I am forum administrator for a car enthusiast site, a role I have been in for a little over a year now. As admin I guess I take a little more notice of what happens on this forum and it has been an interesting case study on human behaviour.

What never ceases to amaze me is the way some people conduct themselves when they can hide behind their computer screen. I must say the vast majority of people on the forum are sincere, kind, helpful people, but every now and again someone decides to go on the rampage, attacking all and sundry in their wake.

I liken a forum to a dinner party at someone’s house. If there is someone there you don’t like you don’t join in their conversation, or at the very least don’t address them direct. On a forum the attitude seems different. All of a sudden the angry person has a right to speak, not just in turn but on their soap box, and everybody must listen. If anyone disagrees then that is a personal attack on them and grounds for immediate verbal (textual?) assault!

I have seen this time upon time on various forums, on various subjects, and it does seem the same wherever you go. People who no doubt in normal everyday life would probably never say boo to a goose somehow seem to gain confidence and a lot of agression. Is it that they have something to make up for in life? Why are they this angry?

I can only assume these people are not like this usually, as it seems so common that if they were you would see it in the office, in restaurants, in the bank and on the street. Maybe I just live in a good neighborhood, but it doesn’t seem all that common.

Sometimes things do escalate, but on a well moderated forum these things get dealt with fairly quickly and fairly well, but the question still arises, where do these people come from, and why are they so angry?

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I have posted before about the decision to design around the WordPress interface, but I thought I would elaborate a little and explain the business case for using it as a back-end.

I started out in web design the same way a lot of designers, using Dreamweaver. I then progressed to hand coding and producing standards compliant sites that I could be proud of. The problem is, customers fall into two categories:

1. Those who are happy with their site to sit there, day in day out, looking the same and with the same content.
2. Those who want a dynamic site, they want to nurture it and want to update it.

The problem is both these types of customer have their own similarities and differences.

Allow me to explain…

If you ask both types of customer what they want from their site, out of the top 5 in their list I would imagine 9 times out of 10 you will find “Highly ranked on Google”.

In the old days you could get away with a nicely designed site and still get ranked well on Google, but in recent years this is just not possible. In order to get right up there you need dynamic content, updates etc. This immediately rules out the first type of customer. I am not saying these types of customer should not be allowed, just that they should be re-educated. Type 1 needs to become type 2.

1. Those who are happy with their site to sit there, day in day out, looking the same and with the same content.
2. Those who want a dynamic site, they want to nurture it and want to update it.

Now if we take a look at the second type of customer, who wants to be involved, wants to be dynamic and wants to nurture their site to success we have the problem of how they go about it.

In the early days they used to email me changes, often these were small and either I would have to take a little time to do it for free or charge them for the change. If I did the latter it used to disuade them from making changes, if I did the former then I would spend a lot of time doing lots of small changes. Not ideal.

WordPress is a great way to give control back to the customer. It allows them to update the site whenever they like without involving you. It also avoids the cost of making changes, from both your point of view and theirs. This can only be a good thing.

In my experience, once people get used to adding content using the WordPress back end they often end up getting really “into it” and the site goes from strength to strength. By keeping the content fresh and updating often the site is already half-way to being highly ranked. Of course there is plenty more to do, but fresh content is half the battle.

Once you learn to use WordPress to design a non-blog site it really comes into it’s own, but I’ll leave that for another day.

What would you do if your site disappeared? You may think it is unlikely, but in reality the statistics may shock you.

Here’s some food for thought:

• 40% of Small and Medium Sized Businesses don’t back up their data at all
• 40 – 50% of all backups are not fully recoverable and up to 60% of all backups fail in general

Source: Realty Times

Whoever you host with there are always failure points, whether it is the hard drive in the server (if it is not RAID), the data-centre burning down (it does happen) or just accidental deletion of content. The general rule of thumb is if it can happen, eventually it will.

This may not have been such an issue in the early days of websites where the content was stored on your local hard drive. If the worst happened you simply need to re-upload all your HTML files and away you go. Nowadays a lot of sites are dynamic, containing pages upon pages of dynamic data updated on a regular, often daily basis.

A lot of people use their website to conduct their business, sometimes it is secondary to their main source of income, but increasingly it is becoming the main money spinner. If the site were do disappear so could the business.

Here is another interesting statistic for you:

60% of companies that lose their data close down within 6 months of the disaster

Why am I harping on about this you may ask? Well one thing we are quite particular about at ThinkSynergy is backups. There is a daily backup on the server which is copied to 2 different locations every day. A little over the top? Maybe, but it gives us and our customers peace of mind that if the worst did happen, they would be back up and running very quickly.

What is the backup strategy of your current host? Do they do nightly backups? If the worst did happen and their data-centre burned down, would your site be on their priority list? It is easy to presume these large companies have great disaster recovery, but would you trust them with your business?

If you run your business from your website, or use your website as an income earner it is easy to sit down and put a value on the site being live. Developing a backup strategy is not something that many people get excited about, but it is vitally important. Do you have home contents insurance? I bet you do. It is equally unlikely you will ever have to use it, but you have it anyway, just in case.

If you don’t want to create a strategy yourself at least do some checks and make sure the people you host with have their own in place, it is worth it in the long run and will make sure that the business you have built up is still there next year.

I think I speak for most small to medium size businesses when I say the bain of our life is often paperwork. We have so much on day to day that finding time to sit down and create invoices, reminder letters etc is something that can all to easily get on top of us.

Recently I discovered Blinksale, a simple, easy to use online invoicing service. I decided to try it out and it really is very good.

Simple

The interface is incredibly simple. You logon to your account and you are presented with some tabs for adding users, customers and invoices. You create an invoice template, set it to recur however often you like (in our case annually) and attach your customers to it. 

Blinksale takes care of emailing the invoice to them, and provides a nice dashboard for reminding you when invoices are overdue, and allows you to automate reminder emails.

Low Cost

There is a charge for Blinksale, based on how many invoices you send out per month. The lowest option allows 3 invoices per month and is a great way to try out the system before signing up to one of their paid programmes. 

Their categories are well laid out, so you would need a fair few clients to move you up the scale, and makes it very easy to justify paying the small amount they ask, based on the client base you have amassed.

Time is Money

Over the past few months we have saved hours upon hours of time by using Blinksale. where we would manually prepare invoices Blinksale takes care of it. It is great to get notification of invoices going out and payments coming in, similar to having a personal secretary!

Just Do It!

I can heartily recommend Blinksale as an invoicing solution. There are other solutions out there with more features and it is important to find the correct product for you. What I will say is these days it is vital to automate as much as possible, giving you time to do what you do best. Try it out and see how you get on.

Having used Stumbleupon for a month or so I thought I would write a post about my Stumble experience.

Surprisingly to me I am still a regular Stumbler. I did think this would just be another fad that I would tire of and uninstall, but it seems not. I am surprised by the quality of some of the stumbled sites out there ad find myself regularly hitting the Stumble button to pass a few minutes (or hours).

I must admit the main benefit for me is the sharing aspect. I hit Stumble a few times, find a good site, then immediately hit the “send to” button to share it. This makes it incredibly easy to surf the web with someone else, even though they are 5569 miles away!

I occasionally hit the “thumbs up” button, but mainly as it adds it to the bookmarks when you do that. In my mind making the adding of a bookmark default is a good move, otherwise I would be tempted just to hit stumble again.

After this relatively short space of time I am finding I now have a huge collection of bookmarks and have experienced an enormous amount of new sites that I never knew were out there. more than this, I now have subscriptions to a handful of great blogs which I check via RSS every day.

Thumbs up for Stumbleupon!

I happened upon a great post by Sailor at Nice2all.com about speeding up WordPress the other day. As I always like to do when I find something good, I like to leave a comment and show some appreciation. I scrolled down tot he comment button and saw an icon in the corner.

Logo designed by the guys at Biotek

I did a little research (ok, I clicked on the icon in Sailor’s sidebar) and found this post.

It is something I have thought about before. Doesn’t it seem rude that you take your time to compose a comment for someone’s site and they decide that you are not worthy of a little “link love”?

Allow me to explain

The no-follow attribute basically means that although the link works when you click on it, it is effect a dead end for Google and the search bots. This means your own site will not gain from the link you just created.

This was originally designed to prevent spamming, and yes it does occur occasionally, but to be honest it happens if you have no-follow or you don’t. There are more effective ways of tackling spam without punishing the commentors.

For this reason I have decided to implement this feature on all my blogs, so that if you leave a comment you will get a genuine, Google enabled link back to your site. It’s the least I can do considering you have given up your time to post on my site.

If you have a blog and would like to know more about it, please feel free to comment, or visit the sites I linked above.

Thanks go to Sailor at Nice2all for inspiring me to do this.

I heard about stumbleupon a while ago. It seemed to be the next “fad” like bebo, myspace, facebook, digg, technorati, the list goes on. I tend to avoid these “fads”, ok with the exception of facebook, which seems to be as essential nowadays as owning a mobile phone! It seems you no longer exchange numbers with people, you poke’em then ad’em! (but that’s for another post!).

The Install

I was initially turned off from stumbleupon because of the need to add a toolbar to your browser (boo hiss). I have been caught out in the past by this sort of thing. You install a product and all of a sudden your browser is highlighting links in yellow and hijacking everything.

So it was with caution that I installed stumbleupon. Fortunately the toolbar is harmless and well laid out.

Getting started

The registration process is quick and easy. It asks you about your interests. This is important as it determines what content is thrown at you.

You are first presented with a Stumble toolbar,with the obvious “Stumble!” button on the left.

Press the Stumble button and the browser will load a page Stumble thinks you might like, from your list of interests. If you like the page you can click the thumbs up button on the toolbar, or thumbs down if you don’t like it. Stumble uses this data to work out your likes and dislikes. The idea is the more you stumble the more accurate it will get.

Friends indeed

Once you have registered with Stumbleupon and greated your account you can add friends. This is a similar process to adding friends in Facebook, it even used the MSN API to grab your contact list if you allow it to.

Friends makes the whole stumble experience much more worthwhile. Rather than emailing your friend a funny link, or pasting it into MSN (if they are online) you can click the “send to” button and choose your friend. This will then pop up on their stumble toolbar next time they log on. It allows you to send a comment too. This is great fun but be aware, stumbling with friends is addictive!

Channel hopping

There is a selection of channels on the toolbar. If you wanted to search for a single topic, say internet games, you choose the channel and hit stumble. Your search will be narrowed and you will stumble just that area. This is a neat feature.

Favorites

If you discover a site it (are the first to stumble it) the site it automatically added to your favorites. This forms part of your mini-blog within your logged in area. When you stumble you can see who stumbled befor you. You can then enter their mini-blog and see their favorites. Not sure how useful this feature is, feels a bit too much like stalking to me!

So, what’s the big deal?

To me the big deal is getting back to the days where you actually “surf the web”. In recent years the internet has grown so big but has got cluttered with a lot of crap. Stumbleupon is a vehicle for navigating the good stuff and filtering out the bad.

I can come home from work and stumble for half an hour. To find this many good sites would take hours using google. It’s also great to be able to keep track of where you have been. All your “thumbs up” sites are kept in your user area and int he new version of Stumbleupon it actually adds it to your bookmarks (or favorites, in IE).

I love Stumbleupon, it’s a great way to find new sites, the only down side is I seem to find it very difficult to go to bed now… just… one… more… stumble!!!

I came across these pictures today. It is the Google office in Zurich.

At first glance I thought “cool”, that seems like a great place to work. However, thinking about it you do have to wonder why they NEED so many different ways to relax and let off steam? Do these people ever get to leave the office and go home?

I can only imagine the pressure these people must have to work under for these kind of anti-stress facilities to be required:

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