I just did it again — I’m doing some major structural changes to a site and I forgot to take screenshots of the original before I started breaking it down. It’s the second time in 2 weeks!

Why is this important, you may ask? It’s simple: Your current work is the best source you have for new work. How am I going to talk about the different versions or things I did to certain sites if I don’t have the screenshots of the earlier versions? You’d think I would have learned my lesson after I kicked myself over this last week, but no … I went and did it again. I realized I should have taken version screenshots of Rockstar Wedding Planner LIVE while I was rebuilding my portfolio on this site, and today I sat here adding some great new features to Cherry Tree Occasions without taking a screenshot of the existing site before I started.

Your take-home lesson for today: Remember to take lots of pictures. It doesn’t matter what industry you do, or what your product is, it is better to have too many pictures than to realize you have none. If you work with digital files, take screenshots. If you are a wedding planner, take pictures of the wedding. If you do teleseminars, save all the recordings of your calls. Don’t just save the final product, too — save the process, take notes of what happened, and gather testimonials about the event/product. The work you do today (and the people you work with) will always be your best source of future work, so don’t forget to beef up your portfolio and talk about your projects at every chance you get!

P.S. Thank you for the magic that is TextWrangler because I used about 700 undos to get the site back to the original on 4 files, saved as a backup version copy, used that for a screenshot, and then put the new version up again.