Semi related to the theme shakeup is my new business card. My old ones had my name and my email, but they were kind of cute and made in a rush before WordCamp San Francisco 2012, where I was pushing to get a new job and needed them.
One of my personal rules about a business card is that the back should be writable. I always like to write on the back where I met someone. Like I have a card from Laura Legendary, and on the back it has a scribble of “WCLV’13 – accessibility – REDO SLIDES!” which tells me where I met her, what we talked about, and what a big take away was. My extant cards had a sketch (by me, not the awesome one by Ben Dunkle that I will treasure forever) and some basic information with my personal URL and my techy one. Oh and my email. Which resulted in a lot more email than I wanted at my personal account.
Bad call on my part. Then I read Bob’s post OMG! I Can’t Find Your Email on Your Business Card. He talks about how the times are changing and how if someone wanted to find him, they would Google “BobWP” and find him! So really all they need is his URL. This is true, and when I revisited what I wanted on a card, I thought “My name, my silly titles, a URL, and a ‘not available for contract work’ note.”
That last one was really important, since I’m just … not. I don’t like doing it, I don’t need to do it, and I won’t do it for most people. Now I know there are about five people going “But Mika, you do my website stuff!” Hey, there are exceptions. And the small group of people I do ‘consultant work’ for are part of why I don’t do more. I can’t and maintain my hobbies. Since I don’t need do, I don’t do it. But sometimes I do little tradsies. Like I did one for a friend recently who had a plugin break and she was lost. I knew what was wrong, walked her through fixing it, and she replied with an email a week later with the following design that just came to her:
The photo (which is also the background on the new design) is one I took this summer outside my gym of a palm tree. She said it was cheerful and welcoming and established me as being in a warm place. She lives in upstate NY where she already has feet of snow this year, so it may be related. Now unlike Bob, I do put my name there, and on the back are two icons (Twitter and WordPress) above a simple word “ipstenu” but nothing more (leaving massive amounts of white space for notes).
The one thing I left out was what I do. I mean, yes, I say “Half-Elf Support Rogue” and “DreamHost WordPress Guru” which should explain something, but the goal isn’t really to get more business, but to have a reply to those people who say “Have a card?” Maybe they’ll look at my site and buy an ebook, or whatever. But hey, now they know what’s up.
Comments
3 responses to “No Contact Information”
I need to do that! No email address is an excellent idea.
@Ryan Hellyer: I figure that since I’m not available for hire, why do you need my email? The contact form on this site goes to a special email box too 🙂
@Ipstenu (Mika Epstein): I have new cards on their way as I type this 🙂 They’ll be ready in time for me to dish out at WordCamp Norway.