I hear you….

Claire Thompson, freelance PR consultant, Waves PR

Sometimes the hardest pill to swallow is your own. You know: “Physician heal thyself.”;  ”Drink from your own fountain”; “Practise what you preach”…. and so on

And a couple of people had made oblique references to this blog. In fairness, some of them weren’t much better themselves (not great lookers) but I have taken a cold hard look. And decided I do need to swallow my own medicine. The structure is pretty much dictated, but I can work better within it. So here’s my own prescription:

1. Make it more personal.

There’s a lot of people out there with a strong ‘me’ brand. I find this quite hard – hiding behind a more professional image sits more comfortably, and it’s much easier to do for someone else than for myself.  I think this quite a female thing – unless you look like America’s next top model spreading your picture around doesn’t seem quite right. But I’ve bitten the bullet and put a picture up as a temporary measure. It’s a professionally taken one, if a little old.(replaced with festive picture)  A new one is top of my to do list.

(As an aside I did have my hair cut in preparation. Three figure sums later, no-one noticed.)

2. Sort out basic SEO

I’ve done the obvious, content wise (and consequently this blog comes up in the top 5% of blogs very naturally in search). But let’s face it, PR folk are two a penny. Especially if you’re called Claire Thompson (John Smith, Steve Jones….). So I’m getting my technical wizard to handle the html metatag bits that I fear. (Yeah, yeah, I know – but programming’s never been my thing since I learned to programme in BASIC as a teenager and it, frankly, went nowhere! My strengths lie elsewhere.)  And focussing.

3. Improve contactability

Having been locked in a battle with FaceBook about my site there, I have been holding off doing too much , but the time has come…I shall sort out the contact pages and make life easier for everyone. By Friday.

4. Client pages

It’s not very clear who I am/am not working for on these pages. Ironically it’s because I took down the client links on the one client which featured regularly, because it looked dated once we stopped working together.

And some of my other work is technically not mine – I’m helping out others.

I do plan to share the journey I make with one direct client, a new haberdashery firm. But frankly, until they’re a bit further advanced business-wise we can’t do much.

But these are excuses. There are a few bits that I could be getting on with, so watch this space.

5. Navigation

The navigation on this site is meant to be layered, but it hasn’t quite worked that way. It’s bugged me for a while. it must bug vistors more.  For which I apologies, and promise to have resolved before the week is out.

Links from front page may take longer, but….

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So there’s my five things for starters. There is, of course, more, but five is actionable. With apologies to anyone who visited this site and was disappointed.

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1. Tweets that mention WavesPR » I hear you…. -- Topsy.com — December 16, 2009 @ 4:07 pm

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