Call out to Chicago Area moms

This is what we posted on another site as a call out to all members who live in the Chicago area.

"We are two moms from Park Ridge who just launched a very cool website, http://www.kidwinks.com/.

Kidwinks is a site that helps moms with young kids find kid-friendly activities, events, restaurants (including a kids-eat-free calendar!), shops and services. It is free for all to use, and you can read more about it by clicking on the About Us link at the bottom of our home page. Twice a week we send out an e-newsletter with links to area kid-friendly events. We include library and park district offerings, festivals, museum free days, kids-eat-free specials at restaurants, etc. This e-newsletter has been VERY positively received by moms who love having us do the research on "What am I going to do with my kid(s) today?" for them. The e-newsletter is also free, and is sent only to those who request it.

If you live in Chicago or the Suburbs of Chicago, please check us out. http://www.kidwinks.com/.

If you are looking for things to do with your Chicago kids, check us out.

Well, we made it into the Park Ridge Spokesman, the city's, newsletter. Here it is "Parents' lives made easier - The place to go with kids in tow...Park Ridge moms, Nina Taluc and Jean Lemke, have created a new business to make a parent's life easier. At http://www.kidwinks.com/, kid friendly activities, services, shops, restaurants, and resources are featured. A twice-weekly newsletter by email is also produced to bring parent up-to-date information." I hope this will encourage parents to go to http://www.kidwinks.com/ when they are looking for child friendly activities, kids eat free restaurants, family fun in Chicago and the surounding area, and Chicago kid events and Chicago for kids activities. So if you are looking for kids activities in Chicagoland take a look at kidwinks.com

We are finally live!!! If you or anyone you know is looking for family fun in the Chicago area then this is the site for you. If you wonder, what is in Chicago for kids? Or, if a friend says, "I have Chicago kids but we just can't find anything to do" tell them about www.kidwinks.com.

Something has changed!

I have been busy working on kidwinks.com. Our web developers sent us the most recent beta site last week. As usual, there were over 100 problems with the site. Links that go nowhere, run time errors, missing functionality and a huge number of other problems. This has been the way it has gone for 9 months. The only difference this time, is that they seem like they really want to fix the problems and do the work, quickly. We found out that the programmer who was creating our site didn't know what he was doing and has since been fired. Our project manager seems to be treating us as a client again as opposed to an open wound that won't go away. We may have a live site in the next month or two. I hate to be too optimistic. We have been told since May that we should be live next month, next month, next month...... We have another meeting tomorrow, we will see how that goes.

Birthing Gerbils

Our gerbil had babies last week. January 13, 2008 the same birthday as our cat (we had a party for the cat). Why is so easy for the gerbils to give birth to something and so hard for kidwinks.com. The gerbils, Sunny and Rocket weren't supposed to have babies. When we bought them they were supposed to be sisters. They were pretty young when we got them. They shared the same cage so they could hangout and play with each other. One day I noticed that Sunny was much larger than her sister Rocket. A couple of days later my sons came running upstairs yelling that Sunny had a baby. We instantly separated Rocket from mom and baby. Now I have two cages to clean. The baby didn't make it. Sunny was too young still when she had him. So you ask, if they are in two cages how could she get pregnant again? I wish they could fix rodents. When we take them out of the cage to play we let them run around together. We had to pull Rocket off of Sunny a lot but I thought we were on top of it. Seems we were a little too slow. So a couple of weeks ago I noticed that she was looking big again. She also started chewing everything and anything. Non stop chewing. She was getting ready to have her babies. That is what we are doing too. I think that the website is in labor. I am quickly trying to get everything ready for the delivery but I feel a bit overwhelmed. And like when I was going to have my children the hardest part was not knowing exactly when it was going to happen. One would think that giving birth to website would be more like having a cesarean. But it's not! This time it is the web developer who is in charge not the baby. Which is worse?

We still haven't seen the babies but we have heard them. Mom is keeping them undercover. I can't wait to see them.

SCORE Meeting

Yesterday we meet with the Des Plaines Chapter of SCORE "Counselors to America's Small Business". They are retired business executives who provide advice to start ups and small businesses. We talked to two men, Gene and Don. We presented our business idea and let them know where we are in the process. They liked our idea a LOT which is great they also gave us a couple of great ideas. One, to have a brochure and poster created by a professional. I have always thought that we needed to hire someone to help us create our marketing material. However, it was good for Jean to hear someone else say the same thing. Two, contact libraries and park districts first. Once we have the big guys on board with the website the smaller business will be more willing to follow.

Web Designer

We have a great website idea, we have a cool name now we needed to find someone to design the site for us. We considered designing it ourselves but thought it would take too long and we wanted it to look GREAT. First we tried people who we knew who designed websites. We sat down and talked to a couple of them. The plan was they would create the website in their spare time. We quickly realized that 1) they would not be able to get the site done quick enough and 2) it was too complicated for them to create. We then meet with two web developing firms. That is what there business was, designing websites. The first had been recommended to me by a friend. They had created a great site for a not-for-profit that she worked with and had only good things to say about the company. The second company was local which would make it easy to meet and they ran a lot of ads on the radio. We talked, we emailed our ideas, we meet with both companies, we emailed some more and some more. Finally we had made our decision. They had great ideas, it was a smaller company, we like the person we were dealing with. They were a little far away....all the way in Chicago, but that would be okay too. We liked the other company too or should I say that we liked the sales person we were dealing with. The reason we chose not to go with them was that their price was a little higher, we were not going to get as much, we feared that they would start to nickle and dime us for every little thing, we thought that our sales person was just that, a sales person and would be disinterested once the contract was signed. We were happy with our decision. They told us it would be two months before they could start on our project but that once they started it would only take 3 months to complete. We were fine with that. Were we excited and started to plan accordingly.