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Webmaster Elitism Part 3 – W3C Compliance
Many webmasters, and site owners make a big deal over W3C Compliance. It is actually an almost meaningless standard for small businesses (and most big ones) – and is always likely to be.
I expect these comments to raise a hailstorm of controversy. But I’ve not written this hastily, and I have the experience to back up what I am saying.
First of all, WC3 standards are created by a group of major players in the web industry. Microsoft is one of them. There are others. They have set standards for code – some of these standards are nothing more than common sense (things that good coders do anyway). They include such things as making sure all tags are closed, and that certain kinds of tags are used to go forward. Others are completely nonsensical, apparently chosen by someone who had the power to say, “That one”.
The original goal was to enhance predictability across browsers. From the beginning, browsers interpreted code differently – and still do in spite of W3C Standards. Web designers have long been counseled to get pages to look GOOD in all browsers, but not to attempt to get them to look identical, because they simply render differently. It was bad enough when web pages were composed primarily of HTML, but now with a high usage of JavaScript, CSS, and other languages, the problem is much more of an issue.
When checking for W3C compliance, gross errors are rarely an issue. I mean, unclosed tags will cause rendering problems, so they don’t usually get past a designer anyway. Huge issues are easy to spot because they cause issues that are visible on the page. But there are a ton of fussy, immaterial little things which do not affect output, do not affect usability, and do not affect anything that matters to anyone, and which can be difficult to solve for a number of reasons.
Site development funds are supposed to be channeled first to areas where the site owner can see an appreciable ROI (Return on Investment). If they cannot, then it should be left out unless a site owner has money to burn and insists. Obsessing about compliance can burn money with no ROI at all.
Now, the real problems come in with four issues:
1. The prevalence of code checkers and buzz about compliance has lead many site owners to believe that somehow their site is superior if it is W3C compliant. Sadly, that isn’t true at all. In fact, a site that passes may be a WORSE site than one that does not, because in general, W3C compliance does not have anything to do with the things that matter most – such as suitable design, readable text, good images, search engine optimization, etc. I’ll repeat that – W3C compliance has NO effect whatsoever on SEO. This means a lot of site owners end up spending extra working out tweaky fussy irrelevant things to make a site W3C compliant, when in fact, it does nothing to enhance the site at all, in any way that matters. Judging on a basis of site owner ROI (Return on Investment), compulsive adherence to W3C compliance fails to deliver any increase whatsoever in enhanced profitability, but it can end up being more costly to implement. We’ve even had clients who insisted on a W3C compliant template, then went in and edited their own site and inserted non-compliant code, so even if a site starts out that way, it may not stay that way!
2. Browsers are not really W3C Compliant. In fact, Microsoft, one of the players in dictating the standards, consistently produces the LEAST compliant browser! It is clear in release after release, that compliance is not at the top of their list for development, because for every compliance issue they address, they introduce additional non-compliant issues. Microsoft has never been about being a team player, they’ve always been more about perpetuating their own way of doing things – one gets the distinct feeling that they are not on the board to comply with standards agreed upon, but to try to make sure THEIR way of doing things is included in the standard. They display only a token effort toward complying with the standard. If the standard is meaningless to them, then it is pretty well meaningless to anyone else. Because non-compliance by a browser means you CANNOT produce a 100% compliant site and have it function correctly, in many cases. A non-compliant browser may REQUIRE that you use non-compliant code to achieve certain goals. As long as browsers are non-compliant, rigid adherence to the standard is not practical, and in fact, is a little silly. And obsessing about compliance becomes merely a matter of elitism, not a matter of performance or anything else relevant to the ROI for the site owner.
3. The standard is changing. W3C standards are not a “write them once” endeavor. They are constantly evolving, because the code and usage are constantly evolving. And browsers have yet to catch up with the LAST standard, let alone move forward to the next one. This lag and delay means that while the original goal of developing a standard for web code that would enhance predictability across browsers was not a bad one, the practicality of realizing it is an impossibility.
4. Coding is incredibly complex. It is a language. This means that the usage and rules can NEVER be completely defined and absolute, any more than the English language can be. Just as a dictionary is always out of date, and just as grammar rules always have exceptions, and good writers always break the rules, coding rules can never possibly define every conceivable usage or combination. So any attempt to define standards ends up being an exercise in futility long term.
Do I think it is a complete waste of time? Not really. I just think that a healthy dose of common sense needs to be applied! I’ve seen template designers wallowing in apologies over a non-compliant bit of code in their template, when that was the only way they could get IE to behave. And I think it is silly that anyone in the industry would think that an apology was needed at all! I see new site owners running W3C checkers on their site and worrying about the errors, when they should be LOOKING at their site, and worrying about what is on the surface, because that is what their customers are seeing.
- It is possible to produce a site that functions predictably, looks good, works well, and earns money, that is not W3C Compliant – in fact, there are millions of them that do this.
- It is possible to produce a horrid site that is not indexable by search engines, that looks terrible, which customers hate, and which repels every person who visits it and fails to function predictably, and have that site pass the W3C Checkers with flying colors. In fact, there are millions of these out there too.
Code checkers cannot think. They can only look for specific technical issues, some of which matter, some of which do not. They cannot tell what is good, they cannot judge quality. And that is the problem with an arbitrary standard which creates rules, but cannot adjust those rules for practical and realistic situations.
It comes back to the bottom line. If what you are doing does not help the site owner earn better, then there isn’t any point in doing it, no matter how good a coder you had to become to do it. If it works for the intended purpose, it is good. A good coder will already be doing the Compliant things that really matter. Beyond that, they’ll be focusing their efforts where it pays the client to do so.
I anticipate a great deal of disagreement with my points. That is what blog comments are for.
An Excess of Negativity
It is so easy to find problems. It is sometimes wickedly satisfying to craft a scathing indictment of a bad idea. It is simpler to find problems than to spot achievements. And it is certainly easier to criticize than it is to find alternative solutions.
Sometimes the ability to speak and write ends up NOT being an asset. It is so easy to fall into the habit of writing critiques and finding fault, and using biting sarcasm instead of uplifting wit.
I think I’ve struggled with this my whole life. Learning the art of kind words, instead of sarcasm or criticism. My lesser nature would drag me into being a dark and unpleasant person if I allowed it to – and I’m sure that for some people who encounter only that side of me, I am already that. But I fight to keep the better side of me as the character that is growing. The growing group of people who actually think I am a nice person is encouragement that I may be on the right track, if I can just keep going and not backslide.
Each day, I try to find something to blog about. Some days it is easy, other days it is hard. And it is always easier to find something to complain about than to find something to teach or provoke productive thought.
What keeps me trying is the concept of becoming who I really want to be. I want to be someone better. I want to leave the world a better place because I was here. I want to touch lives and lift them just a little because I passed by. I know… it will take becoming someone quite a bit better than the person I am now.
Anyone can point a finger and criticize. But not everyone can propose solutions, encourage in spite of problems, and accept even when needed change doesn’t happen where they want it to. But I choose, a little bit at a time, who I am becoming, each time I poise my fingers over the keyboard, and each time I open my mouth.
Joomla Earns for Me, WordPress Doesn’t
Some of my friends are able to make money from WordPress sites. I have found that it is much harder to make money from WordPress sites than from Joomla or other dynamic systems. Oh, I don’t mean as a website owner, I mean as a website developer.
WordPress has more of a reputation for being “easy”, and for being “cheap”. So most people who come to us wanting WordPress solutions, expect to pay about half what they do for Joomla site services.
If WordPress really WERE easier to set up than Joomla, that would be ok. But it isn’t. It takes as much time to set up a simple site in WordPress as it does to set up a simple site in Joomla. Editing templates and controlling template display is actually harder in WordPress than it is in Joomla, and since Joomla does more out of the box than WordPress, I spend more time installing things on WordPress than I do on Joomla, and find that many things that clients want simply are not possible in WP.
We have automated some of our installation and configuration processes. This means we can now install a pre-configured Joomla install, along with the standard extensions, instantly, when the customer purchases. We are also automating updating processes for our systems – we are finding this a bit easier to do with Joomla than with WordPress, because Joomla generally has better separation between core code and the extensions.
WordPress also stores the site URL in the database. This means moving the site, or building it under a temp domain and then activating it under the final domain, is one step harder than it is with Joomla.
Overall, in the final analysis, I can simply earn far more with Joomla. We have timed both WordPress sites and Joomla sites, and find we spend almost EXACTLY the same amount of time on the sites, no matter which system they are built in. Creating custom templates takes exactly the same amount of time in either one, using the tools we use. But we can earn much more from the Joomla site – often two or three times as much. Our hourly profit on WP sites drops to such a low level, that it would be very difficult to sustain a growth business on what we’d earn from them.
We do intend to offer WP options, but they will be simply pre-configured options, with a custom template, and DIY options other than that. Doing that will provide an acceptable profit margin if we can generate sufficient volumes of installs. But other than that, we find that offering custom solutions in WordPress has been a losing proposition for our company.
I applaud those who have been able to work out a successful business model creating WP sites, but with our target market, and our other earning potentials, it has not been an option that allows us to earn as successfully as other systems.
I’m Not Working with Non-Profits Anymore
As a business grows, you really start to discover what is sustainable, and what is not, and who your time wasters are, and who your good clients are. Over time, it is only natural to want to have more of the good clients, and fewer of the bad ones.
About a year and a half ago, we stopped doing HTML sites. Because we discovered that the clients for those sites tended to be some of the more difficult ones to work with. They are less progressive, less decisive, and wanted more, for much less. And they tended to be less able to grasp that the site type they’d chosen had limitations that they did not want (in spite of our having warned them ahead of time). So, lower profit, higher hassle factor, and no benefit to anyone for the extra annoyance. Some quick analysis revealed that of about 20 contracts in progress, the 5 HTML sites we were working on accounted for more than half the time expenditures, but only a fifth of the income. We dropped those services. It was a good decision, we’ve never regretted it.
Lately, we’ve looked at our Non-Profit clients, and have come to a similar conclusion about them – they simply are not worth the hassle.
- They want more, for less.
- They are operated by boards which have a hard time making up their collective minds – so decisions take a VERY long time to get.
- The chief decisionmaker tends to be a director, and the non-profits we have dealt with have had changes to the directors so often that no decision has any degree of permanency. If a director makes a bad decision about the site, WE get the blame.
- They tend to be run by overworked people who never have the time to do their part of things – so we never have a satisfactory closing to the work we do – instead, it sits there half-finished, and the organization tends to want to blame us for the fact that their website is incomplete, when it is due to their inability to provide their part of things.
- The board members turn over so fast that nobody ever knows what was set up before, and what the terms were. They are too cheap to pay to have a manual written that would keep a record of it, and too hasty to ask – they are too busy trying to sweep out the old administration and make a clean slate to even try to move forward with what they have, they want to completely redo everything.
We dealt with a local organization, with this experience:
We met with them to discuss their situation. They had FOUR tacky websites out on the web (built in free web space, or donated by other individuals) – all incomplete, all started by one director or another, none of them done intellligently, all of them making them look bad. They stated their intention to make having a functional and useful website a priority.
It took over a year to get the initial contract. We presented the initial proposal in March of one year, met with them in October, and they finally signed the contract and check the following June.
We created the site design, and it was approved by the director and the board – ENTHUSIASTICALLY approved, I might add.
A month later, the director committed suicide. A new director was hired and came in, announcing she had a graphic design background, and stating that the website design just would not do. She redesigned it herself, and we coded it in. No financial compensation was made for our wasted time.
She declared her intention to make the website her FIRST priority, and was given a training session on the site. We gave an extra session, without compensation also.
She then asked us why we weren’t putting things in, and handed us a listing of organization members when we informed her that in order to put things in, we needed things to put in. Kevin spent three days entering them into the database. We told her that according to the contract, that took up the available content entry time. She said she’d never read the contract, so she had no idea what was included or not, and seemed put out that we would expect her to actually do any of the content entry (which makes one wonder just what she thought the training was for).
Two months later, they revised their member list, and sent it to us. We informed them that updating the list was not part of the contract – she again said she’d never read it. She and the office manager seemed shocked that we would not just update the list. We instructed them again in how to do it.
Six months later, no further progress had been made, but the director was let go. Somewhere along the line, they stopped paying their monthly fees. The new director came on board, we had a nice conversation with him about the state of things, and one bill was paid (no past dues were paid, only a single current payment was made). Payments then ceased again, and we learned later that the director went off to hire another web designer to rebuild a new site. Dumb – if they didn’t like it, all they had to do was FINISH it. If they didn’t like the template, it was switchable for a low fee. Instead, they decided to reinvent the wheel because they’d not finished putting the spokes on the first model and they didn’t like that it was crooked.
Eight months after this director took office, he resigned. A new director came in. We met with her, she told us the site was being handled elsewhere, but promised to pay something when we said that if the hosting was not paid we’d have to suspend the site. They assured us they’d never received ANY invoices, and that if they had, they’d have paid them.
In the mean time, our name is vilified because the website we built “doesn’t look good”, when all that is wrong is that they never put the content into the pages where it is needed (the contract stated that this was their responsibility to provide it, and that we would put in part, but they’d need to either put in the rest, or pay for us to do it). When the new director came in, he had a firm he wanted to work with, he never asked us whether there were simple solutions, and the other company just wanted to sell the new service.
They are no better off now than they were three years ago – they are considerably poorer financially, having paid now for two additional websites, neither one of which is fully functional, due to their own inability to focus on what needed done, and to consistently pursue the goal until it was completed. Their board is too short sighted to want to do anything more than slap a bandaid on the surface, they have no desire to actually solve the problem and find a sustainable solution.
The thing is, this is NOT an isolated experience, it is, sadly, fairly typical. We find things in common with all of the non-profits we work with, and it ends up being just too much of a hassle to keep the work, and too much of a risk that bad decisions on the part of one director will take our reputation down with it.
I just don’t have time in my life to have to pursue a contract for months on end, just to get a parsimonious contract where the organization pays less than everyone else, expects way more for it, and then assumes that we should be glad to get their patronage. I don’t have time to monitor their board and their directors so I can jump in every time something changes and tell them all the same thing we’ve already said 20 times before.
I have no patience anymore with trying to help solve problems for organizations that are carelessly causing the problems, and have no intention of ever doing things differently. There is no profit in it, but even if there were, I’d rather be working with people for whom a genuine difference is possible.
I like working with owner operators. I like working with webmasters. I like that they can remember what they have, and that they are careful about how they use it and about making the most of it.
We have one more site migration and redesign to do for a local non-profit, and ongoing maintenance and hosting for them, and for two other non-profits. We won’t be taking on any more.
The Delegation Trap
I am busy, and I need help. But to GET help, I have to either train someone else to do the things I don’t have time for, or I have to at least lay the groundwork for them to be able to help me – set up access for them, write instructions for what I want done, prep files and send them, etc.
Often, getting READY for someone to help actually takes longer than the task that I need to have done. So I just do it myself, or procrastinate a little more since I can’t fit in the prep work any more than I can fit in the actual task.
If I could do the prep work, then someone else would be able to do not just THIS task, but other tasks as well. So by taking the shortcut for the immediate problem, I’ve eliminated the possibility of saving time next time.
Automation is the same way – setting up automation to save time TAKES time. And that time has to be squeezed out with no return until it is completely set up. So I often procrastinate that as well.
Many small business owners, and parents, fall into that trap. I say parents, because we do this with teaching our children also. If it is just simpler to do it ourselves than it is to patiently go through the processes of teaching our kids to do a task, we may end up handicapping both ourselves, and our children.
I don’t know that I have a solution, other than TAKING the time to enable others to help. Because doing so is the empowering choice that allows growth, both personally within a family, and professionally and financially within a business.
It is an easy trap to fall into. Awareness that it IS a trap can help us to avoid it. I’m going to go write some instructions…
Invasive Software – It isn’t Just Malware
One of the hallmarks of malware is that it blocks your ability to uninstall it through normal methods. It often blocks your ability to remove it through other ways also. It seems that major software and hardware vendors are now using invasive methods to stop you from removing THEIR software. We had experiences with two programs recently that made what should have been a simple flip of a switch, turn into a fairly involved nightmarish experience.
I love Dell computers. I regularly order them online – I build my own. This lets me choose what I want, and what I do not want. I like Dells because they build business laptops. They are built to be TOOLS, not TOYS, and their understanding of what is needed for a business laptop is evident in where they put the performance. We recently purchased one off the shelf from a local store. We needed one more quickly than we could get from Dell directly. I don’t think I’ll do that ever again. It came with options installed that I would have de-selected had we bought it online.
First, it had Dell Datasafe installed. This program is supposed to backup your computer regularly. Dell also sells a subscription for online backups. Fine… if I had wanted it. I didn’t. And the way it worked made it so annoying that we simply could NOT leave it on the computer and expect to get anything productive done!
Every minute or so, a screen would pop up, then disappear. The flash of that screen was annoying, and interrupted work.
So I tried to uninstall it. It would not uninstall, it stalled out every time.
I clicked the icon in the toolbar – it offered the choice of opening the program. This produced nothing more than a repeat of the flashed screen. No option to turn it off. Mistake number one – NEVER pre-install a program like that which you cannot turn off!
Next, I opened the Task Manager and force quit the program. It promptly reloaded itself and continued it’s obnoxious behavior.
Then, I went into msconfig, to attempt to start the computer with only the things loaded that I chose. I restarted – Datasafe had OVERRIDDEN my choices, and loaded itself anyway!
I was finally able to boot in safe mode and remove the offending program. I had also searched online, and found that many people had been required to jump through more hoops than that to remove the thing.
This is UNACCEPTABLE for a software or hardware vendor! It is not ok for them to install ANYTHING that requires more than flipping a switch to turn it off, or going through standard software removal procedures.
Our next experience was with Norton – the trial Security Suite that came with the laptop. We tried to uninstall it, and it stalled out – more than one time, so we knew it wasn’t an exception. Again, we were forced to boot in safe mode just to uninstall the program.
I am not sure if this is a growing trend, or not. I have noticed increasing numbers of “piggyback” programs – where more than one thing is installed at a time, without your permission. This has been my first experience with trusted vendors creating programs that were impossible to remove using accepted methods of removing them. It was not a pleasant experience, it cost me about an hour of time that it should not have taken.
I want to own my own computer. I don’t want a software vendor to decide that THEIR way of doing things is so important that I will want them to protect me from myself. I’d rather be treated like a thinking human being. If I want to turn something off, I should be able to do so. Warn me if you must, so you are sure I understand what I’m doing, but don’t prevent me from doing it just because you like your way of doing it!
UPDATE NOTE: I’m wondering whether I was able to uninstall Datasafe through Safe Mode (when other people have not been able to), because we were running from the hidden Administrator account? The first thing we do when we get a new computer, is to activate the hidden Administrator account, and run the computer from it – this has eliminated countless problems and hassles. That is how I uninstalled Dell Datasafe, by running in Safe Mode in that account.
Two Bad Apples
So a few months ago, someone tried stealing one of our site systems. Yesterday, we discovered another lazy individual who is attempting a similar thing. I find it pretty ludicrous, actually, and while it is irritating that they’d try to steal what we’ve built up, my typical response is, “I wish them luck with that!”.
Early on in business, I’d see a good idea, and try to replicate it (I never stole, but I did rebuild things in a similar manner). I learned that duplicating a structure is far easier than duplicating success with that structure. So they start out disadvantaged in the first place. I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing, am already at the top of the search engines, and already have an established satisfied customer base. Anyone trying to duplicate my success without my help is going to be fighting an uphill battle to begin with, and is more likely to crash and burn than to succeed. So I really don’t have to fear them as serious competition.
Secondly, we have structures they cannot see, and CANNOT steal. We have proprietary software that they cannot access. They don’t even know that it exists, and there is no access to it. I suppose they could buy it along with our other customers who purchase our proprietary software, but I’ve learned that most people who will steal a site structure won’t invest anything else in their business – if they aren’t willing to invest the time to do their own, they don’t invest money to do it right, either.
Our software is a HUGE key to our success. It allows us to streamline our operations and profit where others burn out. Our auto-installer saves us about half an hour per contract. We are implementing elements in it that will save us an additional 2 hours per contract.
We also use special systems and methods for creating the custom parts of the contract. These methods speed up the personalization process, saving an us an additional 2-4 hours per contract.
We have more automation in the works – to speed up site updates, and to speed up maintenance of the automation itself.
These investments mean that we can AFFORD to keep our prices reasonable, and we won’t burn out under a workload that is higher than we estimated. Everyone else has to match our pricing to compete – and if they do so, they’ll go under, because the workload is just too high for anyone who has more than a handful of sites to administrate. Our prices are such that you CANNOT profit by offering the same things we do, unless you do it the SAME WAY we do. And they can’t do that – because they are unwilling to invest either the work, or the money.
We have also invested in making our structure more functional. This is the part they see, and the part they want to steal. We’ll be encoding some of the source, and using other options to protect it, though we’d rather not have to.
Because of those two individuals, and because of other lazy individuals like them, we have to make our Terms of Service stricter for everyone. We have to encode our source code, and we have to do other things that we’d rather not do. Sad, really. They make it worse for everyone.
The only hope is that they’ll learn from their mistake. Because I have no doubt that they are in for a rude awakening.
Big Deal, So I Have Another Website
Back when I created my first website, it was a big deal. I think the second and third ones were a big deal too. But by the time I reached 30, my friends and family were saying, “So what?” if I said I created another website.
I think about three years ago I had 50 websites, and decided that was too many to keep up with, so we sold off a bunch. I think we sold about 30 of them. Somehow, selling them off did not really decrease the number! I think I passed 100 sometime about a year later – of course, some of them were test sites, and Master Sites (sites that we create to use as a clone base for auto-installed sites). But only about 10 or 15 of them.
I started to give sites away. Managed to give away a few, sold a few more. But our server is still pretty loaded.
Then today, I built a new website…. Again. It was needed, we needed a single URL that we could use for promotion of our Seminars and Workshops. So WebsiteSuccessSeminars.com was born. I’m still sort of torn between blue and tan block headers, but overall liking how it turned out.
So, my friends and family have my permission to say, “Big deal… you’ve got another website.”
VAs and Webmasters
Many VAs fancy themselves web designers. Or they promote themselves as being able to do work on websites.
I don’t have any problem with that – I have many friends who are VAs who also work on websites. But I do have a problem with clients who hire a webmaster, and then hire a VA, who does not know how to work on the kind of site they actually have.
We’ve run into this a lot lately. Primarily with coaching clients. Coaches hire VAs. Many VAs specialize in working with coaches. A coach will hire a VA, asking them only if they know how to work on websites, the VA will assure them they do. If they ask about the specific type of site they have, the VA may express a willingness to learn it.
Unfortunately, once the working relationship begins, the VA admits they haven’t a clue how to work on the kind of site the coach has. The Webmaster will advise one thing, the VA will insist on another, the client gets caught in the middle. We can usually predict what will happen…
Eventually the VA insists that they know better than the webmaster, they cry that their way is faster, cheaper, better, and there is no need to hire a webmaster at all, and the coach soon finds themselves paying all over to have another website set up. A very costly enterprise.
Unfortunately, the client will continue to pay. Because while the site may seem cheaper to operate, it is rarely equivalent. A good webmaster is a specialist in all things related to websites. A good VA may be a specialist in keeping up with the routine tasks, but they are rarely a diversified expert in technical issues, they often recommend things that have hidden costs, or hidden risks that the VA is completely unaware of (many VAs use insecure forms, simplified structures that won’t grow with a business, or still recommend HTML websites, and most are not familiar with basic security issues, ecommerce legal or regulatory issues). Such has been our experience recently in working with several VAs who dug in their heels and insisted that the client work their way or none (we were actually shocked when one client allowed the VA to bully them and dictate to them, sort of wondered who was hiring whom).
This really isn’t a rant. Just a caution… If you are going to hire a webmaster, and then hire a VA, you need to make sure that the VA really does know how to work with the website system that your webmaster has helped you establish. Because if they don’t know how, they are likely to be resistant to learning.
Now most VAs will swear that they are perfectly willing to learn something new. But in fact, most are not. Website structures require layers of learning, and after someone (webmaster OR VA) has learned one, they often feel they simply do not want to have to learn another. They will accept huge complexities in something familiar, while refusing to learn a simpler way just because it is unfamiliar. That is human nature.
If your VA really wants to use one thing, and your webmaster has recommended something else as being more suited to the long term growth of your business, a conflict may arise that ends up costing YOU money. Some understanding as you are hiring help, to ensure that you hire people who CAN work together, and who can smoothly advise you in ways that take you forward, rather than muddling along with one person recommending one thing, another insisting on another, will save you a good deal of grief, and money, in the long term.
On the other hand, when you get a good VA, who actually CAN work with your webmaster, the situation is hard to beat. You gain the technical expertise, a second marketing perspective, and the advantages of having a website specialist, along with the advantages of having an experienced assistant to handle site updating and other administrative tasks. This arrangement can actually SAVE you money when you get the right VA, who actually CAN work successfully with a webmaster and your site structure.
Perhaps the best way to GET a good VA, is to ask your webmaster for a recommendation. Most will have a list of people whom they regularly work with, and whom they know are skilled at working with the systems they regularly use.
Good communication is essential. Keep your webmaster in the loop, and let them know if you are seeking a VA. It may save you a good deal of money, and hassle.
My Neighbor’s Netbook
My neighbor is a grandma, who calls us out whenever she has a problem with her computer (a leftover client from the days when we did computer building and repair). She periodically buys a new computer and asks me to help her install AVG. Her newest purchase was a Netbook. By Acer.
I’ve been looking at those. They are cute, lightweight, and are designed to access the net on the road. My laptop is a 17″ Dell, with very high specs. Loaded so that I can work efficiently. It contains my entire business – if it were stolen, I’d be in a world of hurt. Sure, I have backups, but the process of buying a new laptop, and installing the programs I need, and restoring the backups would take DAYS at a minimum. I can’t really afford to lose that kind of time. We’ve been thinking for some time that it is probably better if we don’t travel with our primary work machines anymore. Hence, the need for a set of travel laptops, which would cause less of a disaster if stolen or lost.
Most of our business is now online – which means we can do 90% of our work while mobile, regardless of whether we have our backup data on our personal laptops. That other 10% is critical for long term function, but can be done without or compensated for during travel – a good thing since I do NOT want to have to fuss with syncing two computers. So we can use less functional equipment on the road. But we still have to do SOME graphics and web templating work, so a minimum degree of functionality is required, and it is probably higher than most people would require.
I’m SO glad she bought that Netbook. Because she called me in to set it up for her – remove the unneeded mind-meltingly stupid games, and install Mozilla and AVG. It gave me a chance to test drive the little thing.
The reason I had not yet bought one is because they are limited to 1 GB of RAM. Even running XP (which many do), that is STRANGLED. So I’ve been looking for an option with more RAM.
Sure enough, her little Acer was all that I had feared – actually worse. I suspect that any Netbook would be, if still limited to 1 GB of RAM, I don’t think the Acer brand had anything to do with it. The people at Staples tell me that HP makes one that has a higher RAM amount. I wasn’t interested – the last HP laptop I had was a disaster too. Way too slow, and with annoyances that were not bearable under work conditions. It was built to be a toy, not a serious work tool, and it just could not stand up under 8 hours of use per day.
Back to the Netbook – it took 2 full minutes just to show the desktop. Then it sat there unresponsive for about 3 minutes before I could even launch Mozilla. Mozilla took 45 seconds to launch. So far, I’ve wasted more than 5 minutes of time, and it hasn’t even DONE anything useful yet. Everything it did was unbearably slow. I felt myself visibly age while it opened the Control Panel and populated the programs so I could sort through them (it seriously took so long I thought the thing had froze).
The keyboard size was also really annoying. So small that I had to cramp my fingers together. It was difficult to type without typos every other character. This is an issue of personal preference – but since I have to move back and forth between a full sized keyboard and whatever I use for travel, I needed it to not be a pain every time.
So I went to look for a viable alternative. I found it at Dell. An Inspiron 11Z. They also have a really slick looking Vostro 13″ laptop that is slim and svelt. Both of these laptops are suited to my needs. We went with the Inspiron for one major reason: The specs were fairly comparable, but with the 11Z, I could get DOUBLE the amount of RAM, 4 GB, for the same price as the Vostro with 2 GB. The screen is smaller on the 11Z. Neither has a DVD drive. I can live without that. The keyboard is slightly larger than the Netbook keyboard – a nice perk, though it is still smaller than what I’m used to. But the RAM is the real benefit – it maxes out at 4 GB, but I can still get the thing for under $600, even with all that RAM.
We like Dells, they are made to be used by businesses, with workhorse capabilities in mind. And I can order just the system I want, configured exactly how I want.
So from Dell, I can get all the benefits of a small form factor, without the excessively cramped feeling of the Netbook, and I can get the benefits of a larger laptop in RAM and hard drive size. I’m still not sure how I’ll do with a screen that is so much smaller, but which has fairly close to the same pixel count as my 17″ laptop, but I think it is worth the compromise while on the road. I’m sure it will help if I can get new glasses too!
We’ll be ordering our new laptops within the month. We have a number of events coming up that we’ll need them for. I’ll be thanking my neighbor the next time I see her.
UPDATE: Another neighbor arrived for help, with an HP mini. It was quite zippy in comparison to the Acer. I can see that it might actually be a viable option for a lightweight laptop for one of my kids, though I cannot see it being functional for any degree of business needs.
A few days later, the Acer owner called again. She could not login to her user account. After restarting the computer, we got a missing system file error. We attempted to boot from the restore partition on the hard drive, but it gave a similar error. Apparently her hard drive has been trashed. I have yet to figure out whether the drive was faulty to begin with, or whether she got tired of it and shook it vigorously. Either way, my attempts to repair it have given me one firm and unmoveable resolution:
I will NEVER buy a laptop EVER that does not have a CD Drive and Restore CD as long as that is the standard for restoring a computer!
Assuming Burdens to Open Doors
The potentials ahead are unlimited. Doors to open and discoveries to be made, and all kinds of things awaiting to enrich the life and bring prosperity.
But wait… what is this? Bramble bushes and pinnacles in front of every door. Debris to clear, blocks to scale, and then, keys to find and a heavy door to pry open. The opportunity comes with a good deal of work prior to even being able to BEGIN to benefit from it!
We decided to upgrade from a reseller account to a dedicated server. Three reseller accounts, actually – it was time! Having a dedicated server will open some more doors for us and allow us to offer more to our students and trainees. A good thing.
But oh, the work involved! And still more work to do before we can truly realize the potential of the move.
I recently assisted a client in making a similar leap forward. She had reached a wall – she could no longer go forward. But opening the door to further growth for her meant purchasing a reseller account – and doing that meant a new learning curve, setting up some new software, and investing in some additional training and resources.
Of course, such things tend to become urgent when we feel we do not have the time for it! We seem to be required to invest in an upgrade when our finances are most stressed, to learn a new thing when time is the most short, and to create new marketing materials to capitalize on a new market when we are buried under a load of troubleshooting tasks that demand a lot of time but give little monetary return! If we don’t handle these things though, and if we always procrastinate the extra work to realize new potentials, we stay stuck, mired in mediocrity.
We’ve worked with a lot of small businesses. We find that many of them stay stuck in reacting – they are so busy coping with day to day demands that they feel they do not have time to move to a more manageable system. They cannot implement simple automation to reduce the time they are spending on repetitive tasks, because they are so busy performing those repetitive tasks that they have no time to eliminate them! They are working so hard for so little money, that they have no funds available to invest in an improvement that would allow them to make more money in less time. A nasty little trap that is easy to get into – and a large reason why small business owners burn out and crash the business when they reach a certain phase of growth.
If you want to open a door to new opportunity, you HAVE to figure out a way to do the extra temporarily, that will make the business either more manageable, or more lucrative. Investing in something that moves you forward is worth it – paying for things which only promise “credibility” is NOT worth it. But paying for TOOLS, that measurably help you earn more than the tool costs, is always worth it. Doing extra work, or taking the time to learn something new, is also always worth it when the result is more work in less time, or the opportunity to engage in business areas that you have a demand for, but which you cannot do unless you make the leap.
I think that the move we made has been a hard one. But it is a good choice – even though our expenses go up temporarily, and the learning curve is steep. The potentials to capitalize on new markets where we will have no competition for quite a while, and to enhance what we already offer, are too good to pass up. And we can ONLY get them by investing the time and resources to DO it.
Definitely a burden. But definitely one that will pay for itself.
The Popular Ruts Don’t Tell the Whole Tale
We spent part of yesterday in Guernsey Wyoming, at the Oregon Trail Wagon Rut site. We’ve been there before – twice in fact. I have photos of my now 22 year old daughter, when she was about 10, trekking up through the deepest of the ruts.
Previously, we took the trail with the stairs, and went right to those deep ruts. This time, we took the paved trail from the other end. We passed a long stretch of shallower ruts before we even got to the deep ones. Coming at things from a different angle was very enlightening – we saw some new things we had not seen on our previous visits. We also noticed something we had not noticed before – there were more than one set of ruts in some places.
Inspired by that insight, we began looking for places where more than one route had been taken across the rocks. We found them all over! Wheel marks went in all directions in some areas. We hiked down to where the ruts began on one end, and looked for evidence where the wind had blown dirt into the tracks. It was apparent that there were many routes across, some more deeply marked than others. And the deeply marked ones were not always the “best” way, or even the easiest. They were just the most visible.
Those secondary ruts crisscrossed the deeper ones – merging with them, then diverging again. They didn’t completely leave the trail, they just found a different way over some of the roughest parts. And it was a REALLY rough trail. Steep, rocky, uneven, and probably scary to drive an ox team and wagon over. You can tell that those who traveled it first had to carve it out – hacking down parts of the rock, and filling other parts with dirt or wood. So to diverge from the trail to find an alternate course meant a lot of work for those who did it first.
How often life is like this. We see the obvious, because it is pointed out to us. We think that the obvious is the story, or that it must be the best way. It is only by looking outside the normal expectations and by looking beyond the common that we discover that there are often many ways to do things, and that the best way for us may not be the way everyone else assumes is best.
This analogy extends far beyond that simple correlation. It takes in other factors – the design of the individual wagon, the animals that it was pulled by, the load it carried, the number of people with it, the number of people on the trail and how much congestion there was within a single pathway, the goals and objectives of the travelers, etc. But I don’t really need to expand on that, use your imagination and you’ll find some concepts to ponder.
We had a fun time – but for me, the great thing I took from the day was the discovery of all those other ruts. All of them traveled enough to make marks, but since the marks were not quite as deep and impressive now, largely ignored and unremembered. But for thousands, those secondary ruts where the path of success, the way they made their own piece of history, and the defining element in their life, if only for a day. It made me think about the beaten path, and how much I have achieved by leaving it and carving my own ruts on a little different route.
And I wonder if the marks I leave will still be visible in 100 years, or if they’ll be worn and covered by the effects of time and natural forces.
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