Welcome to September, and thanks for stopping by. Below is a summary of what I got up to in August.
Work-Life
August has been a pretty busy month, launching 1 new website, and working on a lot of existing websites in terms of design updates, new development pieces etc. Below is some of the more notable achievements:
Produced and *starred* (ha!) in a promotional video for Merlin Frame Maker
I’ve long been encouraging more usage of video across my clients, and recently managed to organise and shoot a simple promotional video for Merlin Frame Maker. Pretty happy with the results given we effectively built a very simple storyboard and shot everything in about 4 hours. Given there is no spoken word, it makes the shooting a lot easier, and thanks to Vinay Busi for his excellent camera work as usual.
Let me know what you think of the final version here:
FrameIT continued strongly, but then fell away at the end of the month
July was a really strong month for FrameIT, showing 174% growth vs. June, so I didn’t expect August to get close to this. As it happened, for the majority of the month, August was up vs. July and it seemed like we’d at least match our best month ever in terms of revenue. Alas, all of a sudden, orders just completely dried up in the last 6 days of the month and we slipped to a 10% decline vs. July.
I’ve done the usual investigations to check there is no loss of search visibility or issues on the website, but I can’t find anything untoward, so I just have to assume its a bit of a slow period, which has kind of continued into early September, but there has been some orders flowing back through at least.
We did also manage to make a small update, tweaking the homepage to introduce a ‘# of frames crafted’ message, and generally bringing everything up the fold a bit more.
Finally launched phase 1 of Digital Pathways website
Been working on this one on & off for many months, but finally managed to get the initial website live. There is a few bits left that needing plugging [images, content updates, internal links] but decided that we’ll close these remaining parts down ‘on the fly’ in a live environment. You can check out the work in progress site here: Digital Pathways website.
Investment Life
August was a bit of a mixed bag and early September wiped away a lot of my gains. I a shuffled a few things around in July/early August, most notably:
- Sold off Boeing & Airbus to release cash for other purchases. Took small losses here. I still believe the long term opportunity is there for both these companies given the COVID-19 situation, but I can
- Sold off partial shares in Alphabet to bank some profit [20%].
- Sold off Etsy & Mercado Libre at a loss to cut the bleeding.
- Sold off Pinterest to bank profit before any further slides. Will buy-back in later.
- Bought more shares in Crowdstrike, Fastly as their prices dropped. I’m still now in red, but it’s ok.
- Bought shares in Tesla, Apple as they were sliding. I expect to be in the red soon though.
I think September is going to see some fairly significant drops/losses, but I’ll be holding the majority of what I have now, and topping up during the dips in some places.
