This is it. The final day of our little experiment is finally here. Thank goodness — this has been wearing us out. Day jobs, life, and a home-based business make for an extra full plate.

How did we do? Well, I’m writing this instead of a resignation letter, if that tells you anything. :-) Obviously, it was not as successful as we could have hoped for. But, I would hardly call it a failure. We do have one client, as well as several leads. We are actively advertising our business, practicing our art, learning new skills, and generating word-of-mouth. We have started new projects, abandoned others, and are still considering many more.

In other words, we are doing. That is something we were not doing before. It may slow down for a bit, as we catch our breaths and regroup, but it will not stop. As far as I am concerned, Smart Goat is my career, my other employment is just a job. I can keep that job, or not — and that’s exactly the position I want to be in.

I wrote another article for the OKCPCUG’s eMonitor. This article, which builds on my first article, provides a general starting point for those wanting to convert their existing web site to XHTML and CSS. By writing these articles, I hope th establish myself as the “web standards expert” for this area. I don’t know if that will translate into jobs, but it can’t hurt.

Billy and I did some more work on AdGoat.com today. Billy is working on making the template use CSS positioning, and I did some more work on the logo and categories.

While we were garage-saling today, a lady happened to mention she was considering listing her table for sale on eBay. When I glanced up, she asked if we were familiar with eBay. As we conversed, I mentioned the new Ad Goat site. She seemed interested in it, and we left a business card telling her the site would be ready soon. We really need to get this thing done! (Or else I need to keep my mouth shut…)

I did some more cleaning up tasks on Ad Goat, Oklahoma’s Online Classified Ads site, one of which was incorporating Billy’s logo into a header that says Ad Goat is Oklahoma’s Online Classified Ads site. We also dropped off the coupons with the race coordinators today. The race is June 7th. Nothing like a deadline to motivate a person!

In other news, Billy started work again on Crafty Goat’s beta. And we heard from Clemency, who said they will be giving us more work soon. We are eager for that!

To kick off the launch of our new site — and to force us to get it ready quickly — we made Ad Goat coupons that will be distributed to runners at the Chisholm Trail 5K here in Yukon. A little advertising never hurt anyone, and it will hopefully bring a flood of ads onto the site.

I’m very happy with the logo — it looks nice, and it integrates nicely with our existing branding. And, when you think about the goat reading the newspaper while sitting on the toilet, it makes you giggle like a 12-year-old. Now that’s marketing.

The name servers have propagated, and Ad Goat, still in beta, is now available at its own domain. May it thrive and prosper there.

Angela has been hard at work on the ad site, fixing some things, like the forgotten password e-mail. Things are shaping up for an early June launch.

We contacted one of our Marketing Tool leads and received an official rejection. They decided to go with a company closer to their location. Oh well — there’s other fish in the sea, or some such cliche.

Perseverence is important. You know, when life gives you lemons, and all that. We were unable to get the domain name we backordered for the classified ads site. Perhaps, however, it was for the best, because it forced us to look for another name. We realized it was probably best if this site reflected the same branding as the rest of our websites. So, today we registered adgoat.com, the newest member of the Smart Goat family. Name servers are still populating, but you can view it in its temporary home. It’s not ready to be formally announced, but it is getting there.

Work continues on the ads site. Stay tuned.

We received another lead from Marketing Tool. We quickly contacted the person to demonstrate our eagerness to work with them. Just as quickly, they responded that they were going to give their old web designer a second chance. Sigh. Such is the life of those just getting started.

Work continues on the classified ads site. Check it out, if you don’t believe me.

Angela followed up with dmoz about getting Crafty Goat’s entry corrected. Still waiting to hear on that.

Angela has been busy today — she’s been working on the new ads site and on new products for Crafty Goat. We’ll post pictures of the new items when we get a chance.