A Review of 2022 for Ready Steady Websites®

Well, what a year 2022 has been for us. We have had some big highs professionally and some very low lows personally so let’s look back over Ready Steady Websites® year.

Our Professional Highs

Towards the beginning of the year we started writing our book. We had talked about doing this many times before but this time we actually took the plunge and not only did we start writing it but we got it all written, Chris designed the cover, we asked the lovely Dr Jennifer Jones to edit it for us and we launched The Website Handbook before the end of April. It really does show what you can do in a short space of time if you put your mind to it! So if there’s something you keep putting off, maybe 2023 will be the year for you to get it done.

Once we launched The Website Handbook we were approached by a tutor for the Institute for Optimum Nutrition because they wanted to include our book in their course list for nutritional therapists to help them get ready to set themselves up in business once they were qualified. This was really exciting and also proof that you never know who’s reading your emails. The tutor had been on our email list for a couple of years and when she saw us talking about our book she got in touch. So if you’re doubting whether it’s worth sending it out regular emails, it is! Or if you’re putting of building your email list, do it!

This year we also created a Futurenauts website. This may mean nothing to some of you but if you’re a fan of the comedian Jon Richardson and his podcast, Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts you will be familiar with Mark Stevenson and his amazingly intelligent insights and amusing anecdotes. Well, we were proud to create his website for him this year using one of our website templates to showcase all of his work – he’s not just on the podcast.

Hay House officially endorsed us publicly towards the end of the year which is still very exciting and we know we only wrote a blog post about it recently but we had to mention it again!

We have developed some fantastic collaborations and business friendships over the last year and made new business friendships. We can’t mention them all and I don’t want to miss anyone out but The Humble Penny, Yellow Tuxedo, Katie Tovey-Grindlay, Speaking Business, Gwen Warren, Kate Llewellyn, Sophie Bashford, Trudy Simmons and her community, Hampshire Women’s Business Group, ONLE and many more have been an amazing support this year and we really appreciate it.

Towards the end of the year we started running monthly workshops which have gone down really well and have helped us build our website mentoring membership which we absolutely love running. Running these workshops has shown us that we can get over 100 people signed up for a workshop without using ads and that they really are the right people for us. We still think ads have their place but organic leads are worth working for.

We have had our best financial year in business yet. Now it isn’t all about the money, one of the key things for us about running our own business is to have freedom and to be able to work to our own values but we also run a business to make money and every year since launching Ready Steady Websites® our business has grown and we are especially proud of that this year considering the personal lows we had over the summer.

Our Personal Lows

If you’ve been following us for a few months you’ll know that we lost Jude’s Dad suddenly in May and then five weeks later, on the day if his funeral we lost one of Jude’s close friends. This meant we only did what we really needed to in the business and not much more than that and it was a horrible time.

Coming Out the Other Side

But once we came out of the worst of it, what we realised afterwards was that we had achieved one of our business goals and that we had actually achieved it a while ago but hadn’t take time to appreciate it. When things go wrong sometimes you notice and appreciate the good things more. We have created a business that has a semi passive, recurring income model so when we can’t be full on with marketing and getting new clients in, we still have a good level of income.

Final Reflection for 2022 of Ready Steady Websites®

Now we are at the end of the year we are feeling positive. We have achieved a lot more than we thought we would at the end of May when we felt there wasn’t any point in carrying on for a while but we had the right people around us, wonderful clients and members sending us lovely messages and emails, which we really appreciated. Thank you to those people.

Thank you to you for supporting us by reading our posts. Even if this is the first one you’ve read, every visitor to out website helps. Now it’s time to look towards 2023 and plan for another fantastic year.

We will leave you with our Christmas video for the year. It’s very silly, it pushes our musical ability and will hopefully make you smile!