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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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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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What I learned from failure, an extensive article on things to consider whilst running a tutorial orientated website
This article comes from the personal experiences I had whilst starting Twodded - a ‘quality tutorials’ section of the Pixel2life tutorial listing website. The aim of the site was to provide the users of Pixel2life with consistent quality tutorials and to set a standard for websites in the community to follow.
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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