For weeks (okay, actually, it was months—and we are still learning) after the site was done and after the site designer went MIA, I was forced to either spend countless hours teaching myself, through a lot of trial and error, or throw in the towel.  Obviously I chose the harder road.  Gee, aren’t I a glutton for punishment?  No, just ambitious.  I had a goal and I was following through, come hell or high water.

I learned a lot about navigating and uploading, editing, errors and how to ‘fix’ things going awry in the administrative site of the magazine website, which for those who haven’t used a CMS, it’s where you put everything from the back that is seen on the actual site.  Everything from content and pictures to the little icons you see across a site; they all live here on the platform we use for attribute magazine. I am actually amazed at all I was able to figure out.  I sometimes have to explain things to, and do things that, the current web guy cannot figure out.

I was laid off from my job soon after.  The company was hit hard by the ever suffering building industry in Florida and despite my being on the business development side of things, I was the last hired and therefore, the first to go.  I did find a full time job about a month later, so was grateful for that.  Though on an emotional level, I was a hot mess.  I was struggling still with the finality of my relationship and we were holding on to each other, which I had never let occur before.  Not healthy, not healthy at all.  It was affecting every part of my life and no matter what I did…I just couldn’t move on and be “happy.”

So, I just kept trying to focus on attribute…as it was, at least, a beacon in the fog.  And this was a Golden Gate Bridge fog…

I was able to bring on a couple new writers and an intern to help me with things such as photo resizing, uploading, spreadsheets and letter writing.  We were at least progressing and getting traffic, which is the goal of a website…to be seen.  I was also making connections with some wonderful people and I rarely had someone say no or dis a request to be featured on the site.  I was truly surprised by the willingness of people across all industries/backgrounds to have an article written by a ‘nothing’ website.

Another thing I had to do was “teach” my writers how to write in a style that they weren’t used to or in some cases, how to develop their own writer’s “voice”.  I also had to teach the Editor on board at that time, how not to step on the toes of the writers and respect their individual [creative] voices.  There was so much involved and only so many hours in a day.  For a while I was only getting between four and six hours of sleep at night;  less during crunch time.  And not much ‘me’ time at all.  Welcome to entrepreneurship, Stacey. No one said this would be easy…and it hasn’t been.

One of my goals during this time was to get good, solid content for the site, so I was really researching topics, companies, etc., whom I felt would be fitting subjects.  I was writing a bit less of the content because I had ten writers, give or take, at that point.  The writers were and continue to be, fabulous.  We are so blessed.  We’re also blessed to have two interns stick it out for over a year now…they have really played an important part in the day to day, behind the scenes activity.

We were also starting to get emails from readers that truly touched my  heart and made all of the headache, sleep loss and learning curve, worth it.  The appreciation of the readers is what is most gratifying for me.  Ironically, it was when I was at the point of being seriously fed-up, I got my first email from a college student named Ryan who was just gushing about how grateful he was to have found a place to read about the positive things people do and that are transpiring in the world.

But something wasn’t feeling right.  It hit me that the majority of my staff and registered users were not Gen X.  This was a little bit of a concern, especially considering at that time, our content was mostly about Gen X’ers.  This realization set my wheels in motion and turned on a light bulb of sorts.  Was it possible that our content was actually transcending generations? Was the content being showcased something that people of all ages were thirsting for? Quality and optimism in one place…there was only one other publication I knew of at that time that produced this type of  content, Ode Magzine. And I dreamt of being on the same level as Ode.

There is beautiful irony in this last paragraph, but you will have to wait it out until next time to find out what it is…

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In numero 4:  The “Ode” connection. Going with the tide, embracing change and yes, more web designer drama (this just wouldn’t be a story without it). Oh, and finally getting closure in that ended relationship… all in the age of Obama-mania.