Blog · Field Notes
Week Two: Five Proposals, a Sponsorship, and a Storybook Cafe
Five proposals went out this week, LFW sponsored its first event, and the site changed 15 times. A short record of week two.
Every Friday I write down what LFW actually did that week. Last week was the first one.
This is week two.
Five proposals
Five went out this week:
- A public health district in Georgia
- A county children's commission in California
- A public university system in Oklahoma
- A business association in Kentucky
- A regional transportation agency in California
I can't name them while they are deciding.
Two went by email, two through upload portals, and one by overnight mail in a sealed envelope.
And yes, for that one a sealed bid by mail was required. No fax, no PDF upload. A few more are due by mail in October.
Every one says plainly that LFW is new and does not have a list of past government clients. What it does have is my own record.
Our first sponsorship
LFW is a sponsor of WordPress Accessibility Day, a free online event on October 7 and 8, organized by volunteers, about building WordPress sites everyone can use.
It was an easy choice. Accessibility is part of every site we build and run, and the event is free to attend. Register here.
Follow LFW
To promote WordPress Accessibility Day, LFW needed somewhere to post about it, which was a good excuse to finally sign up for X and Facebook, both as @lfwdotcom.
They join the LinkedIn page LFW already had.
Follow along on your preferred platforms.
The Storybook Cafe
On Thursday the WeWork in Rosslyn turned a common area into a Storybook Cafe, with drinks and treats from books like Harry Potter.
I had a muffin. As far as I can tell, it was not a Horcrux.
The LFW Golden Ticket
On Friday I had lunch at Ted's Bulletin with a potential teaming partner. The lunch was redeemed with the fabled LFW Golden Ticket, good for one free meal.
If you are a potential client or teaming partner, don't be surprised if one turns up in your inbox, for a restaurant convenient to you in downtown DC or Arlington.
What changed on LFW.com
Two changes worth a closer look. Everything else is on the changelog, which has 15 entries from this week.
LFW Experiments is live
LFW Experiments went live on LFW.com on Sunday. Half of first-time visitors see "Request a quote" on the homepage and half see "Run the free audit."
The split happens at Cloudflare's edge before the page reaches the browser, so nobody sees the page swap one button for the other. Visitors whose browsers send a privacy signal are left out entirely.
So far 71 first-time visitors have been split between the two, 40 and 31. Nobody has clicked either button yet. That is far too few to call a winner, and the dashboard says so.
Monitor checks uptime every minute
Monitor now checks uptime every minute, once from Cloudflare's network and once from LFW's own server, so an outage is caught even when one of them is what went down.
A request for proposals asked for 99.9 percent uptime and a monthly uptime report, so I built that feature in. LFW.com is the first site on it.
Next week
More proposals, including one that goes by mail, and more tinkering.
If you know an organization whose website has nobody looking after it, I would be grateful for the introduction.