I have a business update for you this Monday, but before I get to the boring stuff, here is what is going on in family life:

I ripped my pants. One of my favorite pair of pajama pants that is. It started out as a small hole with a little draft in the seat and ended up in a good laugh. I can’t resist a good laugh! I communicated with Keeley about the the hole in a way only her and I could understand. The way married couples do. This left Samuel, my son, out of the loop on what was happening so he had no idea I knew of the hole. Keeley told Samuel as I pretended not to hear. Playing dumb comes natural to me. He was having a bad day and needed a good laugh. He waited until my back was turned and I was distracted. He gripped both sides of the hole and *RIP.* What started as a small hole was now an open gash. He couldn’t stop laughing. When he finally did, I simply replied. “you mean I have had a hole in my pants? No wonder every time I tooted I heard the sound of a flag flapping.” This sent him into more fits of laughter. I think there is a moral here. Maybe take one for the team? No. When life gives you a problem, the best cure is laughter? Maybe. No, I think what I think the moral is this: Toot jokes are super funny to a six year old.”

I have put a lot of work into my freelance design business this week, mostly by working on the website. I have optimized, socialized, prioritized, adwordatized, tednerized, designatized and etceteraized www.duckofalltrades.com with one goal in mind: Create a self maintaing site that I can easily update with new content as needed that meets the needs of my target audience. I’m hoping to get it to a point where I can focus less on the business side of DoAT and more on design. I want the site to take care of itself.

When I last left you, I realized how little time people actually spent on my site.  Most people were clicking on one page and then leaving. I set out to fix this problem by directing searchers to new front pages that are designed to draw their attention in more and be targeted to what they are looking for. The results are a success so far. On an average, people are staying 2-4 times longer and clicking through more of the pages. Traffic wise, I’m still averaging about the same as before. I’m hoping to increase this next week. I have a few ideas on how to do this. I’m trying to be creative about it. Should be fun. I am thinking it will be better to push this site and use ite as a launching pad to my other endeavors. I want to create something people care about.

I should have numbers to share with you next week. Right now it is still too early for them to be significant. I can tell that this site has been successful so far. Readership has doubled every other day! I already get more people on this site than the DoAT site. I have been using AdWords to advertise DoAT now for about two weeks. So far I have had little success. When I say little, I mean none. My click through ratios are HORRIBLE. On an average, they are .04%. What does this mean? Out of every 100 people that view my ad, only .04% click on the ad and go to my site. That isn’t even a whole person! That’s like a whole person’s pet gerbil. So out of 100 people, 1 pet gerbil goes to my site. Gerbils don’t need design or illustration. I think they just like to play with mice.

The hardest part of being an artist is knowing when to put then paintbrush down. When to stop? I thought I was at this point with Moo-pig. Apparently not. I had an idea yesterday that I just had to try out. Originally I had planned to do the book in black and white. Then it turned to black and white with a splash of blue. Yesterday I had the idea of adding in more color to see how it works; a pig color/texture for Moo-pig and only Moo-pig. The idea? In Moo-pig’s world, she seems out of place, not real. She isn’t one thing, she isn’t the other. But visually, she could be colorful and real in an otherwise black and white world. She is herself and that is what makes her real. Might work, I’m playing around with the idea. Here are two images. One with her in black and white and one with her in pig color. What do you think?

Moo-pig in color

Moo-pig black and white