Blog – Megan Jonas

Back to the Future

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 1, 2017

I’m happy to say that I’m back in the lower-48 after spending a fantastic summer in Alaska and taking an almost month-long road trip through Alaska, the Yukon Territory, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado. We’ve settled into our new lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I’m most excited about having reliable internet and cell phone service again.

I keep describing Alaska as 1996 to people, and it’s not too far from the truth. The cell phone service is very limited, our home internet came out of a cellular MiFi device (remember those?), and shipping anything took two weeks. Oh, and there’s still a working Blockbuster Video in the town where we lived.

Being in Fort Collins feels a little like returning to reality, but a good reality with a nice Target and lots of good restaurants. I’m having a little trouble getting my feet wet here, but I’m planning to start joining some networking groups next week and have a few events on the calendar. It helps that my parents are only about 90 minutes away in a South Denver suburb.

As for my future, I’m still working for private clients over at Jonas Digital (accepting new clients now!) and am considering taking on a part- or full-time position at a company here in Fort Collins, if I can find something that is a good fit for me.

Adventure Kitty survived his trip to Alaska and back and is happy in our new home. I am woefully behind in blogging our adventure over at Last One Up, but I’m planning to take this chance to work on getting caught up with our stories from the summer as late fall sets in over the Rocky Mountains and days get too short for after work adventures.

Here’s to a new adventure!

Alaska for the summer

Posted by Megan Jonas On April 27, 2017

I’m moving to Alaska.

No, seriously. I took a summer job at an adventure lodge in Alaska. It’s a full time job that won’t leave much time for web development, but I am keeping many of my current ongoing clients and will be returning to full time web work in the fall.

I will return to this blog at that point, too.

For more on my trip and adventures in Alaska, check out my blog at Last One Up.

Separation of Church & State

Posted by Megan Jonas On January 27, 2017

Now that I’m running a full-time WordPress development business, I have decided to split my blog and move all of my portfolio items along with any work-related content over to http://jonasdigital.com.

I will also be blogging periodically about my adventures on the road at http://lastoneup.com.

You can continue to watch this space for any and all writing that I may do about non-work or adventure items, including items about journalism, technology, politics, and other things that come out of my head.

Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started My Own Business

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 27, 2015

I graduated from college 10 years ago, and since that point, I have had a full-time, salaried job, until June of this year when I decided to go out on my own and start my own freelancing business.

Now that I’m about six months in, I have a list of things I wish I’d known when I started. Some of these things are practical, some are philosophical, but all are good advice for anyone thinking about going out on their own.

It’s better to start with systems than to develop them as you go
Pay for the accounting software
Your business name doesn’t matter nearly as much as your business structure
Working for friends can be a blessing, but it can also be the hardest client relationship to manage
Insist on signed estimates and deposit checks before starting a project
Hold on to your free time. Just because you work at home doesn’t mean that you’re always at work
Be confident in your abilities, but know when to ask for help
It’s OK to outsource things you’re not good at (more on that in my next post)
The worst part of any job is going to be billing – dealing with money sucks
Save everything – receipts, business cards, notes, emails, mockups, draft documents, checks, etc. – you never know when you’re going to need to refer back to something

And above all – remember the reason you’re doing this – whether it’s for creative freedom, the ability to work from anywhere, the ability to spend more time with friends or family, remember that reason and hold on to it. There will be hard, horrible days where you’ll wish you could go back to a full time job, or where you’ll want to fire clients, resign accounts, and quit projects. On those days, it’s important to think about why.

For me, there are multiple reasons why freelancing works for me, but one of the biggest is that life is short, and there is so much in this world that I want to see and do, and so when I have a hard day, I remember a raft trip down the Nolichucky river on a Wednesday morning, and how it was a perfect day, and how in my previous jobs, it was a day I would have had to miss, sitting instead in my office while the leaves went from green to yellow to red, and then fell off the trees. Those are the kind of days that make it all worth it.

Home for the Holidays

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 25, 2015

I am home in Colorado for the Thanksgiving holiday and I’m enjoying time with family, and the natural beauty of this country.

We’ll have a traditional Thanksgiving feast tomorrow, with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, rolls, green bean casserole, and cranberry sauce. We’ll watch parades and football and sit by the fire.

I want to wish everyone a happy, healthy holiday season, and remind you to stop, take a breath and appreciate the traditions (old and new) that this season has to offer.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Do you use checklists?

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 23, 2015

As I fly home to Denver today, I’m wondering what tools other developers use when setting up projects.

I have a questionnaire that I sent to clients before quoting a project that helps me get a sense of the type of website we’re going to build.

But I’m thinking of developing a series of checklists for new projects.

Collecting Logins for Clients with Existing Websites
Setting up a new WordPress installation
Plugins
Social Media Scheduling
Analytics and Adwords

Any others you’d like to see?

American Advertising Federation Asheville

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 20, 2015

When I moved to Asheville, one of the things I worried about was finding a fantastic community of professionals, like the one I had in Washington, D.C.

I was a pretty regular attendee of events hosted by the Online News Association in D.C. and loved the inspiration and camaraderie I got from that group. Of course, our community was huge in D.C. (note the specialized nature of the group) and I knew that I wouldn’t have quite that size group here in Asheville.

But last year, I found the American Advertising Federation of Asheville, and felt some of the elements I was looking for. This year, I’m serving as the Education Chair for the group, which gets me involved in board meetings and other decisions. We’re a small group, but we host great programs and social events.

Being the education chair has allowed me to meet with students at the local colleges in the area and hear from them what they want in a professional group following college. We are hoping to attract some of these students to the group and need to provide networking events and interesting programming to do so.

Our challenge this year is membership and attendance, since our group is small and new, but I hope we continue to grow and provide great programming for the year to come. If you want more information on the group, check out the American Advertising Federation of Asheville and come to an event!

Keeping up with the cutting edge

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 18, 2015

One of the things I’m loving about self-employment is the opportunity to continuously learn new things. From changing technologies, to new projects, it seems like every week presents a challenge that I have never conquered before.

Last week, I worked my way through some social media best practices courses that served as a refresher course for me as I launch into a social media project for a client. This one in particular from Hootsuite has a series of videos and quizzes that help you work through the changing landscape of social media.

It was great for two reasons:

I refreshed my knowledge, staying up-to-date on the latest best-practices for social media
And, it reminded me of the items that I needed to describe to the client to get the best elements for their profiles and posts

Now that I’m working for myself, doing these kinds of things can be hard. While I’m running through these courses, those are not “billable hours” for me. But it improves my work across many clients and lets me reset my brain for new projects.

How about you? How do you balance the need to do continuing education and research with the need to create billable work?

Social Media for Open Source Communities

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 16, 2015

This is the final post in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

For a community that prides itself on “openness” and “collaboration,” the open source community does not always readily embrace social media as a means to promote their projects and get people involved.

Rikki Endsley, from OpenSource.com, gave a quick rundown of best practices for all social media, and some of the key platforms in particular.

For those of us that do this for a living, her tips were not groundbreaking, but it’s always nice to get a quick refresher course on what we should be doing to promote our projects.

Her key takeaways were:

Send out Relevant, Interesting, Accurate Information
Know who your audience is
Craft your text
Use hashtags
Avoid PR Speak
Numbers do well
Ask questions
Images are very important
Retweet, Respond, Reshare, Reply

I think even experience social media professionals can use this refresher course from time to time, and it was an excellent way to talk about how Open Source communities can get out of their small bubble and welcome more people in, which was, after all, the point of the conference.

Open Government Data

Posted by Megan Jonas On November 13, 2015

This is the eighth in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

In what was probably the most interesting session I attended in my two days at the conference, I listened to Mark Headd of Accela, Inc., talk about the issues with open government data, and how governments can really embrace the spirit of open data laws, vs. just adhering to the letter of the law.

This is the area in which I have the most experience, having worked and trained as a journalist and with the Code for Asheville brigade over the past year, and I found his perspective on the subject interesting and informative.

He advocates for eight principles of open government data:

Complete
Primary
Timely
Accessible
Machine Readable
Non-Discriminatory
Non-Proprietary
License Free

Citing data.gov and the 18F project of the federal government as models for open data, he noted that the culture change in the halls of government can be the biggest barrier to open data.

Most of all, though, he noted that the best way to encourage open data at any government level is to use it. That’s where local journalists and code communities come in. Build something useful and the government will see that their efforts to open their data and make it machine readable and timely are important to the people they serve, and the people who use the thing you build will understand why open government data is important as well.