Preparations for the Month
This piece is part of my month-long project of building brand awareness for a local business, The Blossom Lounge, by creating a new website and making their content more accessible to customers. Feel free to come and follow along on my journey!
It’s now the end of the first week of my month-long project. The main focus of this week was getting all the preparations done for the work to be done in the upcoming weeks.
This week, I worked on:
- Making a project outline
- Making a project landing page outline
- Building a task management system
- Doing SEO research
- Writing 2 blog posts
Project Outline
Once I had thought of a project idea, I needed to plan out all the corresponding parts. This meant thinking of ways of adding value to the local company I had in mind and breaking down parts of the project I needed to do. This was to give me an idea of the work ahead of me for the month.
Project Landing Page Outline
I then built a landing page outline to plan out how I am going to organize and showcase all of the content I am going to be creating this month. Throughout the month, I am going to be adding new content to this outline. This will make publishing everything at the end of the month hassle-free and easy to do.
Task Management System
I used Notion to plan out and schedule the tasks for the month. I broke down each week into separate pages to help me stay on top of my tasks and keep things organized. I estimated which days of the week I am going to do each task which I will update as I approach each week.
SEO Research
Since one of the main tasks for this project is building a website, I knew SEO research would be important. Through SEO research I found out about the ways to best optimize a website for the local business this project is built around.
Blog Posts
To further concretize what I learned while doing SEO research, I wrote an accompanying blog post explaining the basics of SEO and why it’s so important. The other post I wrote is the one you’re reading right now.
Challenges
One of the main challenges this week was thinking and planning ahead while also focusing on the current work at hand. I found it a bit overwhelming at first seeing all the work ahead of me, but was able to be more productive when I focused on just a day at a time.
Lessons
Some things I would do differently would be to ask questions earlier on so that I could have gotten started on my work earlier. I believe doing the heavy lifting now of scheduling the rest of the month is going to pay off in the coming weeks. Having a clear idea of the work ahead is going to encourage me to stay on top of things, and is a practice that is going to be useful for future projects.
It also would’ve been helpful to hone in on what I wanted to get out of my SEO research. SEO is a very broad topic, and focusing on specific aspects of it rather than SEO as a whole might’ve been more useful.
What’s Next
Now that I have the framework of my project done, next week is when I’ll start building the actual website. I’ll be using Webflow to build the website and information from their current website and social media to incorporate into their new site. I will then document the work I did by writing an accompanying post and filming a video. I will also write another update post.
