I’m going to try and hire a few more people to create a sales team. I hope the fiasco of last year doesn’t repeat itself. Craigslist was extremely helpful in getting the people. I’m going to start making some calls on Monday. All the more reason to get this site done.

I talked to a friend of mine in KY. He’s going to do some recon down there for me and see if the market is open for web design. I also talked to a friend in Peoria and he said his wife might be interested.

I went to a poetry slam with my friend Justin this past Saturday. I was mainly for kids but it was an icebreaker if I ever wanted to publish my stuff. The main demographic was 10th grade girls. They had some pretty heavy stuff in their poems; abuse, their generation not living up to its potential, mom had breast cancer, etc. So one of the parents that were there, I talked to them about her daughter’s poetry and the function of Solar Dragons Scholarship Center and she was interested in what we are doing. In addition to that, I met up with the Library Director in Richton Park. She was interested in some projects that I ran past her. Hopefully we can keep in touch.

My main focus now is to fix this flash and call these potential sales people on Monday.

I finally caught up with Mark, so we are back on track with the hummer club. I talked to Trish and she needed some work done too. I’m meeting up with Chris on Monday to talk about some social media stuff.

There are some projects I want to do but I’m probably gonna run it past Matt and ppl on LinkedIn first. Someone has done it, no need to reinvent the wheel.

This week is super crazy: I have Trish’s stuff to work on but I haven’t heard from her since she went back to Louisiana, Mark’s hummer stuff, poetic process and techno fugit. I need to organize my work files on my computer to get a more streamlined process. I found a slideshow template that I had been experimenting with a while ago that might do the trick for the hummer site.

I got the login info I needed from Mark Price for the Hummer Club. I don’t have access to the server though, just an admin panel. I’m going to have to get access to the server. He has three sites he wants me to work on: www.illianahummerclub.com, www.illianahummerclub.org and www.nisark9.com. I really want to get started before the year is up. Mark says that things are going to start jumping in the spring for the hummer club. I definitely want to have things up and running before then. I don’t want the hummer club deadlines to start to clash with the Techno Fugit ideas.

I bought my old site www.poeticprocess.org. There are things I want to experiment with using my poetry site. I already learned how to setup an apache server and install php. I’m going to write down what I want the poetry site to do and see if that will encourage me to learn php at an even faster rate. Everything I’m doing is going to be client-side, so I dont have to worry about crashing/blowing up a server because I dont know what I’m doing… yet.

To be honest, I need a couple of design interns if this is gonna balance out. The clients I have now are already taking up a lot of time. I can’t do their sites while taking on more clients. I should talk to Robert Morris either this week or next week. When the site is done, I’ll print up the business cards and we can get this show on the road.

With the Hispanic population being high in this area and in Chicago, I want to hire someone to translate our site into Spanish. Speaking of which, I need to free up a block of time in my day to learn Spanish. What good is having a bilingual site if I cant talk to clients in their own language?

“Project Icarus” is looking up. Our writing staff is in place and we have a cover artist. I have a contact that can print and distribute the comic for us, so that is working out in our favor. I think I want to keep the comic local and have local businesses advertise in it. We are debating on having a monthly comic or just do a graphic novel. I’m leaning on the novel, just to have a finished product to promote versus a piece of a product. I prefer having a whole product and then have people critique it. Unfortunately, that means there can’t be any room for error. We’re still working on it, so I’m not going to worry about it too much.

Since I’m going on a trip for a week, I’m setting everything up to be ready to go when I get back. I have a client list and I’ll design the business cards for my sales people before I go. Things are looking up so far and here’s hoping they can take off when May gets here.

I remember when I was getting my A.A.S in graphic art; we had to make a movie. I was fortunate that Isaac was available to help with the movie. About 40% of the movie’s creative look was from other people suggesting a variety of ways to handle a certain scene. I appreciate that those people in my movie really had my back and it turned out to be the best movie in the school. They even took a copy of it to other campuses for Robert Morris. I felt like a celebrity for a little while all because I had a good team working with me.

Now I have a new team. I have a couple of programmers and a guy thats pretty good with flash. This works for now. As things grow, we’ll see how it goes…

I started a new project this month. I started a comic with a friend of mine. He liked the basic concept and is scouting artists for us to create the comic. I’m debating over what style and if we want to use color or not. I would prefer everyone to stick to what they are good at, instead of double duty; I.E. me coloring and writing, or the artist penciling and inking, etc. I bought a DVD called ‘Countdown to Wednesday’. It was really informative about how to break into the comic business and all thats involved. We thought we had an artist but he wasn’t up to such an elaborate project. If Solar Dragons has more business coming in, some of the revenue can fund the comic. I’m thinking about sponsors as well, various businesses and colleges in the area. March is right around the corner, so we’ll see how things go.