Yay!

I’m so glad you’re here. It means we’ve been talking, and we both would like to see if we’re a good fit.

I do one thing: help creative businesses get their work out into the world.

I do that in three ways: as a virtual assistant, as a designer, and as a tech whisperer. What does that mean for you? Below you’ll see what I’ve been doing for clients over the past few months. You may have other ideas we can talk about too. Your time is valuable, so feel free to just click to the section you need from the icons below.

Next step: let's chat!

You can tell me all about your business, where you want it to go next, and where you need a bit of a boost or an extra pair of hands.
 

As a designer,

I build on your work building your brand, with:

  • social media images
  • beautiful, interactive pdfs and workbooks
  • email templates
  • websites (although that’s a whole other story!)
  • extra bits and pieces of branding

And it’s all designed to look, sound and feel like yours.

As a virtual assistant,

I help you get more done, with fewer headaches:

  • customer service emails
  • organising your mailing list
  • uploading blog posts, or classroom content
  • creating images for social media
  • spreadsheets
  • file management
  • project management
  • organising your online store

Give me the stuff you hate doing!

As a tech whisperer,

I let you concentrate on what you do best, by handling:

  • the apps you need integrated with your website (calendars, payments, mailing list sign-ups)
  • website back ups
  • plug-in and template updates
  • email automations
  • checking your website for security, speed or search engine issues

And I’ll teach you how to use what you need to make life a little easier. 

Designer Portfolio

 

Website design:

Each project has it’s own requirements, and each client has their own voice. We start by discussing the look, feel and intentions for the site. If needed, I help them choose between WordPress, Squarespace and Shopify. Then I begin to design the site, selecting a theme and personalising them using code, extra images and  all the features of the platform.

woowooheart.com

janecrisp.com

erinfaithallen.com

everydayjoy.co.uk

Graphic design projects:

Virtual Assistant Case Studies

Creative people often prefer more visual organisation systems, so work with notebooks, sketches and piles of paper. If that is no longer serving you, I can help. These are some of the ways my existing clients have asked for support.

1. Paper chase

This maker had the descriptions and stories of her products in more than 30 documents. They were in slideshows, pdfs, text documents and spreadsheets. I collated them all into one spreadsheet, that we know use to track inventory and as source content for her website.

2. Who’s who

This painter and art teacher had been collecting email addresses for years and was using gmail for newsletters. She has half a dozen groups for different activities and these needed to be separated out from personal contacts, cleaned of duplicate addresses and people who had moved on. From MailChimp, her tribe can now manage their own details and preferences – more important than ever since GDPR.

3. Get the message out

Another painter and art teacher runs several art courses online. Her time is stretched thinly between the studio, home and everything else that running a business involves. I handle her customer support emails – it is so freeing for someone else to handle these, if you tend to take them personally. I also update the classrooms when she has prepared the classrooms and send emails out to the students with all the information they need. I’ve also set up automatic “welcome to class” emails that are sent as soon as anyone joins the class.

Tech Whisperer Case Studies

If you’d rather connect with your tribe than the internet, I can help. You have full permission not to know how to use your ftp settings, or even know what that means! When the tech stuff needs wrangling, let me sort it out for you.

1. White screen of horror

We were making a small change to the formatting of a page, when it happened. The screen went white. We couldn’t log into WordPress, and visitors couldn’t see the site. Luckily, the clients had my Monthly WordPress Maintenance Package so I had a recent backup, and was able to log-in and replace the damaged file. The whole drama from adrenaline burst from sigh of relief took less than 45 minutes.

2. Jigsaw of tech

These days it seems like you need to subscribe to five different services to run your business smoothly. I’ve set up integrations for nearly all of my clients at some point. Whether it’s joining product printers to Shopify, or linking Stripe to your calendar service, it’s often just a little more complicated than advertised.

3. Moving shop

Many makers start out on Etsy, and it is the right venue for many.  At some point, you may feel you’ve outgrown it or want to build your audience independent of a market place. Maybe you want to move from WordPress to Shopify. But oh my, it can be overwhelming to think of setting up all those listings again! The good news is that there is often a short cut or two, and if not, or if the transfer goes awry. I’ve helped with several of these over the past year and it’s almost certainly not as bad as you fear.