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Realizing a Dream
My class starts Monday, through the University of Wyoming. I am not TAKING the class, I am teaching it, through their outreach program. I am not a licensed teacher. I have no post-secondary education to speak of (well, a drama course I took at the local community college when I was in highschool, but I don’t think that counts!). So this is a cool thing for me, especially since I was originally approached by them to do a course in web design.
The class was not highly promoted, and we have just a few students taking it. The Outreach Coordinator called today to ask if I still wanted to do it, or if I thought there were too few students. I told him that I’d do it. It is a necessary step for me, I need the experience, and this opportunity will help me polish my courses and add value to them.
Besides, small classes are fun. With web design, when you are building an actual project, you can help the students in a more personal way. The lessons can be adapted to their specific needs instead of just generic. That is cool. They’ll get more out of it.
I’ve done a lot of teaching, but never something like this. I’ve done individual tutoring, and workshop presentations, and short classes. But this one is quite different. 12 classes, each one building on the next, and no supplied curriculum. I had to write it myself. Would have been an overwhelming task if I had not already had so much of it done.
I asked the Outreach Coordinator whether there were enough students to justify the class for the college. They said this class, they’d run anyway, because they do not have a web development degree program, or anyone who teaches it on campus. They want to offer this through the outreach department on a regular basis.
So now I just need to live up to their expectations. I know I have the ability, and the knowledge. I just have to be able to present it in an organized and understandable way.
And I know that I cannot do this without the help of the Lord.
Volunteering When You Don’t Have Time
Somehow I always seem to open my mouth and volunteer when I really DON’T have time to volunteer! But sometimes I just cannot let a job NOT be done.
We are in one of those phases where we have a lot of fish in the pool, sniffing the bait, but nobody is biting. Oh, we have several pending contracts, but we don’t really believe that the money is coming in until it gets here! Web Design is just like that.
I rebuilt my Carry to Term site about two months ago. Stuck it in Joomla. Seemed to have more potential that way, and better options for encouraging people to talk to us and ask for help and support. I stuck a forum in there. It has not been used yet.
A few days ago, a lady who contacted me when I was pregnant with Sidney did so again. She is finishing the book she started then. She’d like more ability to reach people who have received negative prenatal diagnoses too. So it appears that the site that I rebuilt will be needed and used. Kinda cool, since I had just come to the conclusion that I had a site that needed a network of people to run it, and she comes and says she has a network of people with no site to run. Pretty cool how God works those things out.
And then I volunteered to build her a blog and a new site framework to sell the book. I’m sure I’ll find the time to fit it in, but the painting job we are trying to finish just may suffer a bit!
Now, if I can just give away a few more websites… anyone out there ready to raise a hand and shout, “Pick me!”?
Two New Experiments
Well, after making the decision to rebuild Megafamilies and Natural Diabetics, I finally got the job done. The new sites are functioning well, and are two of the best sites I’ve built in a content management system. We’ll see where they go now, since they have the ability to handle much more visitor interaction than the previous structure.
Taking a site out of a static HTML structure and putting it into a CMS is complex. It involves setting up the CMS, then transferring the content in page by page. In this instance, I also had to restructure the site layout for the Diabetes site – it had grown too large for the original simple link structure.
Once that was done, and the site ready to launch, I had to set up redirects for every link – old page to new page. That was not hard, just tedious. But doing that means that when someone tries to visit one of the old pages, they’ll get sent to the new one instead.
Google income dropped slightly during the transition, then picked right back up again. We’ll see if it gets better or worse, and how the changes affect the traffic, and income. I’ve changed sites before, but they have not been ones with strong traffic trends or AdSense earnings.
You can see the results at: http://www.naturaldiabetics.com, or http://www.megafamilies.com.
The Difference Between Privilege and Responsibility
His eyes lit up as the knife was held out to him. His first chance to use the knife to divide something. He eyed the pie carefully, considering how he could cut it into six pieces while still reserving the largest piece for himself. He poised the knife to cut, just a little off center, and then froze as he heard his mother utter these words:
“You have to take the smallest piece.”
Suddenly his entire goal shifted. From the goal of getting more, he now has the goal of being scrupulously accurate! He now has a responsibility to be fair, added to what he thought was merely a privilege! He considers more carefully, and checks all options before he makes the first cut.
He learns more as time goes on, about being the one with the responsibility for the wellbeing of more than just himself. And much of it goes back to those words on the first occasion that he was entrusted with the knife – “You have to take the smallest piece.” He learns that even when he tries his hardest, sometimes inaccuracies WILL happen. And that he must accept the outcome even when there was no fault on his part. Sometimes there are consequences that we don’t intend, that we have to make up for anyway. We musn’t require others to do that for us.
Privilege is often thought of as something ungoverned. It is only as time goes on and we mature that we realize that it comes with a price, and that it must be earned. And that the hidden responsibilities that go along with it are far weightier than we had originally considered.
In business, this marks the difference between true integrity, and the mere appearance of it. The appearance considers only what they perceive that people will notice, while in the background, retaining the thought, “How can I get a bigger piece than they do without making it LOOK like I did it on purpose?”. True integrity means you always take the smaller piece when you were responsible for creating the pieces. That you look out for the interests of your clients, associates, and even your competitors. That the Golden Rule is carried through every level of everything you do.
The result is pretty awesome – customers who come back again and again because they know you will never cheat them. And beyond that, they know that you will consider their needs and situations as carefully as you consider your own. All other things being equal, such a business will always do better than the competition.
Gone to Seed
We planted, and watered, and watered, and watered, and weeded, and watered. And just the squash came up. We watered some more, and replanted, and some lettuce came up. The deer ate it. We put stinky fertilizer around it. The deer left it alone.
This summer was hot. And stormy. For three weeks we had blazing heat. Right about the time we planted, of course. So the seeds got cooked before they could sprout. The soil is clay, so heat just bakes it and the soil holds the warmth.
The zucchini bore fruit. So did the squash. But the squash did not pollinate correctly, so it did not mature. The cucumbers grew, and we had enough cucumbers to eat and give away. Ah… the feeling of wealth that comes when you have something everyone else wants, that you can share!
Finally the beans and more lettuce came up. Along with about 6 beets. And countless tumbleweeds. Not to be outdone by the tumbleweeds, the grass, of course, sprouted and hollered for attention. Grass always does.
It is autumn in Wyoming. It comes early here. The storms are back, and the wind is picking up. The kids are a little less enthusiastic about watering the garden now, so it is not bearing as well. The weeds are attempting to come into their own. We are battling them, but it is a tough battle. And some of the plants want to go to seed. Growth, yes, but not USEFUL growth right now, since we don’t WANT seeds, we want fresh veggies.
Again the comparison to business is too strong to ignore. Have I let it go to seed – have I let it grow into something I did not want, and have no use for, at the expense of something I do need? Have the weeds of discouragement, disorganization, and distraction taken over and sapped the strength from the desired growth?
And if so, what do I do about it? I think it is easier to spot the problems than it is to actually SOLVE them. A plan. Some action. Good action.
Tomorrow WILL be better.
Flash Really Ain’t Bad
You hear it all the time – Flash interferes with SEO, Flash slows down a site, Flash is expensive, Flash won’t benefit most sites it is on. And while all this is true, in many situations, there is another side – that is the wise use of Flash.
Now, let us be plain about just what we are discussing. Part of the confusion about Flash comes down to the fact that people are lumping everything Flash together. There are actually three basic uses that are totally different:
1. Flash INTROS. When a site is created with a doorway or home page that is nothing but Flash. No meaningful text, no useful information other than this “loading” bar, and then a movie which, more often than not, really doesn’t tell you anything helpful. These pages are all but invisible to search engines, and to people with visual disabilities. A double whammy.
2. Flash SITES. Even worse. Like an entire site full of intro pages. Links built in Flash are invisible to search engines and to the visually disabled, or to anyone who does not have the right plugin. In other words, if the person cannot view the site on your terms, it is useless to them. It is also extremely slow, which translates as annoying.
3. Flash ELEMENTS. This is just a box on the page, maybe the header, maybe part of the page lower down, which has an animation in it. Nice for galleries, short visual messages, etc. All of the disadvantages that intros and sites have are eliminated, except for the speed issue. Even that is mitigated, because there are other things on the page for the visitor to see. There is content for the search engines, text for the blind to be able to grab with a text reader, and a potential enhancement to the appeal of the page to everyone else.
Now, that said, it still is not the “best” thing for every site. Most sites we build would not benefit from video animations at this time. Some do – I mean, if you are in a high end market that targets certain personality profiles, then video is a definite enhancement. For others though, it makes no difference, and therefore, cannot be a justifiable expenditure.
To include it in a site, we have to be reasonably certain that it will increase the monetary gain of the site owner – enough to offset the cost of including it. And there is an expense to be considered. Flash element creation requires either specialized skills and software, or simplified software that is purchased on a single site user license basis. So either way, there is going to be a cost. For a few businesses, you can see immediately that the cost would be justifiable. A few are equivocal, and others you can say with certainty that there would be no benefit.
Sites that WOULD benefit:
- Any site selling videos.
- Any site selling video production services.
- Any site selling high end graphic design services.
- Sites promoting highly visual products or services.
- Sites promoting to a market that is impatient and largely visual, such as video gamers.
- Sites selling action related items or services.
- And other sites where motion is a definite enhancement to a sales message.
Sites that might benefit – worth using only if the site owner can afford it:
- Sites selling trendy items.
- Sites selling visually appealing items that are artistic in nature, but not high end.
- Sites catering to teens or college age visitors.
- Sites promoting design services where displaying a range of styles in a single place is helpful.
- Sites selling unique and visually identifiable merchandise.
Sites that are unlikely to benefit from Flash:
- Those selling products that are not easily identifiable through a picture.
- Sites owned by people on an extremely tight budget – they can get more bang for the buck in other ways.
- Sites catering to a frugal crowd – Flash looks expensive, and detracts from the message.
- Sites that target the visually impaired.
- Any site for which there is no strong purpose in the imagery and content of an animated or video clip.
Flash can be a great enhancement, and indeed a good investment for some websites. Of course, it also depends on what you DO with it – whether you are just throwing something in to throw something in, or whether you have a purpose, a plan, and a concept which will actually add to the quality of the site! Assuming it is done well, a certain percentage of sites can benefit from wisely used Flash elements.
And, technology is changing all the time. The standards by which we measure today will certainly change in a year or two. As internet speeds increase, and the low end moves up, we’ll have more options for using more resource intensive elements. As Flash evolves, someone is BOUND to create a means of coding to overcome the accessibility and SEO limitations. Until then though, it pays to understand what the limitations are, and how to work around them in effective ways.
From Durable, to Consumable
We are watching an evolution in our marketplaces. It has been happening for many years, and it has gained a little attention, but perhaps not what it should.
Manufacturers are changing durable goods, to consumbable goods. Durable goods are those that last long enough that purchases are infrequent. Consumable goods are those that we “use up”, and purchase more of. Traditionally, durable goods included clothing, tools, appliances, equipment, etc. Today, we see a trend, inspired partly by greed, to make durable goods consumables.
Consider – How long does clothing last now, compared to how long it lasted 20 years ago? A computer, once a 5-10 year purchase, is now a 1-3 year purchase. Appliances break and are discarded in 2-3 years. Washers and dryers, which once had a 10 year warranty, now have a 1 year warranty. Vacuum cleaners have plastic parts, and wear out in a very short time under use within a family (one of ours lasted just 4 months, and it was not abused). Athletic shoes are made to last “one season” – that is, 3-4 months.
Prices have come down on many of these items, but durability has definitely taken some heavy hits. We live in a plastic world – I don’t mind plastic in general, if it is tough plastic. But many of the items that are being made from plastic are being made from plastic that is too weak to stand up to the average use of the product.
We’ve also seen a trend of lowering the prices of durable goods, while increasing the price of their related consumables. Printers are the best example of this – A printer used to cost several hundred dollars, but the ink cost $20 for a large cartridge. Today’s cartridges cost between $20 and $45, and hold less than a quarter of the ink the old ones held. But printers are cheap. In fact, printers are SO cheap, that it was once less expensive for us to purchase a new printer on sale than it was for us to replace the ink cartridges!
A durable good allows a manufacturer to profit just once per customer, for a specific period of time. A consumable good has them coming back, again and again. But the cost of making “disposable” goods in place of durable goods runs through more than just our pocketbooks. Environmentally, it has a huge impact. And it has a negative affect on society as a whole, in perpetuating the myth that nothing is permanent, and that if something bugs you, just throw it away.
Some say this is just a reflection of the society we live in. It should not be. The trend is disturbing, and continued, will have disastrous effects on the ability of families and small businesses to survive. If you have to not only plan to get something you need the first time, but also to afford to replace it every year, your budget is quickly out of control.
I see no solution though. I think in this instance, greed will out.
The Flu… and the Flu again, and Something Else
Eavesdropping on our family would be horridly unexciting. The sounds lately consist mostly of sniffs, coughs, harrumphs, snorts, low pitched nasal voices, and frequent whining. When everybody is sick, everybody has to do their chores anyway!
David did it. He came home from camp with a pretty severe respiratory virus. Erik got it. Then he got something else. Then he got a cold, all in rapid succession. Then David got the cold, Alex got a fever and headache, then Adriene, then Betsy, and about the time that Alex got the cold, Kevin and I came down with the fever and aches. No cough yet. I’m TIRED of everybody being sick. I’m tired of the sounds of mucus being expelled from bodily orifices. I’m tired of running out of Kleenex! Our acetaminophen and ibuprofen budget is out of control!
So Kevin and I, neither one feeling too good, tried to build a small porch today for a trailer house. Both of us moving slowly, worn out. Like a bad carpentry show in slow motion. But being self-employed, you work. You work even when you feel sick, as long as you are able. Nobody will pay us to stay home and wrap up in a blanket and force fluids. If we don’t work, there is no income. And we need income! The result was solid – but it wasn’t much work for a whole day!
We’ve been enjoying life around the illness though. It is good to have David home, with his humor and helpfulness. I took him to pick up his brand-new glasses yesterday. He asked me how fragile the filament was that held the lense in on the bottom. I told him I though it must be pretty sturdy, after all, Kevin has had a pair of glasses with half frames for about 4 years, and it has never broken. On the way home, after getting the glasses, David made an attempt to adjust the frames, and pulled the wrong way. The filament on the left frame snapped before we were even halfway home (it is an hour drive home, but STILL!). He sat there feeling really foolish, with a brand new pair of glasses with just one lens. He contemplated the possibilities of monocles – and abandoned the idea when holding the lens in with just his eyebrow and cheekbone gave him a cramp. The glasses lay in his other hand looking pathetic. After about 10 minutes, he perked up, and said, “Maybe I could just tell the other kids that I got contacts!”
The kids started homeschool yesterday. David is a great help with it, and Erik is now learning to tutor his siblings also. I was proud of them, they got right to their schoolwork without anyone having to tell them to, and they worked diligently to finish their lessons TWO DAYS IN A ROW! I know that the honeymoon is going to be over probably Thursday. After that, there will be the usual “I can’t find my pencil”, and “I didn’t eat breakfast yet!”.
And in all of this, I made two critical business decisions. The two sites I’ve had for sale forever, which are worth every bit I am asking (hey, they make me money… people think I’m gonna GIVE them away?), which I get LOTS of nibbles about, but which everyone runs from when they realize I want an actual amount of money for it, are no longer for sale. I’ve decided to rebuild them in a CMS, so I can expand their features. A monstrous amount of work, no idea HOW I’ll fit it in, but know that I have to so they can keep earning for us. Yes, that was two business decisions… keep one, keep the other. Two choices.
We’ll also be doing a booth at the Casper Events Center for the Idea Expo. This is our target market, and it makes sense. It is pricier than our usual, but should be worth it. This is one of those scary things though – going out on a limb to gather the resources to get everything together for it. Gotta go out on a limb to get the best fruit though.
Our son reports for his mission on the 24th of October. The same day our daughter is scheduled to ship out to Kuwait, for training to go into Iraq. Bit of an irony, really.
The Value of Experience
“There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”
Will Rogers
I grew up on a farm… And while the particularly painful experience mentioned by Will Rogers was one I was able to avoid (by happy education from the example of someone else!), I know the pain of having to learn certain hard lessons myself.
My comfort is, that even Christ had to learn by experience. He volunteered. Yet in the Garden it was still unexpectedly hard. Not that He was unwilling – just that the reality of experiencing it was so much more agonizing than He could have imagined.
I am now in a position of having a lot of experience with specific things. I’ve set up shopping carts enough to know the common pitfalls. I’ve set up enough websites for enough customers that I have a good idea of what they might do in response to various challenges, and to know that if I leave certain doors open, a good percentage of clients will walk through, not out of an intent to harm, but just because it is easier. So I now close those doors, and I now avoid certain types of cart setups.
Those are things I could only learn by experience. And while I can pass on a good deal of what I have learned, some of it won’t make sense until my students SEE it. They must see the reality to understand the instruction fully. What they envision in their minds prior to the experience won’t be quite like the reality.
Experience teaches us the nuances of working with people in our specific area or culture. It teaches us the particulars of a changing world that is slightly different than the world we were taught about – as will always be the case since life IS change. Experience teaches us not only what to watch out for, but how to be prepared for future potentials.
If you have never built a government website, you may not know that there are particular legal requirements, at all levels, and specific sustainability issues which apply to government sites. I know this because I have learned the hard way. It wasn’t something someone else COULD have taught me, because the specialty that I occupy did not exist when I was learning it. Had I been able to rely on the experience of others while I was learning that, it would have saved me, and someone else, some heartache. Nothing catastrophic, but it would have been better if I had not had to learn the hard way.
Experience is what makes you a true expert. But it won’t make you an expert in everything – only in the things you are experienced with, that you have learned from.
Green apples do give one the runs.
Tongues do stick to mailboxes.
Siblings do become your best friends once you are grown.
Mom and Dad do get smarter as you get older.
Dumping white gas on a fire is not a smart idea.
These are the truths that we learn by experience – or by watching our little brother try to prove everyone wrong. So who are you… the observer, or the little brother?
I love it when people call me a genius…
Of course, we can’t all be geniuses all the time, and I have to keep reminding myself that I’m really just another struggling microbusiness owner who gets it right a lot, but who also messes up enough that sometimes it is hard to remember that I DO get it right a lot!
We’ll our latest stroke of brilliance is subscription based web services. We didn’t want to try that for YEARS, because if you enter into a contract with someone where you give them everything and they pay you back over time, you set yourself up to be suckered, unless you go into the whole financing contract route, which takes more lawyers than we can afford, and which has additional regulations which I really don’t have time to learn. Ok… you can breathe now, I’m done with that incredibly long sentence!
Anyway, we found a way to do it which reduces our risks of getting burned to an acceptable level. Perhaps a singed eyebrow or blister now and again, but no missing limbs or need for skin grafts. I can live with that, it’s no worse than the risk of going outside in the summertime and getting a nasty sunburn up here at high altitude.
One of the other aspects to it is that we had to make it actually an ongoing SERVICE, not just a fix it and forget it sort of thing. We had to continue to provide value so our clients did not get tired of paying us. If we gave them good value at the outset, and kept good value there even after the terms of the contract were filled, then they’d continue to pay us every month, even when they could move their site somewhere else and NOT pay us that amount.
We’re pretty excited about Better Instant Website now. Because we’ve not only got services where you can build your own site very easily with our expertise and design skills behind you, but you can also choose full service now if you want to. I love it when we can roll out something that is really high value, and still affordable for our target clients.
Every business ought to have that feeling now and again, and everybody ought to get told that they are a genius at least once in a while. Even if you know you aren’t, it makes you feel like you ARE, at least for a bit!
Pretty Sad
I met with them one morning, in their elegant hotel. It was tastefully decorated – terrific accent colors, deep wood tones, lovely soft-hued wallpaper. It would be so easy to create a website that echoed that easy elegance, that took elements right from the hotel to craft a site that felt like you were taking a virtual visit in the hotel.
I did not impress them. I am just a country web designer to them. They went with a city firm instead. They paid much more than I would have charged. I saw the result last night. It made me want to cry. It has been on my mind ever since.
It is a completely professional design. And that is all. It fails to reflect the elegance and character of the hotel. It looks rather sterile, except for a single texture in one small part of the design where an attempt was made to incorporate a pattern similar to the wallpaper, but the wrong color. It looks like a man tried to design something a woman would like.
The site has flash where it does no good. It has an entrance splash screen, which does nothing for the site other than waste time getting where people really want to go. It has no SEO AT ALL. The copy was written by someone who is not natively from the US, and uses phrases that are not offensive in their native country, but which are offensive and crass in the US. The text is not formatted at all (not even any spaces between paragraphs), there are no legal statements anywhere on the site. There are personal photos where there need to be hotel photos, and one personal photo says, “click to enlarge”. The room photos do not have an enlargement option. Some photos are obviously stock photos (nothing like the land around the hotel). The site organization is cumbersome and awkward – you have to go three or four clicks deep to get at some info that should be at the top, while some of the info at the top is secondary information.
How does one deal with that? When you do something different, which nobody understands well enough to know what they need. When you do it right, and everyone else whom they’d get the service from does only one facet, but the client does not know that there ARE multiple parts to the job. When the client feels they know all they need in one area, but where cultural or web differences mean they don’t know what they think they know.
I suppose they got what they paid for. They paid for high end features, but they did so at the expense of minimal function. Sad.
This is not the first time we’ve encountered small and micro businesses who got snookered, because they did not understand what they needed, or what the industry would provide or leave off. I am at a loss as to how to promote in a way that helps people understand this. That there is more to web design than an expensive design. That the other services which are needed WON’T be explained to them, nor will they be included from most firms. They’ll expect the business owner to KNOW that, and to hire someone else for everything else, or they’ll hope they don’t notice what is missing (sadly, this is true).
So now I am building a site for their competitors. There will be no question as to which site performs better. The little country motel that I’ll be working with will have a site that outperforms the expensive site that represents the hotel. And it will do it for half the price.
Business is Like a Vegetable Garden
We planted a garden again for the first time in about 8 years. Living at
high altitude, gardening is doubly difficult. Some of my kids have never
gardened before, so they are learning fresh.
First, you plan the garden. Where will you put it so it has the best
chance of succeeding? Which crops will you grow? If you choose the wrong
ones for your area, or for your soil, they’ll either die, or be twice as
hard to grow. And you make sure that the entire plan is actually doable
– not so big you can’t keep up with it, big enough to make it worth your
while, and designed and laid out so that it will be as easy to maintain
as possible. You might think about mulch, or pest management, or other
long term maintenance items, and how to implement wise timesavers to
keep it all as efficient as possible.
Then, you prepare the ground. You have to dig a lot, and then you have
to take some crap and use it for good rather than just wallowing in it.
You may need some help, or to borrow a tool or two.
Next, you get in and sow some seeds – you don’t know which ones will
sprout and which ones will die, so you throw a few extra into each hole.
Then you water. And water. And water. For three weeks you wait to see
signs of anything coming of what you already spent so much time doing.
Just about the time the sprouts start to show, some weeds crop up. They
can just suck the life out of the garden if you don’t nip them quick. So
you KEEP watering, and you start weeding. It can get discouraging at
this point, but that is the requirement of gardening, so you do it.
Eventually you have nice plants that look just great. Your garden, if
tended right, begins to show signs that it is going to give you a
reward. Because you still just have potentials, no vegetables. At this
point though, it is easy to keep going because you can see that it is
likely to pay off – as long as you don’t get complacent and slow down.
Eventually, the crops start to appear – small at first. Some can be
harvested early, but not too many. If you take too much too soon, you
miss out on the bumper crop!
And then the plants start to bear so much that you find yourself giving
away your hard earned results to anyone whom you think might enjoy them.
In the season of bounty, generosity feels just great, especially when
you realize that no matter how much zucchini you give away, there will
still be enough for you, even if you store as much as you have room for!
Business can be like that – but without winter coming to wipe it all out
at the end of the season. But where you put in months of work for a
garden, you put in years with a business.
I think as we have distanced ourselves from the soil, we’ve lost a few
of the inborn understandings that we once had – kids used to know from
raising animals and growing crops, that you had to give it a lot before
it would pay you back. How much feed and care and training do you give a
colt before you ever get to ride him?
So where is your garden? Have you sown enough seed? Have you watered it
after you sowed it? Did you weed it and tend it even when it wasn’t
certain that there would be a crop to reward you? And if your business
is producing a bumper crop, are you showering the needy with zucchini?
Gardening doesn't have to be that hard! No matter where you live, no matter how difficult your circumstances, you CAN grow a successful garden.
Life from the Garden: Grow Your Own Food Anywhere Practical and low cost options for container gardening, sprouting, small yards, edible landscaping, winter gardening, shady yards, and help for people who are getting started too late. Plenty of tips to simplify, save on work and expense.
