2 Dangerous Customers For Freelance or Work at Home Developers

By developer, I mean freelance programmers, SEO consultants, WordPress hackers, and any other non-designers doing freelance That is, someone who does design by necessity, rather than by trade. I am not a professional designer, but I have done plenty of ‘design’. Why the quotes? I’ll get toi that later.
So no matter what kind of dev you are, or even if you’re all of them, if you’re a freelancer, you deal with customers. A salaried developer answer to Project Managers, Project Shareholders, and managers. As a freelancer, you deal directly with small business owners. Here’s an example:

Steve Business-Owner:
Hello, you were referred to me by Sally Small-Business, and I want to get a new site built and put on google. Can you do that? How much does it cost? Sally said you did hers for $300.

Steve

The first sentence has tipped you off to our first dangerous customer type. The I-Don’t-Know-Anything-About-Computers-But-I-Heard-I-Need-To-Be-On-Google. So now, the dilemma. Sally is a friend, but even so, you know you didn’t charge her $300 – that is what she pays per month for your maintenance contract. Of course, make it clear to the client what your hourly rate is, but how do you describe the many different parts of your full service? Let break it down:

1. Design – If you’re smart, you get as much information as you can, by telling the client ‘I am drafting up a proposal for your site refresh/programming project/SEO consultation. in the meantime, please let me know if there are any sites you like, or any preference or ideas you may have.’ If you’re lucky, he will send over a fairly extensive list of likes/dislikes, or a couple sites he likes the look of. Ignore the flash ones. Invest a quick half hour, and search your favorite design sites, like www.crowdSPRING.com or themeforest (Themeforest has a big selection and some reallly good designs, so long as you don’t need anything to unique. Generally the WordPress templates are ~ $32). See if there are any designs you know you can use or modify to make the customer happy. Examine the links he sent. What do you surmise he liked about it? Colors, usability, fancy menus? Zero in on it, and find a design in the same vein, and sell him on that by showing him an example, and tell him how it improves on the designs he sent.

TO BE CONTINUED…

How I’m Able To Work At Home And Be Happier

I made the transition from an office working code monkey to a self-sufficient work for myself at home small business 2 months ago. Here’s how I did it.

• Confidence – I have 2 kids and a wife who is also an independent business person. It didn’t occur to me to worry if I could support the family without that steady paycheck. I had so many good ideas but no time to implements them. I was sure that I would start making enough money to pay the mortgage (2 of them, as a matter of fact), because I was able to find a good job and pay the bills that way. There is essentially no difference between working for someone or working for yourself, functionally. Either way you have a path to success – you know your success point. Its only the trip from where you are now to where you want to be that is different. Inspired by that sometimes rocky path…
• I saved the money to do this. Yes, I was confident, but stuff happens. I could have been hit by a bus the day I resigned. So i saved up a generous cushion fund to make sure a) I had enough to feed the family, just in case and b) I wouldn’t feel panicked or overwhelmed by being on my own suddenly. The pressure I would put on myself, I figured, would be enough stress, without the gnawing worry of how to pay a month’s mortgage. We stripped absolutely every last bit from our budget, went without dining out or anything like that for 2 years. Remember, this is my make or break moment – the difference between working for myself for the rest of my life, or a working holiday and then back into someone else’s rat race. 2 years of hone made dinners is a pretty small price to pay.

This ends part one. Part 2 will be up this week.

Create A Website In An Hour Using WordPress 3

This tutorial is meant for those who have used WordPress before, though it isn’t essential. Let me know in the comments if you think any parts need further explanation.

• Download and install WordPress 3.0. The latest version finally gets rid of that annoying admin password auto-generation, and instead allows you to set an Admin username and password during installation.
• Yes, WordPress installation is that easy.
• Set remote rpc under settings>writing – I do this because I update multiple blogs simultaneously and it requires remote XML-RPC
• Set permalink structure for SEO. Click Settings>Permalinks, I usually use /%category%/%postname%.html/ or /%category%/%postname%/ (I’ve seen some people claiming this doesn’t work, or is wrong/bad/stupid, but meh – it’s always worked well enough for me, and I’m in the middle of testing alternate permalink structures to see if there really an effect)
• Delete default ‘Hello World’ post
• delete defaultcomment
• Set user first and last name for posting display purposes Users>your profile
• Update the ‘Uncategorized’ category to something juicy, so if you’re like me and forget to set categories when doing batch wordpress updates, then at least your permalink will show the right subject. No idea if this is good bad or indifferent for SEO purposes, but it hasn;t failed me yet.
• delete about page
• install theme
• Install plugins – akismet, all in one SEO all in one, feedwordpress, google xml sitemap, twitter tools. These are the base plugins I put on every blog – but I generally add them from within the new wordpress installation, to make sure I get the latest versions.
• Add the new site to your Google Analytics account.
• Add the new site to your Google Webmaster Tools account.
• Create a new ad and channel for this site in Google Adsense, and then get your new ads and put them on the site.
• Add other affiliate marketing ads/networks etc, whatever your deal is

now to create content

• import whatever blog you want (generally I create multiple blogs on the same subject to test the waters and see which design/voice/style works the best – I import another blog to flesh out the new blog – I don’t believe in the hypothetical Google penalty for duplicate content, but I could be wrong )
• Using the feedwordpress plugin, funnel some posts from your other sites to this new one – be sure not to just randomly grab other bloggers’ RSS feeds – even if you think its ok, you dont want someone sending you a nice friendly letter from their lawyer a few months down the road. That is a hassle no one needs.
• write one original posts, with keywords
• Use the Google Sitemap plugin to generate a sitemap, and add that to Google Webmaster tools
• Now the real work begins!

Notes:
With WordPress 3.0, installing plugins is the easiest its ever been. Click ‘Add New’ under plugins, do a search for the plugin names as I’ve given them, then it’s a one click install. Some of the plugins do require activation and/or settings changes, but the ones I’ve listed here all all self-explanatory.

CodeIgniter Godaddy and You

Recently I was setting up a CodeIgniter installation for a new project on my GoDaddy shared hosting account. I ran into a slight problem: I was getting the CodeIgniter 404 error doc while trying to just get to the default home/index page! Here’s how I fixed it:

In System > Application > Config > config.php
Change:

$config['index_page'] = "index.php";

to this:

$config['index_page'] = "index.php?";


and further down in that same file:
change:

$config['uri_protocol'] = "AUTO";

to:

$config['uri_protocol'] = "REQUEST_URI";