It has been a busy bunch of months, but finally after all that time, I'm off for a week! Time to sit down, take a load off, chillax, and do pretty much nothing.
…or maybe not.
I'm pretty much swamped at work lately, even with the addition of a new developer. Actually, that's caused more work for me in the short term as I have to start building work plans, project plans, and many other plans so that all of the developers (and our graphic designer) have plenty to do to keep them occupied.
Then there's a ton of other extracurricular activities I need to finish, such as performance reviews, interviews for a new developer, and various discovery documents (not to mention documentation in general).
This week I'm going to try to crank a few of those things off, and I'm going to attempt to read a book or two as well. I've got my eye on “Getting Things Done”, which I've had on my shelf since the cruise a year and a half ago. In addition to that, I'm going to read “CSS Mastery”, which is an awesome book on CSS design…yes I'm pretty much a guru, but it's always fun to learn new stuff.
All New Comics has settled into a nice little pattern. Every week I spend 2-3 hours updating the site on Sunday with the new stuff for the week. This involves finding cover images for every comic we get every week (an average of 20-25 titles which go on the site weekly), finding a blurb about each book, consulting with our inventory to figure out how many go online vs how many go to pulls, and going through the store admin to upload all of that good stuff. Then I write a little blurb, post it as news, put it on the front page, and make sure everything's organized just right.
I also usually look at our analytics to see what's being searched for, who's talking about the site on message boards etc, and if there are any new customers whom I should communicate with.
This week is additionally busy as I have to add a few dozen products to our subscription routine, which will keep me busy for a few hours.
Our AdWords are generating about 150 or so new visits every month, and our sales have definately increased. We're actually where I expected us to be at this point, but now we need to step it up so that we're making more sales and getting more people subscribed. I'd like to see us double our subscriptions by the end of the summer, and double our monthly sales as well.
It would also be nice if Pete and I weren't our own largest customers every month.
That part I doubt will happen anytime soon though. We both read far too much, and buy way too many little extras. It's not our fault though, the companies keep on putting out so much good stuff that we've gotta keep buying it all!