Freelancer's Office: Blog

I spent the other morning working on getting my websites organized, going back over my websites binder and making sure that I have them all listed in it.  Pretty much just a basic maintenance overview that did not entail any changes to any of the sites, just a review of what sites I maintain and making sure they are all entered into the binder.  While I was getting them all organized I linked most of them to the privacy policy here at Freelancer’s Office, giving me an easy to update privacy policy.  I also created a help page that allows website visitors to submit tickets for help with my websites.  Later I will be posting links to the ticket center on some of the websites, but first I want to do a little bit of tweaking to the ticket center.

I took a break from most of my other work (including my novel) to work out a privacy policy for my websites.  This is something that I should have thought to create a while back, but most of my websites have not had one up till now.  My main concern with creating the privacy policy, aside from making it right, was that I wanted to create something that would cover all of the different sites that I maintain.  My reason for that is so that when I need to make a change to the privacy policy, I don’t want to have to go around from one site to the next for 20+ websites and update the individual privacy policies.

By creating a single central privacy policy that covers the needs of all of my websites, I am able to update a single privacy policy and know that it has been updated across the network of websites.  I have not seen anything that says that privacy policies have to be based on the site that they are for, so I don’t see why there should be a problem with sites that all follow the same policy can not all link to the same policy.  I even saw that in effect on a Google service that linked from the domain it was on back to the main Google privacy policy.  One thing that I included on my privacy policy were button links to return the reader to whatever page from my network sent them to the policy.

My main stumbling block was in not knowing what to include in a privacy policy.  I had to do a lot of looking around to see what the things usually covered.  At last I ended up basing my privacy policy on those of other websites, the BBB template for a privacy policy and other resourcs on creating privacy policies.

Okay, I know that my posts here have been pretty much rambling and all over the board, but there is a reason for this.  I have been working slowly on getting the site organized to something that is actually what I have envisioned before I launch it officially, so rather than just let it sit here with “docked domain advertising” on it - something I detest when I drop by a website that looks interesting, I have made an effort to at least keep the site active and show that I am working on it and that is about to pay off.

I have a full day of work to do today, but with any luck a full day of busting my backside will result in my spending all night at long last doing some marketing for this site.  So far there has been limited marketing that has been all based on links from other sites I own and a few sites that have found my site here and found it worth linking to (heartfelt thank you to those sites!)

One major change (aside from the template might change again, I ain’t decided) is that I am taking full control of the advertising that appears on this website.  I don’t want to have the hit and miss advertising that I have seen far too much of, I want to have control so that I know that if my readers follow a link from my website, that they are going to be going to a site that I feel comfortable referring them to.  Bulk junk advertising sites that serve up links and banners just can not match the high level of advertisement targeting that I want to have for this website.

There will probably be more changes, but I won’t get them done if I don’t get started, so I’ll get to it and see you on the other side of the revisions for the official Freeelancer’s Office launch.

“Sorry- if I had any advice to give I’d take it myself.”

- John Steinbeck

I have got the sidebar stuff figured out now.  As you can see, there is now a “Notes” category over there on the top of the right sidebar, it lets me create posts that will show up in that area.   I’m still planning on the best use of it, but I think I need to see if I can make a second one of them so I can post contests and writing workshops that I hear about and not have them lost in the blog list.