Christoph ZillgensBack to Home

I’m not in the mood of writing at the moment. Sad things happend at the very first day of the year and they don’t seem to turn out well. Thinking about the Web, design and any other business related stuff feels so wrong now. But on the other hand it might be good to fill the empty brain with some positive stuff and to look forward. Well, time to move on, find my way back to everyday life and forget the sorrow—at least for now. So, here comes my review and outlook.

2009 review

The year 2009 passed by really fast. It was my first year of beeing self-employed. I founded a little one-man-company back in January after working a few years in a Full-Service Design Agency. The start went well, but in the middle of the year I felt the problems of the financial crisis, as some projects couldn’t be started. The end of the years was full of work again and so is the beginning of 2010.

Goals for 2010

I think it’s important to define some short-term and some long-term goals for yourself about what you want to achieve in the future. Of course we all want to earn money, but this is no real goal but more a necessity. Goals are important to make sure you are moving in the right direction and it is always motivating to reach a specific goal.

For me it is also important to make my goals (at least the business goals) public, so that I feel somehow forced to try to achieve them or at least to take them more seriously.

1. Grow the business

   Of course, this is every business man’s goal. But for me this means—besides earnig more money—to try to get more and more job offers so that I can select the ones that are best for me and my portfolio.

2. Redesign my business site

   I designed my current business website zillgensdesign.de within a few days after many false attempts. It fullfilled its needs during the first months but I think it is not reflecting me, my business and my clients in the way I want it to be. I also want to attach an english version to my site.

3. Improve networking

   I don’t like the term “networking”. Perhaps this is due to fact that I’m not good at it. I’m often too shy to talk to people I don’t know and I also have to spread the word about my business a bit more.

4. Meet (more) real people

   Working from home has the disadvantage of feeling alone sometimes. To outweigh this I attended a few conferences last year where I met some really amazing people. This is refreshing and I hope to meet those guys again in 2010 and do more travelling, too.

5. Focus more on blogging

   Well, this is a bigger part as it includes many single steps like improving my branding, realign the design, focus on high quality content, write better english and so on. I only have a few visitors on my blog at the moment, since I just started back in November. I’m excited about how this evolves during the year. I also joined project52 to force myself to write on a regular basis.

So, that’s it, for the moment.

Update May ’10

I took a long break since January 2010 and one of the things I failed at already is project52. But as others pointed out, I want to write when I like to and not neccessarily every week.