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Clients: things you need for a site launch
The following is a general list of questions that can be updated towards what client’s need to do to help people launch their site on time and without any problems.
Decisions need to be made well in advance when it comes to launching a site, and this article covers just some of the most important things to consider when it comes to getting your new site online. These aren’t things to leave until the last possible minute, and should all be dealt with well in advance to launch.
Content
Are you going to re-write it? Are you going to use the same stuff with some problems? Are you wanting us to arrange a content writer for you?
Audio
Have you got all your audio files ready in the correct format to be put into the CMS? Are they on the online web service you’re going to be using to host them ready?
Video
Do you know how to get video off your CD’s and DVD’s stored? Or anywhere else for that matter? Do you know what format they need to be in? What codec to use? Do you know how to convert this format into the one you need everything to be in?
Images
Are you going to be using a web service such as Flickr? Or the CMS provided? What size do they need to be in? Do they need resizing? Or are you going to use the originals? Do they need watermarking?
Training
When will you be trained? What on? For how long? Who needs to be there? Do the people doing the training really need to be coming back several times? Or can you get all done at once? Will it cost you less if this is the case?
Contacts
If there’s more than one source for the requirements going into a project, then there needs to be a sharing of all these sources between the companies involved.
These can include, but are not limited to: accounting, hosting contacts, IT contacts, domain name registrars, designers, developers and directors.
The timeline
Make sure your timeline includes strictly set deadlines that aren’t slipped. When will you have your contacts ready? When will you have a training deadline set? Your images ready? Videos? Audio? Content for this section? That section? The other section?
Make sure they are realistic and not rushed, when deadlines are rushed they are often missed. If the staff are managing other things at the same time then they need the time to do that, not be forced to make decisions about other things too.
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Quick notes about sending job applications
About 90-95% of applicants to job applications I post up elsewhere find my blog somehow and compliment me on it in the opening paragraph of their e-mail. Given this I thought I’d throw some nugget-sized wisdom bombs in front of the eager young eyes of those applicants so they can better their application, or not bother at all.
- If it says full-time please for the love of god don’t apply thinking it’s a freelance position. It just isn’t, ‘full-time’ and ‘freelance’ are two entirely different job types.
- No, you can’t apply for the full-time position, waste an hour of my time talking to me and then say “so here’s the thing… I work with three others guys in…” - stop - your a company already. Next.
- The same goes for ‘White Label’ services. Go away.
- Applying because you like Rolled’s (or my) sense of humour? Show some of your own, it knocks you up the queue significantly. If you are going to talk like a robot, attach a video of you dancing like one to up the comedy level and recover that dreaded generic application from the dead pile.
- Adding to the point above, show some personality. It’s very clear when you are using a template you’ve pre-prepared or slightly editing one.
- Address the actual job, If I say I want x and x from a Wordpress Developer, please tell me if you can do any of those x’s. It’s almost the point of the e-mail, the introduction and background paragraph’s are meaningless unless a paragraph addressing the job and your talent to do x and x appears. If you can do x and x extra that’s brilliant, but address the original issues.
- “I’d like £65 an hour and I can work 9-5, I’m just out of University and have done some work for a company in London”. Use some common sense with your rates, especially if you are straight out of University or College with little experience.
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A quick note on the CV
Out of the past 20-30 designers I’ve received CV’s from only one has been designed well enough for me to get a good impression of the designer, and it wasn’t created in Word. It was two pages and contained links to his recent work, some thumbnails and was fully branded.
It didn’t contain: his education background as far back as when he attended Nursery, his grades breakdown and ten pages of reading material padded out with lots of stretched truth to do with what they did at their last job. Example:
McDonalds - Senior Beef technician
Lead a team of three people processing and preparing beef for use in gourmet food ate by thousands daily. Designed a unique technique of packaging that is used for top customers to this day.Translation
Was in a team of four saying nothing, doing nothing but unpacking pre-shaped burger meat and passing it down the queue. Figured that spitting just underneath the cheese in annoying customers burgers before packing them could never be found, and that tip is now passed down through remaining staff to new staff to this day.Essentially:
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Stop blabbing on, don’t send 100 URL’s with no explanation but send four or five latest pieces of work with explanations for each. Realistically I don’t have ten minutes for each applicant, so if your e-mail or application contains more than a minute or two of reading then it’s not going to get read. -
Why learning web development at college is good for you
I constantly hear people complaining that they aren’t getting what they want out of college, that they can do it alone and that they don’t want to be taught ‘behind the times’ ASP and that their college needs to be brought into the ‘current day teaching techniques’ - so here’s why I think all that is a load of crap.
With your teacher(s), you will more than likely deal with the hardest client you’ll ever have
With my first web development project at college we had to develop a random concept web site into XHTML/CSS. I submitted a div tag/CSS layout and was promptly asked where I took the code from and why I was trying to cheat in my college class. To which I explained that I had been developing outside of college for some time prior to joining the course, which wasn’t met by believing eyes.
You see this type of interaction with a teacher is what teaches you the fundamentals of dealing with bad clients, bad contractors and bad customers. Do you blow your lid and call the teacher a fool? Or do you politely explain you’ve got x years experience playing with sites beforehand?
If the teacher has past experience running their own company or doing client projects then they’ll be even further of a problem to you. They’ll teach you how old fashioned some clients can be by being old fashioned themselves - why aren’t you using tables? Does this validate to HTML 4.0 standards? Why aren’t you including food costs in your client billing breakdown?
Learning ASP isn’t all that bad, especially if you are in it for the money
There’s more money in ASP and there’s more real jobs available. The type where you sit in a company and develop all day long. The language teaches you structure, and gives you a first hand view of what it is like on the other side of the fence should you be a PHP/Ruby on Rails type of guy. Why is it a bad thing to be able to start a PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument with ‘well I’ve worked with ASP before, and…’?
If you’re good, you’ll learn to teach
I spent a lot of my time helping out my friends with problems at college, my grades suffered but at the end of the day but I gained a good knowledge of what it is like to teach. Today this is applied to how I can teach clients about how Rolled’s process works, how we teach them Wordpress or basic XHTML for post formatting in their CMS.
At the end of the day I finished basic tasks in less than a minute, and spent the rest of the hour helping people out and learning from it - just because you’re finished with something doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to do.
Presenting
I was useless at presenting when I first started on my college course, a nervous wreck when standing in front of the class. If your course includes presenting and you’re asking why - I honestly don’t know what you’re thinking.
The talent of being able to react to an incredibly tricky question from a teacher in front of 10-20 people and not look like an idiot is something of a secret that you can take to your grave. Putting passion into something you have no passion about when presenting is also another talent that few have, especially when it’s all put together the night before at 4am after getting in from a night out.
It teaches you how to place graphics, what fonts work and what don’t, how to present one idea but how to present another - and at the end of the day, it’s practice for pitching if you are to be in that position later on in life.
In conclusion
Stop whinging - stay in college and get your degree/diploma. College can teach you many things you wouldn’t learn outside of the boundaries until it’s too late. Do you want to present to a client having never done it before? Deal with a bad client for the first time on your newly acquired project? Have work go entirely dry and not have those Junior ASP programmer positions to apply to? Lose every PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument because you have no facts to use to back up your side of things?
At the end of the day it’s college, it’s not an experience many get more than twice for two to four years of their life. Suck it up, learn from it and experiment as much as possible whilst you can.
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Qualities of a great freelancer
The following are qualities that I consider core things I look for in freelancers I use when outsourcing work and getting things done. They are also the things that each and every freelancer working on jobs for Rolled At possess.
Personality
You may remember the guy who bored you to death on the phone, but you’ll remember the one you related to and laughed with a whole lot more. They’ll also become a pleasure to work with and you’ll use them more often. I can’t tell you how put off I am by the lack of a personality in some freelancers I talk to.
A love for the job
Clients don’t want their leg humping, but they do want someone who wants to do the job they have available. Someone who wants to see the product of their work come alive at the end of everything.
Chances are if you don’t love making websites, the ones you’ll be creating won’t be very good once your finished. The first question I ask anyone when I talk to them the first time when I’m adding a freelancer to my list is ‘do you love what you do?’ and if the answer isn’t yes with a convincing follow up statement then they don’t last passed that first question.
Patience
Can you wait for a job or are you going to be asking me every day about it? Are you going to blow off a huge list of insults at a client when they merely suggest a small change? Patience in my mind, is something that every freelancer needs in order to be a freelancer. You need to be patient in order to wait for a client getting back to you, to hear back from a job follow up and patient with your work too. If your forever complaining that something is going wrong instead of simply looking for a solution then your going to be closing doors instead of opening them.
Flexibility
Don’t work with frameworks? Someone else’s code? Pre-built scripts? Other people’s CSS/XHTML? These are all basic examples of lack of flexibility in some areas. Whilst they aren’t vital ingredients of a web development freelancer they do effect your ability to get work if you aren’t a specialist or established.
A speciality
The freelancer who specialises in one area and becomes a guru is someone that can - providing the speciality is of importance - become a cornerstone of a business. A talent in one area can be what gets you hired over someone else for a particular job, and it can be something that allows you to make more money that someone who generalises over multiple areas of knowledge. They do a better job, they have more experience and in most cases they take less time to get things done.
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My five golden rules of freelancing
I find I come across a lot of freelancers who don’t enjoy their job as much because of a variety of different things. They aren’t living by a set of golden rules as I do, so I thought I would share the rules that I live by whilst freelancing in order to benefit future and current freelancers a like experiencing problems in their day to day work.
Golden rules are simply something that you stick by, they are your code of ethics and they are how you conduct yourself in day to day business.
1. Keep it interesting
Working the same job over and over is always going to get boring eventually. That’s why I tend to diversify what areas each job is in and the specifics of those jobs. Occasionally i’ll see a job which is completely out there and send a message about it on the spot. This will either allow me to meet somebody new or just experience what it’s like to work with that area of the web.
It’s all about breaking the routine that every freelancer drops into from time to time. It shouldn’t feel like your copying and pasting what you did last week for a new site and changing the name on top - it should be that your adding something to your skill set, experiencing something new and dealing with different people on a week to week basis.
2. Don’t work with people that you don’t like
There’s nothing more aggravating than working with people you don’t like. It demoralises you, makes work a chore rather than a passion and basically makes you question why you do what you do.
Always be sure to save up your money in the background and have a backlog of pay stored away. This gives you a position where you can turn down clients you aren’t sure about and pull out of deals that are making your life hell.
The last thing you want to do as a freelancer is to break a relationship with a client by pulling out of a deal. But I feel that if it’s no longer fun or interesting to work (or even aggravating to work) with that client then you should be moving on and finding work else where.
3. Know when to escape
Knowing when to take a break and when to stop working is a key part of freelancing. Otherwise we’d all be doing 12 hour days every day and just get burnt out all the time.
Take weekends off, read a book, get some DVD’s, join the gym, walk the dog, visit the local shops to get a sandwich … all of these things you can do to escape working.
(This is all of course outside of work hours and during breaks.. not to avoid working in the first place.)
4. Treat every job as if it’s your first
Don’t get comfortable with a long term client, your standard should be as high as it was when you first worked for them. The day you decided that if you did a good job on the first project there may be more in it for you. This should be how you treat every job - as if your out to impress in a job interview and need that job to survive. That hunger to impress the client and keep them happy is how you deliver consistently and how you keep that client wanting to use you in the first place.
Think about this - are clients going to refer you to a friend if a friend needs work? Are they more likely to refer an excellent freelancer, or one that delivers average results?
Of course there is a twist to this rule - we all know our first jobs weren’t the best and where possibly even sloppy. That is something you’ll have to refrain from doing with this rule of course.
5. Communicate beautifully
Spell checks and grammar checks are vital for the less than able English speakers here. I often find clients talking about how poor ex-hires where with their English and it will always be off putting when a client wants to deal with the client with long conversations about jobs.
Another important part of this rule is to put communicating with the client as a priority. If they send you an e-mail it’s not ‘I’ll do it later’, it’s ‘OK I’ll respond now’. This is any time of your day your at the computer and this is what can set you apart from the rest. Having an instant reply or instant action towards the e-mail they’ve sent (if they want/need something doing) is always going to be something that a client likes - and it’s something that’ll win you over if your trying to impress them.
So there we have it, my golden rules of freelancing. I hope to have benefitted a few freelancers with this articles and I welcome any comments you wish to leave.
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Locking and password protecting your Mac whilst you are away
I recently found a small annoyance with my iMac in that I wanted to lock my Mac whilst I was away from it and/or not using it whilst keeping all my programs running in the background. This is of course great for keeping things like Mail downloading whilst your away, which keeps things running smoothly during the day.
Let’s start by pulling up the system preferences:
We should have course have this:
Select ‘Security’ from the Personal row, which is the sixth icon. You should now be in the ‘Security’ preference panel. Continue forth to make sure the checkboxes to the left of ‘Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver’ and ‘Disable automatic login’ are checked. It should look a little something like this:
Hit the ‘view all’ button in the top left of the panel to go back to the system preferences panel and continue into the ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’ preferences panel which is also located on the Personal row of preferences, this time being the third icon in. Once it’s open click ‘Screen saver’ at the top to make sure your in the right area.
Click ‘Hot Corners’ in the bottom left, this will bring up a nice drop down sub-preferences panel. Continue forth to select a corner and select ‘Start Screen Saver’ (I’ve selected the bottom left for mine).
Once this is activated if you move your mouse into the furthest point of your selected corner the screen saver should start up. Wait a few seconds (sometimes up to ten or so) and then move your mouse to bring your Mac out of it’s screen saver mode. You should then see a password prompt for your username and password - this would mean it’s worked.
No-one can now get onto your computer unless they know your username and password to get into your account.
If you would like to expand upon this and remove the screen saver from the screen after a certain amount of minutes. Go back into your system preferences panel and select ‘Energy Saver’ which is on the Hardware row - the fourth icon.
Change your slider to whatever amount of minutes you want your display to turn off on. This will remove the screen saver from your display but keep your computer running.
Make sure ‘put computer to sleep when it is inactive for’ is set to ‘Never’ and ‘Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible’ is unchecked. This makes sure your computer won’t stop processing applications and activity in the background whilst you are away from the computer.
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Ten things you hope the client never says
Working from home as a full-time freelance web developer I’ve encountered some absolutely stunning lines from clients and so have friends of mine. This is a small collection of those lines to watch out for if you choose to go into the field yourself.
1. If you do this one for free…
This has to be one of the most popular. People always want something for as little as possible, the notion of ‘you get what you pay for’ normally doesn’t register until at least eighteen years old, but the notion can be ignored at ages high above this.
2. This will be great exposure…
This usually comes before number 1, ‘If you do this one for free you’ll get great exposure’. The problem is great exposure isn’t a link in the footer and it isn’t a mention in the launch post. Great exposure is guaranteed jobs afterwards, and lots of traffic for your own personal site - that and possibly free advertising in a prominent placement.
3. Deposit?
Some clients want you to effectively work for free. No deposit and lots of free work = one starving freelancer. To be free to accept work that doesn’t involve deposits be sure to have some money stored away to eat away at until the client pays in the end. Make sure they are trustable and will pay in the end. Be sure to do your research.
4. Can I put this on my GeoCities?
It takes the breath out of you, working on something for a long time and then a client asking you if they can put it on an incompatible hosting platform that won’t support it. It makes for some difficult explaining but makes one great entry on a ‘ten things you hope the client never says’ article.
5. I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want it anymore
This is always an annoyance, and is sometimes a requirement in order to progress onto other projects. But it’s always something that will affect you on a personal level.
6. Ok can you just add this, and this
“You want money for the additions? You said you’d do everything for a set price!’. This one starts a lot of arguments and can affect your relationship with the client dramatically depending on how you react. To prevent this one blowing up on you always outline a clear feature set before starting work and outline exactly what you’ll deliver. Also outline what additional costs will be monetarily to the client. Will they be by the hour? Or a fixed fee? Discussed on arrangement? Whatever it is - it’s always best to plan these things out beforehand.
7. I just need you to look the other way whilst we break this law..
Whether it be tax law (it usually is) or some kind of pass the parcel - breaking the law is bad, um kay? Be sure to brush up on your tax laws that apply to you - make sure that if your hired to do a job for a company as an employee that they are handling your taxes, and if you are a contractor that you sort out your own. It always helps to know a small amount of law, and to consult an accountant when you aren’t sure of something.
8. My mum says that she won’t let me use her credit card so I can’t pay you
Funny, but a huge cringe worthy moment. It happens to all of us once in a blue moon, and it makes a fun entry.
9. Yahoo! will buy us
This is normally followed by number 1 and/or 2. People get bought all the time - but it’s simply not the case that millions are involved with every purchase of another site. Yahoo! may buy anywhere between one and tens of sites a year, but that’s between one and tens of several million websites out there.
10. Nothing at all
The client disappears, drops off the face of the earth. It’s your worst nightmare, they get you started on a project and leave, they give you a brief about a project tell you the deposit is coming and then you never hear from them. To avoid this make sure you always have a backup plan and if you can get a secondary contact for your client - that’s even better.
I’d like to thank Ronalfy for giving me the idea for this article. If you have any other things you’d like to see me write feel free to leave a comment or use my contact form to send it directly.
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Five reasons bad clients are good for us
This article is also posted on DevLounge.net and can also be read there.
I find people complain a lot about bad clients and how much they hate them (naturally). But instead of writing yet another one of those tired old posts that are so popular slating them and their inability to understand things that are ‘basic’ to us, I decided to flip the table and write about how good they are for us.
1. They make you work harder
Having problems with a client makes the day harder and it makes you work harder. If we all did easy work all the time there it wouldn’t make an interesting job, and it would be fairly boring after a while.
2. You learn from it personally
You make mistakes, you learn from them. You pick bad clients - you learn to spot bad clients. Things the clients say, things they do, how they approach you - all these things we can learn from and better ourselves in our chosen areas.
3. They keep your work interesting for others
People love gossip (especially in England) - so what better to gossip about than your work? What better to relate with your friends or partner with than a bad experience with a client?
Something that happened today, something they said, how they said it, how stupid that demand was - all of these things don’t involve technical aspects of the work that would confuse someone who isn’t in the area.
Gossip is how people in technical areas such as computing relate to others about their job whatever area they are in and don’t we all love it.
4. You are challenged in places you don’t want to be
Can you float that advertisement over the content and then make it invisible please? Can you make that list go alphabetically, then order by numbers, make it criss-crossed and make this picture over here flash colours when you click this link?
Bad clients can think of terrible things you could never dream of, but isn’t learning how to do them what makes our work interesting?
5. They test your character
Are you willing to float the banner over the content and make it invisible? Make that picture flash colours when the link is clicked? Or is it not ethical? Are you going to shout at a client because they make you do things you don’t want to do? How do you handle it?
All of these things test our characters as professionals and everyday people. How we deal with them tells us a lot about ourselves and it lets us learn from the experiences.
So can we all agree that at least sometimes bad clients are good for us? That they make our lifes a little more interesting?
If you know of anymore reasons bad clients may be good for us all, please add your comment below and I will post them in any future follow up articles :)
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More things to consider whilst running a tutorial orientated website
This article is an expansion from a previous article entitled: “What I learned from failure, an extensive article on things to consider whilst running a tutorial orientated website“.
These are things that I have learnt from running Twodded, a ‘quality tutorials’ section of the Pixel2life tutorial listing, which recently was declared dead. Several points have also been added by managers of other tutorial orientated websites that have left comments on the previous instalment of this series.
Keep in mind that not all of these points will necessarily relate to your tutorial orientated website and that this article might be expanded again with another entry at a later date – so if you wish to help expand the following article please leave your additional points in a comment below.
If something goes wrong on your site, it’s your fault - not the user’s
I had this argument a few weeks ago where by a friends site was down because of an error and when I said “calm down, take down the site and put up a ‘we are doing this’ page and and i’ll help you fix it”, I received the reply “why should we care about the users? they can bare with it, it’ll only be twenty minutes or so”.
When running a site, your first priority is your user base (especially if charging). If a new user arrives at your site and sees PHP errors all over the place, chances are they won’t be coming back. However if they see a ’sorry for the down time, we are doing this right now’ page, chances are they’ll revisit later in the day to see if your site is back up.
Also, if you are doing something that requires the user’s attention and means downtime and possible errors, make sure there’s a clearly visible way of telling the user when it will be happening. This tells the user it’ll be happening, keeps them “in the loop”, let’s them know you care and gives them time to get anything they were going to do out the way before the down time happens.
Don’t go out of your way to obsess with SEO
By this I don’t mean using a CSS based layout, using meta tags, using ALT tags or title attributes in your links - these examples are just good practice. By this statement I mean the people who insist on people linking to them with certain text, putting 500 word essays in their ALT tags, hiding key words from users using negative margins/small fonts and other similar tricks.
All this time you spend obsessing over your rank for monkey butts and bananas in Google can be spent on better things such as writing more content, enhancing existing content or replying to comments on previous tutorials. Try focusing on your existing audience and keeping them, they’ll refer friends and lots of them, when treated well.
Personally when I see tricks like this on websites I don’t revisit them, and the majority will do the same. Don’t put SEO before your user’s experience.
Make sure if you add a feature, it’s necessary
Do people need the ability to view your tutorials in a top 10 views list? Personally I think this gives the user the chance to try holding down F5 to increase a tutorials views for a joke, or clearing their cookies and refreshing to increase the count. If your system isn’t good enough to handle it adjust and wait, then ask yourself if the feature is necessary and if it will enhance your site when added. It can either provide a valuable service to the user or it can make you look like a joke, that’s your decision.
The same goes for whether people actually want to view your tutorial as a PDF or word document, do they really want to view comments on the same page as the tutorial, do they really want to be told about your new services in the middle of a tutorial… and so on.
Another thing is feature requests. Just because one person requests it or five people request it, doesn’t mean the majority want it. Think about how many people will use the feature and if it’ll make your user’s experience with your site better. Is there a reason other sites don’t have this feature? Sometimes there’s a good reason why no-one has it.
Reward your writers wherever you can
Whether it’s a simple link in your affiliates system, an author websites link on the tutorial they’ve wrote, share in revenue, allowing them to run their own advertisements or just complimenting them on their excellent writing skills - you need to reward your writers.
This is just a sample list of rewards of course, but there are a lot more things you can do. Writers need to feel passion for the project or company they are writing for and the more their writing something benefits them, the more they’ll feel that passion.
Don’t promise what you can’t deliver
I have to admit that at Twodded I did this a lot. I promised I would write, I promised I would put up ‘authors home page’ links, I promised I would fixed a bug here, a bug there… and so on. Simply put – this made me a terrible person to work with, and I began to fully understand staff that lost confidence in the project.
From this I learnt that you should only promise what you can deliver, and to set realistic deadlines for my projects. When you come through with something not only does it show you to be someone you can rely on, but it shows your dedicated to the project.
Set yourself apart from the crowd by doing better
AJAX tabs using JavaScript is the hot topic and everyone is writing about it, so you write about it - why? Why not go one step ahead and write a tutorial on “AJAX tabs using Javascript, and how to make them dynamic with PHP”? Not only are you attracting the crowd around the latest buzz, but your attracting the crowds that want more and are sick of the same old topic.
The question you have to ask yourself is: do you want to be the sheep or the shepherd?
Make sure you have time to run the tutorial orientated site the first place
When starting a tutorial orientated site a lot of people have them as ’side projects’ to their ever growing network of websites. This shows on every website they build as they often dedicate less time to one project than another they favour at the time.
When starting a tutorial orientated site make sure you have the time to run it, to write for it and to manage it, otherwise you’ll be thrown in at the deep end with no swimming lessons and all hell will break loose.
Be prepared for troublemakers
Trust your staff? Think they’ll never turn their back on you? Think that no-one would ever try to run an SQL injection script on your commenting script? It may sound paranoid, but your wrong.
Make sure everything you build is secure regardless of it’s use. Once in a blue moon you’ll see a staff member or a user revolt, someone looking for trouble. If you aren’t prepared for this then you are fool, because ‘If something goes wrong on your site, it’s your fault – not the user’s’ – your the person people will frown upon when this happens, not the person responsible. Don’t get me wrong you’ll get a hundred and one comments saying that the person responsible should be burnt at the steak, but everyone has ‘how did the owner allow this to happen?’ bouncing around in the back of their minds.
My golden rule – just because people aren’t saying it to your face, doesn’t mean it’s not being said. Listen to the one or two people that complain about something, as occasionally they are speaking out for a majority that aren’t saying anything to start with.
Keep the community and staff in line
Do you want people flaming your tutorial writers? Do you want your tutorial writers flaming visitors? Then say so, and make it happen. Make sure you have things put in the way of this happening such as comment approval systems and that no-one gets through without your say so.
In regards to staff, make sure there’s a set of rules to go by and make sure that if they are broken that action is taken.
If you have tutorials on multiple pages, make sure there’s a print option available
A very small point here, but I made this mistake on Twodded and a lot of visitors hated me for it. Simply put – some people want to view it page by page, some people want to view the entire thing at once and some people want to print it out and read it. Accommodate all three groups by implementing paged tutorials with a clear ‘print view’ option at the head of the tutorial.
Don’t overdo your content management system
I see this on the mass majority of tutorial orientated websites, no-one seems to know how to cache. You wouldn’t need a dedicated server to power your whatever thousand visitors a day if you just cached the pages that never change. Do you need to pull out a tutorial of the database every time it loads? Do you need to pull out your about page every time that loads? Sure you can store it in a database for easy editing and use it in the CMS, but cache it when your done.
It sounds simple, but a lot of people could be on shared servers or virtual private servers that are on dedicated when they simply don’t need to be.
I hope this article has benefited your tutorial orientated website and that you had fun reading it. Keep in mind that this article might be expanded again with another entry at a later date – so if you wish to help expand the following article please leave your additional points in a comment below .
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