The Adventures of Cowboy Hazel

As was hinted at yesterday, I took today off of work and spent it working on my own personal projects today. Actually, I got quite a bit more accomplished here than I would have if I had gone into Saks. I completely re-did this site (Cowboy Hazel) and, as you can see, wrote the code for my own blog. I didn’t like all the fancy extras that Wordpress forced on you. I probably would have dealt with them, though, if they only would have let me use my own style sheets. But, they didn’t, and I didn’t want to have a flowery blog that didn’t match the rest of my site. And that’s how we’re here.

Also, by creating my own blog, I have a little more control over the dates of entries. So, I was thinking about going back and moving over some stuff from my journals onto here. If you see stuff start popping up on past dates, that’s what’s happening. But, I don’t really know if that’s worth the effort.

I’ve started doing a lot of time analysis lately (like cost analysis, but considering time as the primary resource instead of money). I really want to focus on getting the projects that I have in existence now to a really kick ass state before I start moving on to new things. The Cowboy Hazel revamp made the cut because I decided to make the site public (even though I’m currently not running any advertising here). I was thinking it might be a good portfolio piece. And, more importantly, I just wanted to have a web site of my own. Lantenengo Industries has taken over all my others.

But another project got left on the drawing boards today. I was planning to build a directory, possibly called the Five Fish List, that was basically going to just be a links page on roids. But, the problem is (as it is with so many other ideas) that it’s already been done before. Why would my directory be any different from the thousands of other directories out there? And, with all the recent anti-link farm sentiment coming from Google and others, I don’t necessarily see a big reward for the effort that building a directory would take. I ran the idea past my dad and he agrees that the effort outweighs the benefits. Also, he didn’t like the name. He said it sounded a little fishy…

I need to buckle down and get some more work done on my web development sites. I’ve been focusing so much on the Network lately that my business web site is not getting the love that it needs. Considering that contracted out web-design is currently about 99.9% of Lantenengo Industries’ revenues (with advertising making up the other 0.1%), it seems ridiculous that I’ve been focusing so much on the advertising aspect of the business. It’s not completely ridiculous, though, because I have reasons for it: namely that I’m trying to change that percentage and that I want to focus on the long-term project of audience development while I still have a full time job in retail that pays the bills. If I get to the point of doing web development full time, it will be more difficult to remain interested in the side projects of the Network. Still, I need to have a solid, clean, yet cool (and S.E.O. friendly) lantenengo.com to present to potential clients. Move that to the top of the list.