How to use these graphics

To add a graphic on your own site, first you’ll need to right-click the image below and save it to your computer. You can then upload the image either to your own site (if you’re using WordPress for example you can just upload it to your media library) or to an image hosting site like Photobucket. Please don’t link to the images directly on my site, upload your own.

The code to actually insert the banners on your page goes a little something like this:

[html]<a href=”http://www.infobarrel.com/signup.php?ref_id=47754″><img src=”yourimagepath”/></a>[/html]

You can either paste the code directly into your site file where you want it to display, or use the text widget for WordPress. Change the ref_id to your own, and the image source to the newly uploaded image. If you have any trouble leave me a comment either here or on the InfoBarrel thread and I can probably help you out.

125×125

468×60

Plenty more to come soon, get your size requests in if you have them!

I recently got to this point and decided to go for the VA approach, since I’d like to get to know and trust one person who is able to help with all aspects of the business when needed. Unfortunately, I had no clue where to start.

Step 1: Know what you want

Being completely new to the world of virtual assistants, I had basically no clue what they would be willing to do, what they would charge, how they would charge, and many more things besides. All I knew was that I wasn’t finding enough time to get everything done, and needed help. As hard as it was, I should really have found time to sit down and think things through clearly. Learn from my mistakes.

• Make a list of all the tasks you feel could be outsourced.
• Think about how you like each task to be done and how easily you could train someone else to do them the same way.
• Look at your budget and find out exactly how much you’re able to afford per month or for a particular task.

Step 2: Find some interested candidates

For you this step might mean advertising on one of the numerous freelance job sites available. I specifically preferred to work with someone in my local area so this approach was less likely to work, and instead I turned to Google. Unfortunately Google was unkind, and I was only able to find one or two (way over my budget) options, so in despair I started asking for advice on various freelancing forums and even Facebook! I did get one quality response from a post on FreelanceUK but I ended up turning down the guy in question, so perhaps more forum posts elsewhere would’ve turned up further gems.

In the end, I put up an ad on Gumtree. I knew this was likely to get me a lot of “spam” replies, as well as replies from people who had no idea what a VA even was but were just desperate for some pocket money, but I’ve used Gumtree for househunts etc in the past and know that there are some actual real people and offers on there so it seemed worth a shot.

From what I could tell, half of the people replying didn’t even realise that “Freelance virtual assistant required” would even involve being self-employed and almost half of them declined to answer any of the questions I’d posed in the ad as a sort of “did you really pay attention” check. Not exactly the greatest start ever, but never mind.

Hoping that it would all be worth it, I trawled my way through numerous worthless posts and finally made a shortlist of people who appeared to have actually read the ad and seemed “nice”. Niceness may seem like a strange way of judging job applicants but let’s face it, a VA is someone you need to feel comfortable with.

Step 3: Compare the options

Oh dear, this bit is difficult. I found myself in the position of liking two candidates equally, and it was a horrible experience having to choose between the two. This hiring lark is definitely not for the faint-hearted!

Don’t be afraid to ask searching questions about their experience and their reasons for applying. I was particularly on the lookout for someone who wouldn’t mind mucking in with website updates as well as general admin, so this was important to discuss.

After settling on one applicant, it was time to let the others know and that was of course the worst part of all. A job in HR is definitely not for me, I’ve learned that much.

Next steps

The person I chose as my assistant is currently in the middle of moving home and setting up her company here, so it seemed a great time to get in as one of those all-important first clients (which we all know end up being the favourites and getting all sorts of discounts *cough*). Due to this, we won’t be starting work together immediately but rather taking our time and discussing exactly how everything will work best for us.

This is great because it doesn’t add much pressure to my already hectic days and maybe I’ll actually get some sleep this weekend for once.

I’m really excited to be taking this step and getting the admin side of my business a bit more sorted out. Considering one of my previous jobs was administration, I’ve made a right pig’s ear of it now I’m self-employed. Watch out for the next update where either my stress level is down and business is flourishing, or it’s all gone horribly wrong and I’ve gone back to sporadically updating my mess of a “clients” spreadsheet.

What do you already have, and what do you need

This is probably the biggest surprise omission from my point of view. Often people will contact me to ask for a quote for, say, a WordPress theme. After some investigation it turns out they also need hosting, WordPress installing on their server, content migration from their old site,  a new logo and 3 hours of training on how to admin their new site. That does not all come under “WordPress theme”.

If in doubt, be overly detailed rather than leaving possibly important information out.

Goals for the project

Are you trying to increase awareness  of your brand? Do you want to get more website visitors to buy a product from your online store? Are you working on improving search engine rankings? Do you need to just generate more traffic and pageviews for advertising purposes? Are you trying to take over the world and make “the next Facebook”?

However far-fetched your ideas, make sure your designer knows about them. This will help them decide whether your project falls into their area of expertise, if your budget is too low, and probably start some ideas going round in their head before they’ve even been awarded the project. Protip: If you’re trying to make “the next Facebook”, don’t.

Design stuff

Link to other websites you like, and ones you don’t, and give reasons for each. Where posible these should be in a similar niche to yours, but even a general guide to your tastes is immensely helpful.

If you already have a logo/brand with specific colours, mention them here. If not, feel free to give your opinions on which colours and styles you’d like to see. A good designer will always listen to what you want, but bear in mind that a good client will respect their designer’s expertise when advice is offered.

Site structure

You should always know, if only vaguely, what will be included in your site before trying to get a quote. You can use Excel, an online mind mapping tool, or even just a list of page titles to represent the structure, but it gives your designer a good idea of the size and complexity of the site. If you already have a design and you’re looking for someone to develop the site, it may seem obvious to you what the structure should be just from looking at the existing images. Please trust me when I say it’s better to jot down a site structure anyway than to leave someone to fill in any gaps with their imagination.

You don’t need to be really specific about which page will go under which in a dropdown menu, just make sure you have all of the important content included in the plan. Part of a designer’s job is to fit everything into a usable site layout.

Features

You may have a detailed feature list drawn up already, but be unwilling to share it with just anyone. On the other hand, you may not have thought about it much beyond “I want a community site”. Write down a list of at least the most important features in your brief, and if this first stage goes well you can always get more detailed down the line as your designer should tell you exactly what they’ll need to know.

“But I just want a design, not the development!” – Hand over a feature list anyway, a designer needs to know that you plan on having an event calendar so they can actually design it. Mocking up a homepage and leaving the rest up to the imagination of whichever poor coder you hire later is baaaad.

Budget and timescale

This is a bit controversial, since a lot of people think giving away your budget means a provider will always come in as high as they can. This may be true of some unscrupulous characters but try not to judge the industry as a whole.

Giving your ballpark budget helps the designer, since they won’t be wasting time quoting on a project that pays too little or too much (yes there’s such a thing as too much!), and it helps you because the designer can advise you on the best way to proceed, you’re not spending time reading quotes that are way beyond your means, and as an added bonus you get to see how the designer handles the situation which is a good indicator of their professionalism.

For example you want X, Y and Z completed in 2 weeks for $500 but this budget is too low, a bad designer will tell you so and you’ll be on your way to someone else. A good designer will work around what you have available and offer to remove unnecessary feature Y with the possibility of revisiting it later, or increase the timescale to make the project more financially viable. You’d always have the option of just going to someone cheaper, but as we all know “you get what you pay for”.

Example website brief

This downloadable example can be edited in Word etc and used as-is, or can just be a starting point for your own brief. I hope it can be of use, if so please leave a lovely comment to brighten my day.

When Spammers Attack

A good example of this is a spam comment received on a text-only post, demanding that I stop relying on “the video” to make my point for me and wasting my intelligence. Lovely, I must say. The number one spot so far however goes to the following comment, received just yesterday:

I dont know who you think you are, but youre just blowing smoke out your ears. Nothing youre saying makes sense and its all a bunch of immature ranting. If you want people to get behind your blog, you should at the very least learn a little something about what youre talking about!

Now I know what you’re thinking, how do I know it’s spam? The clue was in the commenter name, and in the fact that the exact same drivel shows up on a load more blogs in a Google search. My blog isn’t immature ranting…it’s just pointless.

And Other News

Our top story this week, Michelle and Tom are moving house! Into something closely resembling my childhood dream home, in fact, which is very exciting. It’s even got a big garden and a shed to keep our as-yet-nonexistent garden tools in. Or to play hide-and-seek in, we’ll see how it goes.

As a result we’ll be lacking internet for about a week and trying to make up for it by *hisssssss* spending time with each other instead. Clients have been informed, a notice of absence is up on the contact page, if I missed anyone out I apologise. The blog may or may not lie dormant for a week and a bit, depending on how much t’internet access I can blag during the week.

Upon my triumphant return to the world of the living (living geeks, at any rate), there are exciting plans afoot. First of all, my first official free WordPress theme release is coming up. I’m also going to be hiring a virtual assistant, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and never quite taken the plunge. Lastly I’ve just released a tutorials blog for people trying to make their own business websites, based on how much fun I’ve had writing stuff for site owners so far.

See you soon!

p.s. yay shed!

This is the last post in my How to Choose a Web Designer series, and it’s coming to you a day late because we’re moving house this weekend and I’m mostly running around in a panic rather than writing blog posts. So far we’ve covered the different kinds of services people call “web design” and which of them you might actually need, how to judge a designer on their portfolio so you can make an informed comparison, and what sort of questions you should be asking someone you’re considering for the job. In this final part, I’ll go through some important things to bear in mind when making your final decision.

Price

Obviously this is one of the first things you’ll want to know, and it’s tempting to just go for the cheapest deal you can. Some portfolio sites you come across will have guide prices listed, some will not, personally I don’t believe there’s something inherently “bad” about making prices transparent but statistically bad designers will do this more often than good so just be wary.

Don’t let a low price fool you, either, a custom design from a terrible designer for $100 is not a good idea when you can buy a well-designed template for $30 and just put your logo on it.

One more consideration, price-wise, is whether they charge hourly or per-project. Project pricing has the advantage that you know exactly what the costs will be, whereas hourly has the advantage that you only pay for however much time is spent. It’s a delicate balance, I prefer project pricing for the certainty of it.

Personality

It’s actually quite important when you’re working with someone online that you don’t detest their very existence! After a couple of emails discussing your project you should get a feel for who is overly formal, who is a bit too informal and jokey (like me!) and who you generally feel comfortable talking to.

Relevant Experience

It’s all well and good hiring someone who creates amazing illustrated blog headers, but if you’re looking for a functional company site make sure they do that too. And so on!

Bringing it all together

If your budget is low, what you’re probably looking for is someone who can do the majority of your site themselves (ie a designer/developer), who works on a project basis rather than hourly, and who has a portfolio with similar projects to your own that have turned out well. If they’ve not worked on your type of site before, the design could end up needing lots of tweaking/revisions and going over-budget.

If your budget is more flexible, you have more choice. Whether to hire design and development separately is up to you, and will depend on whether you can find someone with all the necessary skills that you feel comfortable working with.

In the end, only you can know exactly which things are most important to you. Some combination of the above should go a long way to helping you decide, however. If the series has given you something to think about, or you need more guidance, feel free to leave a comment.

Writing an eBook is something I’ve been interested in doing for a looooong time, and I’m a compulsive newsletter-signer-upper, so signing up to this one to get a free eBook on how to write an eBook just seemed to make sense. eBooks the Smart Way by Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income.

Actually, just read his whole blog, it’s awesome.

The problem

I wanted to run a function on admin_init, which would need arguments passed as an array. Running the function is easy enough:

[php]
add_action( ‘admin_init’, ‘my_function’);

function my_function() {
//some code here
}
[/php]

Add_action does accept a third parameter, but it’s not what I hoped it was. Instead it’s the number of arguments your function can accept. So how do you actually pass these arguments?

My solution

The answer appears to be using do_action, which is something I’d never personally worked with before, and using two functions. The first parameter of do_action is the hook name, followed by any arguments you want to pass.

[php]
add_action( ‘admin_init’, ‘argument_function’);

add_action( ‘my_hook’, ‘my_function’);

function my_function($argument) {
//some code here
}

function argument_function() {
$argument = ‘something’;
do_action(‘my hook’, $argument);
}
[/php]

Since I want to run my main function on admin_init, this is essentially a chain reaction.

The second add_action defines a custom hook, rather than one of the built-in WordPress ones, which I’m calling my_hook. On admin_init my argument_function is called, which passes the argument to my custom hook using do_action, which in turn triggers my_function but includes that argument.

If that last paragraph didn’t make your head explode, there’s one more thing to bear in mind. The third parameter of add_action is, as I mentioned, the number of accepted arguments. This defaults to 1, which is why it’s not needed in my example. If you’re passing more than one argument, you must be sure the number in that third parameter and the number of arguments being passed is the same, or the sky will fall down. No exaggeration.

There’s probably a better way to do this, but if so the documentation is scarce. It works, which is the main thing. If this helped you out, or if I’m doing it backwards, please leave a comment and let me know!

So you’ve found a company or a designer, they have the skills you need, and you like the look of their portfolio. Now it’s time to actually approach them with your project. This is a handy (not exhaustive by any means) list of things to ask and/or look out for.

What CMS do you suggest?

Bonus link: Choosing a CMS – does your site actually need one?

A lot of companies still try to get away with offering static sites. I’m not saying a CMS is needed in 100% of cases (it’s probably more like 99.9%), but even if you only change content once a year isn’t it better to be able to do that yourself rather than pay extra for someone else to do it? I’ve had a few clients who started off on this kind of deal from someone and then decided to add a blog, or other regularly updated content, meaning they needed me to port the entire site over to a CMS. Better to just get it built on one in the first place, methinks.

Some people will tell you they have an in-house CMS. This is fine, though may be more expensive. It’s often more tailored to your needs though can equally be more clunky and unintuitive. Ask for a demo and judge for yourself.

Others will use a pre-existing solution. WordPress is probably one of the more common ones you’ll see being suggested because it’s simple, powerful and free but there are more complex solutions (Drupal, Joomla et al) as well as much more basic ones too (CushyCMS).

Anyone with your best interests in mind will suggest what’s right for you, and not just whichever they personally prefer.

Which browsers do you support?

This is pretty controversial, but tells you a lot about the company/person you’re dealing with. The gist is that new, better technologies won’t work on old out-of-date browsers. The main culprit here, and bane of web developers everywhere, is Internet Explorer 6. The reason it’s still an issue is that many large companies won’t upgrade, seeing it as unnecessary expense. Therefore the audience share is much higher than usual and websites must be “dumbed down” if they’re going to be viewable by everyone.

Support for IE6 varies. Some prefer to stop supporting it altogether, reasoning that if the entire internet breaks for them these companies will be forced to upgrade. Others see it as their duty to support as many browsers as possible.

Browser support affects your decision in two ways:

What kind of site are you running? If it’s primarily aimed at corporate types, IE6 support is probably the way to go. If you’re aiming for the young hip market you can pretty much forget about it.

How much are you willing to pay? Fixing problems in older browsers takes more development time, and therefore costs more. Will the percentage of your target audience stuck on IE6 be worth the extra money?

Do you ever use tables for page layout?

If they answer “yes” to this, just run as far away as you can. You don’t even need to know the specifics of why, it’s probably the biggest red flag they could possibly wave at you other than “well it’s not me doing the actual work, it’s my daughter, but she’s really creative and her nursery teacher says she definitely has talent”.

A few other bits

If you’re quoted an hourly rate, be sure to get an estimate timescale too. If it’s per-project, make sure you understand exactly what would be included, and what wouldn’t. You don’t want to end up in a situation where you’re ready to go ahead, only to find out at the last possible second when looking at the contract that they don’t include setting up the site on your server and you’ll need to hire someone else to do that.

Speaking of contracts, make sure they use a contract! Just ask outright, or see if they offer an example on their site anywhere. You may think working with someone with no contract gives you an opportunity to be….unscrupulous…but it gives them the exact same thing.

You may also want to find out their usual working hours, not for any nefarious purposes but just so you know what to expect when emailing questions at various times of the day. Different countries are on different times, after all, and I’m sure I’m not the only freelancer who uses her career as an excuse to work all night and sleep all morning!

I recently had cause to build a review site where reviews were a separate node rather than a comment or just a little widget, and the node being reviewed needed to show an average rating.  I knew Fivestar could do this, but it would have taken a lot longer to figure out how without coming across this fantastic step-by-step tutorial (PDF).

Disclaimer: The tutorial covers two main scenarios and I can only vouch for the first one, but it worked perfectly so I’ve no reason to suspect the second will not.

Unfortunately, as so often in life, this has fallen by the wayside a smidge due to client work and other more immediate concerns.

We’re moving house in a couple of weeks and, in my mind, this is a good time for a fresh start where work is concerned. I’ve already completed (or at least made progress on) personal projects that have been going stale for months or even years, and it’s finally time to look seriously at theme authoring.

My conclusion?

If I’m going to create many themes, they’re almost all going to need the same building blocks. I need a theme framework! Since it’s for my personal use, and because it will be an awesome learning experience, I plan to create my own framework as a basis for all my future themes. This way when life gets too hectic again, building a new theme won’t actually take as long! It’s genius!

I’ll blog the experience as I go, since it’s very much a “start from scratch and figure it out as I go along” situation. You never know, maybe I’ll encounter problems and solutions that can help others too.

The planning stage

Sitting down with my notebook and a pencil, the temptation was to get carried away. This is my usual technique and it never ends well, so I’m making a conscious effort to rein those urges in and list only the features that will definitely be needed across all themes.

Structure - Obviously I’ll need some base HTML and CSS that can cope with most of the standard page layouts, including a CSS reset of course.

Theme options – The options page on each of my themes should follow the same layout, so I’ll need to design that at some point early on since it dictates the markup to a certain extent. I’ll need the usual logo and favicon uploads, analytics field, theme switcher etc as standard and an easy way for the themes to add their own sections/fields to the page.

Widgets - I also decided to include some built-in widgets with the framework. Twitter, Flickr and ad widgets are very common, and if they’re part of the framework I won’t be reinventing the wheel on each theme. They’re definitely in.

Shortcodes - I wasn’t sure about adding in a shortcode generator, after all it’s a fair bit of extra work and most premium themes still rely on having the user type any shortcodes they’re using. I’d like this to be as user-friendly as possible, however, so a shortcode generator will in theory be worth its weight in gold. It’ll include the usual suspects; columns, buttons, alert boxes, fancy quotes and so on.

Gallery - The debate about whether to remove the default gallery shortcode to make way for a custom one in each theme is still raging. Hmm. Decisions, decisions.

Since this framework is a personal thing, and I personally can’t stand working with child themes,  it’ll be more like a folder dropped into each new theme. I have no idea whether this is good or bad practise, or if it doesn’t matter either way, but it’s my framework so there!

It needs a name

So what if only I will ever use it? Nothing is ever official until it has a name! Anyway, after seriously considering naming it after a pet I decided on something just that little bit geekier.

My framework of awesomeness shall henceforth be known as….AMINO! (get it? get it? hur)

Stand by for further updates as I do everything backwards and make it up as I go along, this will be a really fun experiment.