It's no surprise that images play a critical part in marketing and running an online stationery store. I mentioned last week that sorting out my management of images was going to be critical in making other workflows work.
When I started out on this workflow project, I wrote:
"I find myself constantly reinventing the wheel. Partially, this is a form of procrastination, but I also have a terrible process habit.
Here's how it works.
I find myself typing the same things again and again. Surely I must be able to automate that? I'll do some research - and turns out there are multiple ways of automating for that exact problem. I buy one or several apps or services. I install the solution across all devices, sync everything up and instantly forget all about it.
Later, I find myself typing the same things again and again...
I wasn't kidding.
I further wrote
Images play a critical part in an online business. Every product has one or more. The website has multiple "hero shots" and "sliders" that should be regularly changed. Every mail shot requires images. Every blog post too. These images need to be optimised for each purpose and available to a number of different people in disparate locations.
Turns out...
- Four years ago, I trained and equipped Clare for resizing images. She passes shots through Adobe Elements to get them the right size.
- Clare has also deployed our secret weapon, the Rupert. We have a Dropbox folder where we throw all manner of things, and the Rupert, (he of Wilder. Notes) casts some magical photographer spells and whatever we've put in there becomes a social media-sized image.
So - we have the images and a process. All I really needed to do was get the images into an online folder, rename and organise them. - Oh, and document the process, of course. As ever, the weak link in the process is me. I am learning, that for me, finding a solution is only the beginning. Implementing it, and maintaining it, that's the hard part. So, while I continue to find processes that I need to document, I'm also working on where to store them and how to ensure that I regularly review them.
My other "outstanding" from last week was how to manage multiple links, needed for scheduling social media for the week. I already use Alfred, and with the addition of a Powerpack, (ie money) the clever utility will remember every link that I copy. Boom! Then, today, MacPowerUsers had a show called "The Clipboard Manager Roundup". Both Stephen Hackett and David Sparks recommended Alfred. (You can't see, but I'm doing a Geek strut.) They also recommended some new thing called Paste.
You can find the fruits of my labour at Nero's Notes, an online stationery store, or even right here. Members are currently reading the first draft of my debut novel in weekly installments, and then chatting to me in our Slack channel. If you want to get involved in helping me get a novel out into the world and talking about anything and everything, become a member here, it won't break the bank, but makes a huge difference to me.
