New developers to Magento can find it a puzzling system in terms of system architecture. In this article I hope to shed some light on some of the key directories in Magento and what they do so any Magento developers out there aren’t quite as confused when unzipping their first set of Magento install files.

Here’s seven key things you need to know the location of at some point when developing with Magento and the directories that they are stored in.

1. The templates file

   /app/design/ is the core storage folder for template files. With it breaking down into adminhtml/ for administration templates, frontend/ for frontend templates and install/ for installation templates.

   Within these you’ll find your default template set aptly named default. In your template set folder are your individual theme folders that come with Magento.

   layout, locale and template are the core directories that contain the files that make up your themes.

2. The skin files (resources, components, resources)

   In /skin/ you’ll find your CSS, images, Flash, JavaScript and any other resource files that relate specifically to templates in the system. You will also find the adminhtml, frontend and install directories distinction here.

3. Language files and e-mail templates

   /app/locale/ is your core directory. With sub-directories for each language set installed for the store. You will find .csv files for each of the modules installed on the system relating to their translations. You’ll find the Magento e-mail templates in /template/email/ within your language directory in /app/locale/.

4. Core configuration

   /app/etc/ contains all configuration files for Magento. From the local.xml file which contains your database configuration, amongst other things. To your modules/ folder which contains the declaration of modules in the system.

5. Local, core and community modules

   All modules for functionality are stored in /app/code/ and are broken down into the following folders:

   • community – for modules installed via Magento Connect.
   • core – for modules that come with Magento by default.
   • local – usually for locally developed modules

6. Media files

   All images uploaded to the system as well as the images resized dynamically by the system are stored in media/.

   When importing media files via system profiles (Magento’s name for batch processing), /media/import/ will be your folder to place the images for the products.

7. The var directory

   The var directory is used for several functions in the system:

   • Backups are exported to backups/ by the built in system backup tool.
   • The system cache is stored in both cache/ and session/ folders.
   • Data import for default system data import profiles is set to import/.
   • Data export for default system data export profiles is set to export/.

Hopefully this has given you a good indication as to the important directories in Magento’s file structure. I hope you can now go away and navigate around Magento’s default folders with ease.

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I’m the first to admit I’m a self-confessed workaholic but I’m also the first to admit that being workaholic to the point of work being the only thing in your life is a boring when you look back at it. Work is great and it sometimes leads to fantastic rewards but it shouldn’t never become the basis of your life.

The things in this article are all things that led to me becoming a significantly better programmer and lead developer. They also made me become a significantly better freelance developer whilst I was freelancing.

Nine-to-Five

Start out by actually forcing yourself to work between 9am and 5pm. Get all early morning browsing in between 8:30am and 9am and make sure you’re ready to immediately start. When you’re forced to work within a time period that “isn’t enough time” you’ll find ingenious ways of cutting time out of your day and solving regular issues so you can do more in less time.

You will be able to reflect on parts of your work life during this time that you’ve never thought about. Are you charging enough? Do you need help to get the work done? Are people taking advantage of your time?

Know when to apply the breaks

Set out when and for how long for your breaks are going to be. Your lunch needs to be at a regular time and two other 15-20 minute breaks can be scheduled either side of your lunch. This breaks things up and allows you to remove yourself from problems that can be fixed with a few minutes of simply thinking about it.

The same applies here for time that isn’t spent working. Don’t go out on a three hour break because you’re not in an office and work from home “because you can”, it just doesn’t get you anywhere.

Inbox nirvana

Cut out all of your e-mails as soon as they’re coming in. Make sure you reply to the e-mails that are asking you questions and for help within a suitable amount of time. Either set a certain time period aside for this or break it down into 10-15 minute periods throughout the day so you can spend the rest of your time focusing on the job at hand.

I find Gmail’s built in labelling feature is great for this, I can simply scan an e-mail and mark is as “quote to do” or “reply needed” and make sure those labels are completely cleared out by the end of each time slot so that everyone receives their responses.

Trim the fat, throw out what isn’t working

Simply enough you need to trim out all those activities that take minutes here and there but add up to an hour, maybe more, over the period of your work day (outside of the standard breaks) that stop you getting what you need to get done. Rescue Time is perfect for this as it allows you to see exactly what is distracting you from working properly and shows you how you can be more efficient.

Determined enough to get work done, you may even consider installing parental controls to stop yourself accessing these applications during your scheduled work hours. It sounds funny now, but if you’re a World of Warcraft addict or love your RSS Feeds, you know how much that will cut from your day.

Make some plans, don’t expect them to just happen

Arrange weekly events you would have look like a complete idiot to pull out of, plan things a few days or week(s) in advance so that it’s definite that it will happen. Make sure to get out and experience something else other than the computer once and a while.

Thought of something else?

If there’s anything else you’d like to suggest to others facing this problem or you would like to share how you’ve got over the same issue then feel free to leave a comment or post it up on your own blog with a link to this post so that others can find your suggestion.

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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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• 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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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:
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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Twodded flopped because of a number of mistakes on my behalf in terms of management and communication. In this article I want to share what I have learnt from this experience so that others do not make similar mistakes.

Keep in mind that not all of these points will necessarily relate to your tutorial orientated website and that this article will be expanded on 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 . This is also a huge read so bare with me, and feel free to read in parts instead of one big sit in.

Try specialising in a specific area instead of generalising in everything

With Twodded I set out to cover a lot of different areas so that I had a wider audience. Whilst doing this I took on tutorial writers that had knowledge across several areas and therefore could write tutorials for several categories for the site. This can be good for quantity, but isn’t necessarily good for quality.

Writers that you bring aboard will generally be great with one or two categories and good with several others. The option I took was to get the writers to write for whatever they could, therefore absolutely destroying the ‘quality tutorials’ standard I wanted to set with the project. It’s important to get people to write for what they are great at, not what they are good at. This enhances the end product of your tutorials, and your site on a whole.

Sometimes it is better to specialise in creating tutorials for one program (say Adobe Photoshop), for example you contact Adobe about being an official resource for tutorials on Photoshop – are they going to accept a website specialising in Photoshop tutorials or are they going to accept a website that covers tutorials in fifteen programs including Photoshop? The same goes for users looking for Photoshop tutorials, they are much more likely to trust a specialist website.

If covering more than one category, don’t let a category go without tutorials for a long time

Simply put – every tutorial category you cover is an audience. If you choose to have someone write for C++ but they never write again – make sure you’ve got a back up plan for that category. Make sure there are long term plans for any categories you cover with your tutorials as every category you have tutorials for will mean one more audience wanting and waiting for more tutorials to read.

Too many writers means too many problems, be prepared and available

Management is key to running a tutorial orientated site and the more writers you have working for you, the more you need to manage. To run a great tutorial website you need for each of your writers to: be motivated, be flowing with ideas on what to write next and to be comfortable and happy in their environment. All whilst making sure they like you and see your vision in the site you are running.

You have to understand that not all writers will be happy with the environment you have set out for them and there will be problems. You have to be easily reachable and ready for your staff to approach you. Be the perfect boss.

Hire staff you know and trust, not just anybody

Following on from the previous tip, my advice would be to keep writing teams small. Managing and motivating a small team is a lot easier than managing a team of twenty writers. A smaller team also means that you will be working as a small group of friends and get to know each other very well.

Keep in mind that a motivated team with belief is a team dedicated to writing the best they can every time and not just when they feel like it.

“How to for Dummies” books are successful for a reason

When having your staff write tutorials (and whilst writing tutorials yourself) make sure that everything is explained to the point of a user that hasn’t touched the subject beforehand can understand the tutorial. Every user that reads a tutorial is someone you can drive back to the site – and making them understand the tutorial perfectly is the first step to getting them to come back.

Advertisements are supposed to support content, not become it

Whilst managing a tutorial orientated site it is very easy to ’sell your soul’ to advertisers by placing advertising income ahead of your tutorials and sometimes even your users. For the mass majority of people running tutorial orientated websites advertisements are a necessary annoyance and probably the only source of income. Sometimes we also forget that people are here on our sites to read a tutorial, and not to see which adverts are relevant to the tutorial the user is currently reading.

At Twodded the advertisements are above and below the tutorial related content. This means they are out the way and are letting the user get on with what they are doing. I have seen a lot worse however, such as advertisements every 2-3 paragraphs that look like plain links and advertisements that are placed so integrated with the start of the tutorial that you didn’t even know the first paragraph existed. These for me are examples that shouldn’t be copied and for me, you should think about your users first when thinking about placements of advertising – and not the money it’ll bring in.

One great tutorial, or one great set of tutorials will bring more traffic than 50 poorly written tutorials

The Twodded team had many great writers, the key great writer being Tiago Dias. Tiago wrote a series of three tutorials on how to build an MP3 player in Flash which received twice as much traffic as other tutorials on the site. Each part of this tutorial he wrote brilliantly with the full source code available for download at the end of each tutorial for the user. He also took feedback from readers of the tutorials to see what advancements they’d like to learn and then constructed the following instalments of the tutorials with these in mind. As a result of this the instalments that followed previous entries into the series grew in popularity and the series itself became semi-famous in its own right.

What did I learn from this apart from the fact that Tiago is an utterly brilliant writer?

• Real communication with your tutorials readers can give you an almost unlimited amount of ideas
• Following up tutorials gives the user something to look out for, and makes it easier for the user to learn something gradually
• Sometimes one tutorial isn’t enough, and there’s room to expand this into a better outcome for the user

Always be ready to offer support to people that don’t understand something

Whilst being an excellent writer, Tiago also responded to over a hundred requests for help with the tutorials. As a result of him responding to these readers about the tutorial and helping them, the site grew in popularity – especially Tiago’s tutorials.

I’m not going to list the amount of websites that have forums for their tutorial help and have people saying ‘Look it’s right here, you’ve just got to read’ and ignoring the user. If you help that user out and support them like a friend, they gain respect for you and your site, and will most likely bookmark to return at a later date..

Be prepared for trouble makers

Whilst bringing up this bad example of commenting, it’s important to note that you should handle these trouble makers accordingly. If your writer is responding like this to users that need help on his tutorials, consider lending some advice on how to reply to the situations. Possibly even hire staff to deal with the users in need of help to take the load off your writer’s mind.

Lead by example

One thing I got wrong at Twodded is that I never wrote anything. I never wrote the great tutorial standard I demanded from staff and I never wrote consistently like I demanded from my staff either. This was by far my worst mistake, as potential writers will be inspired by an owner of a site writing a great tutorial and will be motivated to match that quality and possibly even out do it.

On the other hand if you’re a very bad tutorial writer then maybe you have things to learn from the staff you take on board. But please don’t go overboard asking your own staff for help, there’s nothing worse than a boss that knows nothing about what your doing.

Learn from your mistakes

I think it’s evident in this article that I have learnt from my mistakes whilst running Twodded. Learning from your mistakes is possibly the best thing you can get out of failure in any walk of life and will only improve you in future situations.

This tutorial has a second part by the name of “More things to consider whilst running a tutorial orientated website“. Feel free to expand your knowledge of things to consider by reading it :)

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I’d prefer these articles to be based around the tutorial world itself (writing a tutorial, tutorial sites etc.) rather than PHP, as I just don’t have the time to write a PHP tutorial the way it should be done at the moment.

Let the ideas flow

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1. A useless splash page is a requirement

If you’ve got a Flash based website and it doesn’t have a next to pointless splash page that tells us nothing it just isn’t a Flash based website to start with. Try adding an “abstract” render with lots of bend modifiers and bright stars… and set it in space… lots and lots of space.

2. The “none Flash” version of your site must contain Flash

“None Flash” is an industry standard term for “use as much Flash as you can” or “a very sucky replica that doesn’t work in any browser”. You don’t want to be doing things that aren’t industry standard do you?

3. Make your site pop-up in a fixed size window using JavaScript

This is a requirement of any sucky Flash based website and if you want to make it that little bit worse please add scroll bars.

4. Always have an animation to “introduce” us to your site

There’s nothing more effective than a poorly animated, or better yet, extremely long “introduction” to a Flash based website to turn a user on. Not only do we enjoy watching it every time we come to the site, but we love it when the skip button doesn’t work.

5. Pre-load everything at once

To make the 5-10mb pre-loading worse, please add a flashing piece of text that spells out LOADING in the middle of your template. By the way, we don’t want to know how much is being loaded, how much has been loaded OR even see a loading bar… those are just ‘flashy’ and not informative to us users at all… right?

6. If not, don’t pre-load anything

As users we don’t like pre-loaders as they ’slow us down’. Try creating a huge file size and not having a pre-loader, it makes us feel all tingly inside when we guess when the site will load.

7. Make sure that after 10 minutes of waiting, at least one more thing needs to be loaded

Make it the first thing we click on too. Make us really want it!

8. Always use a template

“Isn’t that a template?” – why yes it is. “Isn’t that used on this site, that site and that other one?” – why yes it is!

9. “Techno techno techno techno!” – make sure every piece of graphic on the site is overdone

Lines! We love lines! Why isn’t there more lines? Seriously, give us more lines or I’ll send someone round with a copy of ‘Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring’ and make you watch it 15 times in a row with no toilet breaks.

10. Make sure nothing is compressed

We will wait 20 minutes to avoid that difference in quality only a 800% zoom would show us.

11. I shall not anti-alias my text

Readable text isn’t something users want, just ask all those people without screens.

12. Use circles for buttons

Yes circles are practically pointless as buttons, but they sure are curvy.

13. Make sure everything has a roll-over

Please don’t deprive us of this wonderful entertainment. I can from the bottom of my heart say you would be bringing down the web on a whole by removing these. If your site has less than five roll-overs you just aren’t doing it right.

14. Scrap the one click standard and go for five

There’s nothing more I like than clicking, and when I click on a button but have to click five times to make it work – that really makes my day.

15. If you have forms, make sure they are the default 500kb components

Think of default components as the oompa loompa’s in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”. You don’t want them to go without a job do you?

16. If animating, always use at least fifteen flashes

KA POW! KA BLAM! It’s just like being in a Batman movie… and we all want to be in a Batman movie.

17. Use as many transitions as you can between content

Every time I see the text float in from the right or the left it makes me want to use Microsoft PowerPoint. And no-one should think of using Microsoft PowerPoint.

18. When tracing bitmaps, always leave the original source files to increase size

Small file size? That’s just for amateurs.

19. Make sure any music tracks aren’t compressed

It adds to that loading time, which gives us time to exercise our eyelids.

20. Music should always start over again when we switch page

“Check, check, check it out”. That pause was intentional and adds to the song – yours just ruins the site and your user’s opinion of the music being played.

21. And finally… make sure there’s very little point to you building your site in Flash

Make it look just like a normal site. Really surprise that user with the 15 minute techno remix of MC Hammer’s “Can’t touch this” when they first click a link. Even better, wait for them to let their guard down and show that video of you dancing to the latest Britney Spears CD in your underwear.

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1. Always start with ‘This is my first ever tutorial” or “I just learned this yesterday”

An opening paragraph can be the maker or breaker of a tutorial, and for me to read that you’re new to whatever subject you’re trying to teach or that you’re new to writing tutorials doesn’t really fill me with confidence. Use your opening paragraph to outline your tutorial and what you will teach, not to persuade users not to read on.

2. M15pe1 eev3ry w0rD wr0ng

Yes you’re ‘l33t’, but we have the power to call your mother and tell her you’ve been a bad boy. Eat that with your cereal before school.

3. Make ads more important than the tutorial/content itself

Simply put, when a reader is actually reading the tutorial you’ve written, they actually want to read the tutorial… not ads about Viagra and fetish websites. Advertisement are all right to support the tutorial but don’t let it get in the way.

4. Save all your images poorly

The fuzzy feeling should be inside us when we read your tutorial, not all over the image we are trying to view.

5. Go one step further and host them on a free image host

It comforts us to know you’ve gone through all the effort of paying $10 a month for a host… it really does. It means that you’ll be around longer than the refresh of a page.

6. Always use pixel text and fonts below 9px in size

“Whats all those white lines going across the content area all about?”

7. If you’re going to use dark text, make sure you use a dark background or if you’re going to use light text, make sure you use a light background

Honestly… who can read light red on light blue?

8. If you’re going to use syntax highlighting, make sure it’s impossible to read

The colours are meant for a white background, if you’re not using a white background… customise the colours properly. If you’re using syntax highlighting on something as silly as a dark grey background then how are people supposed to see the code in the first place?

9. Keep it short and sweet

“Is that it?” You don’t want to be told that in bed and you sure as hell don’t want to hear it from somebody reading your tutorial. Now do what you did to solve the bedroom problem and put some effort and work into those tutorials.

10. Make sure you tell the user “we are going to use this, if you don’t know it, go and learn” at least once during the tutorial

If a teacher told you to go and learn wouldn’t you tell him to teach you in the first place? I sure would.

11. Promote your friends’ sites consistently

We only read tutorials to get more useless sites to look at and your friends’ tutorial sites let us know just which sites to avoid in the future.

12. Skip steps

“So we start with this and end with this, tutorial done”… Everyone is psychic nowadays so why teach them what they’ve come to learn?

13. Host it on a forum full of 500kb “animated” sigs that are the size of desktop wallpapers

Those sigs just bring life to the page and really shine through your professional side. In truth, if you showed anything close to a “signature file” in a professional interview they would send you back to your local grocery store for extra training.

14. ALWAYS give your tutorial a name that has nothing to do with the tutorial itself

Readers will hate you for giving them Britney Spears when they are looking for Oasis.

15. Finally, always complain to a tutorial listing administrator that your tutorial was declined at

Yes you thought it was a good tutorial, but we didn’t. Rejection is harsh but so is your site being labelled as ‘ran by that crazy guy’.

To end, I hope people writing all these bad tutorials see my point, and really start to actually listen to the complaints constantly left on their tutorials.

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Note: These tutorials where NOT accepted to Pixel2Life and are NOT a representation of what the actual content on Pixel2Life, just a representation of the crap people like to think is worthy of being called a tutorial…

A tutorial on PHP commenting:

Heres how to comment using PHP
1. Using //
2. Using /* and */
3. Using #

(Yes, that was it…)

Starting your first ever PHP file:

When I first started coding in PHP it was really tough but now i’m uber l33t man. Now heres how to start your first PHP file:

<?php
print ‘hello world’;
?>

Look forward to more uber tutorials!

THE BEST EVER PHP includes tutorial

To use includes simply include the following your page:
<?php include($page); ?>

Now use the following to automatically set this include:

http://www.mysite.com/?page=index.php

(Maybe I should use a root include and ruin your server? :)

And the best submitted tutorial ever…

Sorry you must be registered to view this forum

In closing, please when learning includes and echo’ing in PHP please do not think you are ready to write tutorials on how to use PHP.

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php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

Hows it do it?

This line of code sets the output handler, or output buffer as ob_gzhandler. This sets the ob_start as “ob_gzhandler” so the code doesn’t have to be entered. Normally you would have to enter this in the PHP to do GZIP Compression:

// In the head:
ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”);
// At the bottom:
ob_end_flush();

What is GZIP?

GZIP is a very> effective way of keeping your bandwidth down when having large HTML/PHP pages. What it does, is compresses the page thats being sent to the user viewing your site, when the user recieves this compressed version of the page it uncompresses the page, and views it in the full form.

But how much does this effect the user?

It doesn’t effect the user at all, except for Internet Explorer 0.01 users still on Windows 3.11 of course…

And what about my server?

Once you originally implement this, yes, you will notice changes in your processors activity. But after a day or two you’ll soon see the processor levels lower.

How much of a difference does it really make?

The answer, is roughly 80-90% of your raw code file being sent to the user is removed.

A good implementation case study for this is Pixel2Life. Before GZIP it had a 160kb file output and after a 14kb file output. This of course is brilliant for the 56kers, which alot of us forget about.

Please note

GZIP does not compress images, just the raw code being output and sent to the user.

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