Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Good Idea....


If you're anything like me you can come up with great ideas at odd times and once you get rolling with the idea you start to forget details as you get more and more excited about it (well it happens to me so I'm guessing it happens to others!)

A good solution is a secretary taking notes for you but as small business owners who can actually afford that? Next best thing a tape recorder. They come in all shapes and sizes and can record everything from a reminder to do something like an entry in your bookkeeping to the latest brilliant idea you want to try for your business to thoughts for where to take your business and how to expand it. Iit can also capture a group brainstorming session where you get to the point of bouncing ideas so fast you know you can't write them down fast enough!

Other ideas for it can include talking to it while you develop a new product. How you do something if you have to write instructions or think you'll forget in 6 months how you did something and need to repeat it.

Another idea is while working on your website, have someone go through page by page and comment on the page with their ideas along with while coming up with ideas for new pages you can create lists for keywords, page title possibilities and other behind the scenes type info you'll need when you actually start the page.

Once you're done with a brainstorming session you can then rewind and play the tape and either write or type up your idea lists in some semblance of order and get all the little things you might otherwise have forgotten. I tend to organize things in Power Point with one main idea per page and details listed below for each subject.

Hope this inspires and helps someone!

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

PDF Creation

Recently a great many people I know have been working on creating things to sell in the form of tutorials and e-books in digital format. Quite a few have used Word and are trying to use just a .doc format for selling this idea of theirs…. I’ve e-mailed several and walked several through converting things to PDF format. Adobe Acrobat is NOT the only way to create PDF files. There are services that will convert just about any file you can think of. There are also programs that do this as well. Some are paid others are freeware.

For Word or other MS Office products (yes you can convert Power Point and Excel to PDF!) I use PDF995. This is freeware with no spyware and no ads attached or added to your files. The free version does pop up an ad for upgrading to the paid version but it’s not all that big of a deal nothing attaches itself to your file that you create. How it works is you go to www.pdf995.com and download the files they provide. Follow their installation instructions and the next time you’re in Word and need a PDF you go to file and print and switch to a postscript printer driver (the program knows which one you need and comes with it). It’ll print to file and you save the PDF. You can put anything you want in the document…. photos, links, text, colors, fonts etc. And WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)! The nice thing about this little add on is that it works with Word 98 or greater…. Even up to 2003 (according to the site…. I run 2000 so do not have first hand knowledge of this).

Other programs I’ve run into with PDF converters are Corel Draw 11 and Open Office (open source version of MS Office). I use Corel to convert all my patterns, books, lines & kits for sale and it works just fine.

Poke around online you’d be surprised at how many free programs there are available for converting various file formats to PDF.

Sue Darby~Owner
www.suestinycostumes.com

Sunday, May 15, 2005

New Lessons

My latest lessons have more to do with balancing a family and a business than anything. I have 2 small children and in just a couple days one of the two will be out of school for the summer. What to do with her? Well there's a backyard full of bugs and 'flowers' to pick along with her bicycle but she gets bored with that quickly. So I bring her up into my loft and turn her loose with paper towels and scotch tape and a doll. What does she do? She emulates mom and starts designing patterns for her dolls.

I think by the end of the summer I'll have to open up a new section of my site for her designs. I'll still have to do a lot of the finishing work on the patterns along with the sewing but I have a feeling that we'll have a lot of fun this summer. I also have a feeling that with my daughter learning to read and spell she'll pick up on web design and web languages fairly quick... after not too long she'll be maintaing that new section not me!

After her brother is out of school in less than a month this activity will be limited to during his nap time but should still be fun. When he's out of school as well it'll be off to the park most days... it's the reason we all have bikes!

Lesson learned... include children in your business and teach them about what you make or do... it's amazing how quick they'll pick up on things.