Sitting up at 1am my husband asks “Kristine, what are you doing?” My response is usually simple: “Emailing”.

People don’t really look at email as taking up much time. Email was supposed to make things easier, right? Today, while looking through sent messages looking for a specific email I realized just how much time I spend emailing! I thought this was interesting and would like to share my find with my readers and clients. I think we can firmly stick this one into the hidden value of my web design services. Unlike a lot of businesses, I have always offered free support and try my best to answer emails and help clients with learning their site or simply making sure the design process and site vision are are on track. All of this adds up and I just thought I’d share a few numbers.

4-8. The average number of emails sent back and forth during the quote process.
30-60. The average emails that are sent from me to clients as part of back and forth during the design process on small projects.
100-130+. The number of emails I’ve sent out to clients on average on larger projects.

And when I say that I mean that range would be one person! So during the design time frame when I take on 4 projects at a time I could easily sent out 400 or more emails to the 4 clients. The design time frame is 6-8 weeks. Some emails are quick, 4 minutes to write. Others take more research, 30-40 minutes. Lets say the average is 10 minutes per email. That’s roughly 67 hours of email time, or 10 hours per week and this is a LOW estimate not including the quote process.

Email! I never thought it would be so time consuming! So there you have it. This is the reason my husband finds me up in the middle of the night working, wondering what I could possibly be doing.

So when considering the value of my web design services, here is a hidden value that you are getting when you work with Web Savvy Mama. The one on one attention from me when I am making sure there is good communication and that you fully understand how your site functions.

By the way, check out Thunderbird email client. Tabbed email, filtering, sorting and all your email accounts readable right in one inbox. I love all the features and it does help me save some time!

Recently I’ve been having all kinds of issues with my PC. Its incredibly unstable. So I started making plans earlier this year to transfer everything to a new computer. The part that was really keeping me from going ahead with it was that I’m dependent on my old emails. If you are like me you have thousands of emails that you use as references for projects and clients. Its your backup to the paper files and doc files. I’ve had clients come to me saying their computer crashed and they lost all their emails, panic sets in.

I realize I need to learn to backup my email files and learn to transfer them to another computer if necessary. I found many tutorials but they were kind of confusing. If you’ve followed my previous advice, you’re using Thunderbird email and Firefox browser. If you’re not, go get them now! They are free and easy to use, much better than Outlook and Internet Explorer.

I found this tutorial and used it to start the process, I’ll translate it to easy to understand directions. While I was at it I figure I may as well backup my Firefox as well so I didn’t have to re-bookmark everything.

Step one: Clean out your emails! Trust me, you’ll be kicking yourself later if you skip this step and are waiting on the large file download. Empty your trash and remove any emails you don’t need. For me this was something like 4,000 emails!

Step two: Locate your Applications Data folder. It is a hidden folder so the easiest way to do this is to got to Start>run> and type %APPDATA% (Click ok)

Step three: Locate the “Mozilla” (FireFox) and “Thunderbird” folders depending on which one you want to backup. Copy these folders in their entirety and paste to a portable device you want to backup on. This could be a CD, USB drive or an External Drive.

Thats it, you have a backup of your emails and browser links! To install these if you loose your information just find the Applications Data folder again and use your backup to overwrite the files. (Copy and Paste and click “yes to all” when prompted) You can use this as a backup on your current computer or a new computer, as in my case. Either way, its a good idea to make backups every once in awhile to ensure you don’t lose your important information!

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