Interfaith Quilters quilt show in Longmont on Saturday

From left: Donna Parsons, Karan Michael and Luanne Ross pose in front of the "Harmony in Blue" quilt Friday morning during setup for the 31st annual Interfaith Quilters quilt show at First Evangelical Lutheran Church, 803 Third Ave.

The 99 patches for "Harmony in Blue" were created by individual members of Interfaith and is one of approximately 725 quilts for sale. Last year's sale raised $34,000 for the OUR Center and Safe Shelter of St. Vrain Valley.

"We really appreciate the community support, big time," said Michael, Interfaith's vice president.

The sale runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.

Small business planning

Small business planning

Some people aspiring to start or get into a small business, especially those with available equity, often take proper business planning for granted. A proper business plan is typically required when applying for a business loan, but some people who do not need to apply for such loans may also tend to forget about the business plan, often to their detriment.

Take the case of Elsa whose eldest daughter Terrie was graduating from college. Like any good parent, Elsa was planning to give her daughter a good career start, and she thought getting her to manage her own business was the way to go. Problem was Elsa never had a background in business herself, so she did not really know where or how to start.

Elsa’s sister Brenda, on the other hand, married a local businessman and it just so happened that they had a small internet and arcade gaming business that they no longer had time to manage; or so they said. So they approached Elsa and suggested that it may be a good idea for her to purchase the business from them, with the eventual goal of getting Terrie to manage it after she graduates.

Waffle of the month

Waffle of the month

Some of our more regular and observant visitors might wonder what the WOTM category is all about. It actually stands for “waffle of the month”, and it’s the license we give ourselves to go a bit off-topic every once in a while. We did promise in our very first post that we’ll “keep the waffling to a minimum”, so readers can expect the waffling to just only be once a month.
Joining Twitter

We joined twitter last month. We joined merely because everybody seems to be talking about it, but over a month on, we’re still not quite sure how to use it most effectively. Our preliminary conclusion is twitter – social media in general, in fact – can potentially be a great business tool, but it may not be for everyone.

So while twitter can and should be included in marketing mix considerations, we probably won’t lose too much sleep if we can’t make it fit into our model. A possible folly is for people to just latch on to it because it seems to be what people are talking about these days and lose a lot of resources just getting it to work right for them.
Playing with site look and feel

We are still constantly playing with the look and feel of the site. We added, and then removed, a tags widget on the left sidebar as it looked too cluttered for our taste. We added Clustrmaps at the bottom of the right sidebar, mainly to give us a (free) indication of where our visitors are coming from. We did not expect visits from China and India to be so high, at least relative to the rest of the world; but thinking about it now, it probably makes sense just with their sheer volume of internet users.