Good Stuff from Rene: Volume 13 – A Mini Debrief of My First Big Project

I just finished my first big solo project and WOW. What a ride. Let’s just say I reconsidered my life choices more than once during the process.

Yesterday a good friend mentioned that she knew someone who did a “debrief” after every project to determine what went wrong and what they could improve upon next time. Brilliant.

Since that list would be long, here’s the Reader’s Digest version for my project.

• Don’t act out of fear. In the beginning, the client asked what hosting I recommended. A few weeks prior, I had made a mistake and broken another client’s email during a migration. Because I was scared to do this again, I said we could stay with their current host, whatever it was. Well, it was web.com. NEVER AGAIN. Hosting DOES make a difference. A good host is WELL WORTH IT and not necessarily more expensive. 
• Ask all the questions. There were so, so many questions I didn’t ask. Some that I didn’t even know TO ask. You bet I’ll be adding these all to a list so I can make sure I ask them next time. Ahead of time. So I can bill properly.
• Get in a good mental space. Repeat after me: “I can figure it out. I can find help if needed. It’s okay to go back to the client and say, ‘Hey, I need some more time as I’m still working on this.'”

Read a little more about the project on my site.

Changing Things Up

I’ve been writing this newsletter for six months now (!?!) and am going to take it in a new direction for 2018.

Going forward, it will be more focused on WordPress, with clients, potential clients and WordPress community members in mind. I currently write about topics that would interest these groups on my site. 

I’m going to use this vehicle to notify people of new posts, but will also continue to include some personal thoughts as well. My goal is to make these shorter, a bit more focused and the frequency will probably drop down to once per month.

I’ve updated my signup form to include interest segments, so go update your preferences! Click here, enter your name and email and choose what you’d like to read about. (If you can’t get enough of me and want to read everything I write, check all the boxes.)

If you don’t think you’d dig the new format, it’s totally cool. Click the link to unsubscribe at the bottom of this email. No hard feelings.

TLDR; more business up front and less party in the back. (But still with gifs. Half the fun of doing this is cracking myself up while picking them out.)

As always, thanks for reading! I hope you have an amazing holiday season!

P.P.S. New here? Catch up with my past newsletters.