk rates!

Here’s to 2009 - the year when blogging came back into fashion.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.