keepout
Photo by Zach Klein

First of all, to get any doubt out of the way… No, I’m not retiring (not anytime soon anyway), that was just my lame attempt at an April Fool’s joke.

Now back to this post’s topic: sometime last year I redesigned my website and blog and decided to stop using a built in contact form (via a WordPress plugin), and go with a Wufoo form instead. I chose to do so for a number of reasons, that I’m not going to detail now.

What’s important is that in doing so, I made a stupid mistake that was going to affect my freelancing activity on the short term and that could have even jeopardized it on the long term.

What happened?

I forgot to activate notifications in the admin panel. Wufoo can send you updates via email or even RSS, but you have to enter your email in a box. You’re gonna say “Of course!”, right? Well, this dumb ass writing these lines forgot to do it.

Not only that, but I even sent myself a test message. Of course I didn’t receive it, but since I got carried away with some other things, I forgot to look into it. It seemed strange to me that I did not receive any sort of messages (cause I did receive a few in the past), but I never checked. I acted like an ignorant fool.

Then a few days ago I gave the URL to someone and told them to ask for a direct email there. The message never came (turns out that person never used the form anyway), so I went in and checked. I was stupefied to find out I had 5 months worth of messages: 304 in total! The Wufoo chart shows about 2 messages / day on average.

What did I miss?

If I were to give you a rough estimate of what was in there:

  • 75% of the messages were the “I want a blog / website design. How much?” kind. You know… “supermarket shoppers”, as I like to call them. ;)
  • 15% were requests from people who gave little info (many simply didn’t know) about what they wanted to do and had very limited budget
  • 5% were people asking for help / advice on design or WordPress related issues or people looking to advertise
  • 5% were genuine leads. Some of them were really interesting project!

What did I do?

I went through every single message (took me a few hours), so if you tried to contact me and you didn’t hear from me until this day, your message was either too old (although I saved a few and will send replies next week) or it was one of the 75%.

I apologized to quite a few people, I sent replies to those who were looking for a design / redesign and didn’t seem to find it elsewhere and bookmarked a few interesting blogs in the process. Lucky for me, one way or another a few of the people who had trouble finding me managed to get in touch through other means.

The one that got away!

You all know those fisherman stories, about that big catch that got away: “Oh… if I had my … or my …” (fill in the blanks with state of the art fishing gear). That’s what they all say! For me, it wasn’t even something fancy, it was just a matter of pushing a button. But I didn’t, so I missed the chance of being part of a few really cool projects.

Even so, I had plenty of opportunities and interesting projects (maybe except for December 2008, which was a pretty low month – not sure I wanted it otherwise anyway), so I can’t really complain. But just for reference, here’s what I missed:

Jet Set Zero

I was contacted by Rob Ward from Jet Set Zero to help them design the website and give it that professional “pop”, as Rob said. Apparently, they managed to pull it off and the website looks awesome! So I’m not feeling too bad about this one. Great work, guys, you have a new subscriber!

You know how much I love to travel and that my dream is to travel the world someday. So this was one of the projects I probably would have done for free. But shhh… don’t go telling people about it! ;)

The Knead for Bread

Chuck from CookingBread.com contacted me to help him with a design for a new blog he was about to launch: The Knead for Bread. Apparently, Chuck also did just fine in finding a replacement, so the blog looks great and the photography is amazing! Yet another blog in my RSS reader.

Tony Wu Blog

Tony Wu, underwater photographer with an impressive portfolio, contacted me to design his blog to match his portfolio website’s look and feel. I love scuba and snorkeling and I love photography, so putting my hands on all that great content (just check his portfolio, it’s mind blowing!) would have been lots of fun. :)

Richard Powell of Samedis Design did an outstanding job with the blog design, so at least I’m happy yet another great project turned out right!

Since I was out of the country for most of January, the first two project would have probably been out of the question anyway. Still… Rob, Chuck, Tony, sorry guys and good luck with your blogs! I’ll be watching you!

Lessons learned

This has been a pretty long post, so I’ll try to keep it short. Although I’m probably one of the few bloggers to flame himself (and on his own blog for that matter), I’m the type of guy that admits mistakes and likes to think he can learn from them. Maybe you can too!

Plus you know I’m all about connecting the dots, so it’s good to keep this on record:

  • Lesson 1: it’s the simple, stupid mistakes that can do the most damage (how many times have you spent hours debugging some script or HTML, because of a typo?)
  • Lesson 2: all that crap in my Inbox clearly shows I definitely have to rethink my website copy and maybe structure. The design / layout will probably stay
  • Lesson 3: I’ve had confirmation that some of my recent decisions have been good decisions, that will hopefully shape my future “career”; more about this later
  • Lesson 4: this isn’t something new, but there are still many people who think that starting a blog based on an idea, a cheap so called “custom blog design” and tons of AdSense is the key to success :(

If I think of any others, I’ll update this post.

Conclusions

So all in all, this wasn’t all that bad. It was a simple (although stupid) mistake. But what if this were something more important? Did you do something that you ended up regreting? Do you still regret that, or was it all for the best? I look forward tto your thoughts.