Working from Home with MCS

What do you do when you can’t work in a “traditional” work environment? If you’ve made your home a safe environment – and if you haven’t you better work on it – you work from home. Simple right?

Not so simple. Especially if you are self-employed and must rely on finding new clients on your own, but not in person. And that’s assuming you’ve figured out what it is you’re going to do for a living while working from home.

After I developed Chemical Intolerance from the sick building I had worked in for twelve years, I didn’t know what I was going to do. My job had been specifically dealing with the public. I had another interests and skills though, computers, web design, photography to name a few. I think a lot of you might work from home as well. I see from your Facebook profiles that many are creative by nature and you are building on that strength to make a living with writing blogs, creating crafts.

The degree to which MCS affects a person dictates your abilities in life in general, but especially in gainful employment. Some who follow my blog are possibly on Disability, some are thinking about it now because it can be so difficult to make a living when you are either in the throes of a headache from exposure from going to the store or the exhaustion after the fact.

So I wanted to start sharing what we all do and how we survive. I want to pass along some tips and insight for anyone who is forced to change careers and find something productive to do from home. I am a web designer and want to pass along information that I’ve learned that might be helpful for anyone who is new to creating a website to promote their products, writing or services.

The first thing I would suggest is to use WordPress. It is very user-friendly so you can make changes yourself and manage your own blog.

Don’t ever buy your domain name through your hosting if it’s a name you’ll want to keep. Buy the domain name directly from a registrar (like Godaddy) so you have total control over it. I’ve had experience with that mistake early on, where I wanted to move my website away from a particular hosting company, through which I obtained my “free” domain name and it was like pulling teeth to get that domain away from them!

If you are working online, writing blogs or using social media you need photos to enhance your story or your issue. It really lends to the page aesthetically. As a photographer I’ll warn you – we don’t like it when you “use” our photos we’ve put up on our websites. You can easily find public domain photos for just about any purpose you can imagine. You can even find photos with people in them like the one on this page. Here’s a list of websites that offer absolutely free images you can use for commercial use, graphic designs and blogs:

Public Domain Images from a funny named site gaderinge.com, but the photos are hi-resolution professional photos. I created and manage this website, so if any of you are photographers and would like your photo in the public domain with a link to your site, please message me.

Wikimedia – A great listing of public domain resources.

morguefile.com – They’ve been around for a long time. But be sure to check their photo use restrictions.

Technically anything in the public domain does not have any use restrictions or requirements, that is what Creative Commons license are for. So be sure to check if the image is actually “public domain.”

I hope this helps anyone searching to spice up their blogs or websites. And I would love to hear what you do from home, please share it on the MCSAwareness Facebook page with others!

~Laura