Endeavor Creative

My blog.

It’s called Alison’s Lunch and it’s all about cooking and eating local food in Alaska, while raising a four-year-old and running a bakery. It advocates making real food from real ingredients—and if we’re feeling especially heroic, to try it with our small children.

Where do I even start explaining how fantastic my experience has been, working with Taughnee on my blog? First, she offered all kinds of encouragement to make the leap--assuring me that it would be fun, that yes, I could do it—and that yes, I SHOULD do it. I couldn’t have known how right she was! At the design stage, Taughnee was a wonderful listener—and in fact, the design is based on a page in one of my scrapbooks. She took the best parts of my design idea, and made the design better—adding great little touches here and there (like those adorable little vegetables), and even buying a special handwriting-style font that looks like my writing!

She used Expression Engine to build my blog, which is a really simple and intuitive program that she (very patiently) taught me how to use, so that I am able to do everything I need to do ON MY OWN. It’s such an incredibly empowering experience, as a fairly non-technical person, to be able to make my blog work—and work WELL, without headaches, frustrations, and anxiety. I can spend time on the fun stuff—the writing, photography, and recipe development, and the techie stuff hardly takes any time at all!

She designed a really fun Twitter page for me to promote the blog, then held my hand and applauded my efforts when I was learning how to use it. She set me up for RSS readers, and my blog can also be emailed to subscribers through FeedBurner.

She’s been fantastic support, too, in the very rare trouble times—for example, when I suddenly found myself getting rafts of nasty spam comments, she was on it in a flash, helping me delete them and putting BlackList and other safeguards on the site.

And here’s the kicker. She reads my blog, cooks the recipes, and thinks of other cool things to add that I never would have thought about! For example, she added the “print this recipe” function—of COURSE people want to be able to easily print a recipe!

I can’t recommend Taughnee highly enough. Working with her has been an incredibly valuable experience, not just because of the fantastic, functional, and beautiful blog she’s created for and WITH me, but also because it’s been so darn FUN. Taughnee took my vision, my dream, and my excitement, and created a warm, wonderful online home for my creativity beyond anything I could have invented on my own. Now, I just enjoy filling my little space with stories, recipes, and photographs.

Alison Arians

http://alisonslunch.com/

Anchorage, Alaska