Bummer, artnerd and Del. It's always hard for me at first to appreciate what we call around our house "Another Learning Experience"!
Elizabeth, I found out about graduation 12/10, but didn't get paperwork until 12/14. Got it all in the mail early the next week, which was right before Christmas. So I did prep over three weeks beginning right before Thanksgiving. The holiday timing has made it very difficult to get permission to use images and so forth. I have 15 categories, at least five subcats in each and at least one piece of content in each subcat. Actually, I'm almost to those numbers, which are the go-live minimum goal. Plus I need to keep up the blog, which will make the site seem fresh when it does go live.
I guess no one here would be surprised to know all my Christmas decorations are still up, including four trees. Oops.
One About prep tip: The blog is the fun part, and I found that planning the blog around my content was the most efficient use of my time. So, when I had a post about holiday shopping tips I was able to bounce off a story about a woman getting robbed and shot in a mall parking lot with the following: my own content/link about how to get crime stats for your neighborhood or destination, an About site on walking at night and keeping safe, my local holiday gift guide and the local paper's story about the incident. Because the prep guide says three links per blog post are great, and because my content was so lean in the beginning (and still, really) I always trolled the about sites for good links to build into my posts.
Kim