Many women dream of working for themselves. Some have a clear goal and a definite plan to get there. Others drift from one project to another trying to find the one special project to sink their precious time into. For most of us have family, day jobs, and other demands on our time.

It can seem lonely and a bit daunting when you dream of starting your own business especially if you have no friends or family who have business experience. When I first started I attended some classes at Business Gateway and found them useful certainly but still not quite what I needed. There were a few Womens Networking evenings organised by Business Gateway which I attended in the early days but they seem to have faded away over the years – maybe they’re still happening but I’m not aware of them!!

So I read with interest of the Mumpreneur’s Network in Dumfries and Galloway. It’s grown from 10 members to over 250 in the last year according to Dumfries and Galloway Standard. So many women in business in South West Scotland! – fantastic! I can’t wait to find out more!

I love listening to other people’s enthusiasms and passions. To their business ideas and finding out how they’ve developed and grown, what challenges they’ve faced along the way. What works for them, how they market their ideas.. in fact anything to do with running your own business interests me. I’m fascinated by the great ideas out there and how people have taken that initial idea and brought it into being.

I realise I should have been looking for just this type of network of like-minded people to inspire me and keep me focussed. Many’s the time I’ve felt I’ve been floundering and would have loved someone with similar interests to talk to and throw ideas back and forward with. So if like me you feel you could benefit from this type of network contact Lisa Dunn by email at info@HexagonVA.co.uk for more details.

I’ve moved most of my posts over to the Footfairy blog now.
The new address is blog.footfairy.co.uk

Hope you’ll continue to check things out every now and then.

I’ve just spent the last 40 minutes restoring my WordPress blog from backup. Not too sure why this upgrade hasn’t worked as I’ve not had a problem with any previous installations or upgrades. I wonder if it’s because my blog is in a subsite?? Not too sure about that.
Thank goodness I backed everything up first.
If you’ve had any problem upgrading WordPress from 2.9.2 to 3.0.1 – let me know how you sorted it out.

I hope to have the new logo / site header in place soon. Keep coming back and let me know what you think of it.

Linda

I’ve been on holiday for most of this week. It’s been lovely to catch up on things, potter about at home, explore new possibilities for the website and generally just have the luxury of some time off.
I got a little bogged down at the start of the week. As you know I’ve been thinking of how best to proceed with the footfairy site. It’s been bugging me a little that I’ve not made much progress with it. So last week I decided to sign up for an online course. I realised almost immediately that I’d made a mistake. I browsed the online forums, posted a couple of questions and read through some of the material I’d been emailed. There was so much information that it would have taken forever to read through, digest and then implement. Just too much time involved – time which I should be spending on something else. Luckily the company was very good and refunded my money. That could have been a costly mistake.
Back to the drawing board!
It wasn’t all wasted though – the diversion concentrated my mind and I’ve contacted a local graphics company with a view to getting a logo sorted out for the site – much as I love Tinkerbell I’m afraid I really need to sort out a business logo for Footfairy before Disney take offense!! Bye for now Tinkerbell

So another cyberspace experiment begins! The easy part – I’ll add a book of the month discussion forum. First post is written – second post written – but hey this doesn’t look like any forum I’ve ever seen before! I’ve started trawling the widgets on the web to see if I can find a simple plugin to handle the forum. I don’t really want to have a fully-fledged forum such as you see on support sites with huge numbers of threads. Something simpler would be nice – so bear with me while I scour the t’internet. If you’ve seen a nice example of book discussion forum -let me know.

Business Gateway has a great suggestion whereby they have a program for women mentoring other business women.
Sounds great and I did contact them once after I’d gathered up my courage – - I got a wrong number so I took that as a sign and didn’t call again!!. But honestly I think finding a mentor in your chosen area will be rarer than hen’s teeth. Fine if you have a regular business – is there such a thing? But even then if someone was successful would they want to be bothered with the type of business I have – it’s never going to be a big financial earner but then it was never really meant to be. That doesn’t mean to say that help and advice would be wasted on me just makes it extremely unlikely that Hilary Devey, Channel 5′s Business Inspector would have anything other to say than “why bother?”.
There are a couple of good business forums out there where you can get free advice from business owners but often they seem to be frequented by people touting for business trying to sell you SEO consultancy or tax advice. But for the newbie website developer or DIY-er there seems to be very little advice apart from “pay me £500 or £1000 and I’ll do it for you.”
No wonder Site Build It does so well!!

One of the ways I’d like to develop the site is by increasing the number of courses which are listed. I find it frustrating to try to find interesting courses myself. I’m impatient and don’t really want to look through hundreds of sites to find something which suits me. I’m particularly hoping for an increase in the number of local events / classes.

So if you are in Moffat and are looking for a Yoga class you might be able to find out on Footfairy.

The format at present is a simple text listing which I think is fine for now but may need to change in future.
It’s not intended as an advertisement for the course purely as a convenience for potential attendees – making it simple to find courses on the topic or at a location which suits.
So I made my first foray into the world of mass emailing – by mass I think I mailed around 230 reflexologists -it was a bit of a shambles and after my third or fourth abortive attempt I finally gave up. So I’m about to try again. I’m not really a fan of unsolicited emails but on the other hand but it’s about time I stopped waiting for my ship to come in and began to swim out to meet it. ( Just a little reference to Dr Gary Woods book which is my Book of the Month for April 2010)

So I’d rushed ahead without planning – as usual! WordPress installation had gone smoothly – I had a blog there within minutes so I went ahead and did a couple of posts. Easy! Trouble was I didn’t want my business site to open up with my blog. I wanted a static page. So I started trawling through the t’internet looking for a nice simple explanation. It took me a while to find the answer – it’s so simple when you know how but not so easy when you’re new to it. So I’ve put together a quick video clip to show how easy it was to change to a static page. Hope it saves you some time. Watch the video clip “Create a static page – WordPress and Thesis”

Now Thesis and WordPress are both installed once again in my site. So now I’ve got a development area, a blog for my main site and a blog which I want to include along with my business subsite. The idea is that I’ll keep my local business and its blog separate from my general site.

I’ve made sure that each installation has a different table within the MySql database as the package I’m on with 1 and 1 has a limit of 2 MySQL databases and I don’t see the point in using up my remaining database just yet.

I’ve left my old site just as it is for the moment — that’s Footfairy.co.uk. I’ll try to sort out the local business subsite first and then get back to the main site once I’ve got more experience of using this tool.

My first problem is that I can’t get my navigation sorted out – I’ll attempt to load an image showing the problem I’ve got.

I’ve managed to load an image – it’s not pretty because I’ve not got the size sussed yet. But you get the picture!

The attached image seems to have stuck at the top of the post – maybe that’s not too much of a problem – so you can see that I need to shift things around.

Looks like I’ll be spending some time watching tutorial videos.