masuga.com

Finally, after many hours of work, I am able to announce that Masugadesign.com, a website showcasing my nascent freelance web design business, is online and open for business.

I had been showcasing various projects on this site for a long time, but a couple things led to the decision to split the personal and business sides of masuga.com into two different sites:

First is the fact that all this web design stuff isn’t just after-work activity for me anymore - it’s the whole enchilada now. I was working full-time at a local web design firm (Hi guys!) doing design and building there, and then coming home to work for my own clients during the evening. And late into the night. And on weekends. It was getting outrageous. It was also wearing me a little thin. There was some concern about my showing up at the office late, unshaven, unwashed, tired, cranky, and dressed in rags. (OK, that’s a little over the top, but I’m trying to paint a picture here.) So I decided that this was the best time for me to try and go out on my own, and my wife agreed. Now that I am my own sales department, I thought it was time to take all the portfolio business and move it to the new site.

Which leads to the second point: I need some business. I’m new. People don’t know me. My portfolio is still small. So, with a client’s permission, I’m still into putting a small credit on sites I’ve worked on, to try and gain a few new clients, if possible. Up until today, that link was to masuga.com. A few months ago, a client of one of my clients clicked the link, and apparently disagreed with some things I said on here. Actually it wasn’t even that - they didn’t like a site I had linked to and the fact that I mentioned that I thought the site was “funny”. This was the client of a client, mind you. So I was asked to remove the link to my site from my client’s site. Not a problem. I removed the link immediately, but that got me to thinking that the point of that link is to possibly win some new business, not to gain another reader on my personal site. Sure, someone could now click over to masugadesign.com and then head from there over here, but at least there’s an extra click involved. And they really gotta wanna come over here if they do that. Hopefully they get distracted by the portfolio section…

Having the two sites allows me to still be “me” over here, as I have been since I first put this site up with a home-rolled Cold Fusion blog app before I discovered WordPress, and allows me to focus on the “business” side over there. I still want to have fun with it. There’s no reason that a business site has to be a stiff. All things being equal, I’d rather be a little quirky and attract, say, a local band as a client rather than attracting a large, cold, corporate client for a project that I just chip in on and in the end wouldn’t (or couldn’t) even put in my portfolio.

So there it is. If you do check out masugadesign.com, I’d appreciate any feedback you have, positive or negative. And there’s comments over there as well, so you can leave a note anywhere you please. Although I might want to wait on saying this until I’ve made enough money to afford to take my wife on a vacation to Europe, “long live the American dream!”

This entry was posted 2 years, 6 months ago on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Web Design Related. Obligatory RSS 2.0 feed for these comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.