Going Independent – Two Months In

I mentioned in the last post that I was considering only taking this through week 8. I’ve confirmed that desire, opting instead to focus on content that’s more relevant to potential clients, other freelancers, and web devs.

Hope you enjoyed these glimpses into my day to day of building this up. Here’s week 1, week 2, and week 3 as well if you’re interested in some earlier posts about this evolution.

Let’s dive in one last time!

What’s Happened the Past Few Weeks#anchor

• Cutting back on social network posting to LinkedIn and Mastodon. I had been posting some content on LinkedIn, Twitter (X?), BlueSky, Mastodon, and Facebook for a bit. After looking through the stats and feedback, I decided to narrow focus to these two to save time. I may incorporate others again later depending on the topic, but want to see how it goes with two.
• I realize follower & view stats can often be a vanity metric, but I’m happy to note that I’ve seen slow but steady increases in website traffic, LinkedIn followers & views, and Mastodon followers and interactions. Any one of them can spark a connection so I don’t take it for granted!
• I released that 11ty style guide generator and shared how to add it to an existing site after doing so for this site. Still a work in progress, but feel free to check it out!
• Just before integrating that style guide generator, I overhauled the styling of this site to use more modern CSS best practices like custom properties, fluid grid and typography powered by clamp, and generally making better use of the space with a touch more color.
• I just received some business cards that I took more time than I care to admit designing, they have a unique IRL -> online connection that I’m pretty proud of. I’ll be blogging about that process too so stay tuned for more on that (likely next week).
• I’m getting started on a web dev project for a former colleague that reconnected, more to come on that as soon as I can!
• I stopped counting the number of touchpoints I’ve had, from meetings, email conversations, and social connections I know I’m easily in the triple digits of new contacts since the last update. Surprisingly, it does get a little easier each time. The harder part is tracking progress and making sure I don’t miss reconnecting. I have a pretty nice homegrown CRM (as I hinted at last time) that is working for me for now. Trying to be frugal and so many of the CRM offerings out there are pretty expensive for my needs at the moment.

What’s Coming Up#anchor

• Focusing on this active project I had mentioned above, going to knock it out of the park! I’m working with a really great guy who is also a freelance consultant, we’re just getting started but it’s already been nice working with someone who “gets it”.
• Getting really excited about the State of the Browser conference coming up in a few weeks! My accessibility auditing SaaS app Be Inclusive is a sponsor of that wonderful event, and with the sponsorship I get an in-person ticket to attend. So I’m packing up and traveling internationally to meet some new people and share some of my fancy new business cards!
• I have a few additional project leads that are in various stages of the pipeline, all so different and exciting. Looking forward to seeing where those go.
• Upcoming updates to Be Inclusive including the addition of WCAG 2.2 criteria.
• I have a handful of additional side projects and blog post ideas I’m going to continue to chip away at, now would be a good time to follow the RSS feed so you don’t miss any of it!

As I had mentioned in the intro, this’ll be the last “Going Freelance” update post here but I do intend to still share bits of my progress on social media. So be sure to connect with me on Mastodon and LinkedIn!

Thanks again for reading, onward and upward! 🚀