A few weeks ago, in the wake of the gulf oil disaster, I wrote about contingency planning for small businesses. Make sure you have backups of everything, I said, including your hard drive.

I learned about backups the hard way. As the huge Oakland Hills fire raced down the hill towards my apartment, I watched entire houses explode into full flame while I frantically inserted disk after disk to back up the only copy of my unfinished dissertation.

For years since then, I’ve used “SuperDuper” to automatically back up my entire drive every night. So as far as data backups go, I thought I was covered. But when my computer suddenly crashed and died two weeks ago, I discovered I was not. Unbeknownst to me, my backup software had failed a week before. I lost a week’s worth of work.

I was able to obtain another computer in record time by taking the advice of my computer guy, and buying a used workhorse model on craigslist. The seller was even willing to deliver.

However, no sooner had I migrated my data and apps over from the backup, gotten all set up, and done a few days’ work… but this “new” computer died. I lugged it down to the shop, where they diagnosed it as beyond repair.

I bit the bullet and went to the Apple store. Two hours later I walked out with a new iMac. Again, I migrated everything over from the old backup… minus the missing week; also missing the unbacked-up five days’ work I’d done on the craigslist  computer.

Apple comes with automatic backup software preinstalled. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the password to my backup drive. And I postponed taking the time to search for it, reasoning that a brand-new computer would surely be OK for a few days while I scrambled to catch up on delayed projects.

Big mistake. Two days later, the brand-new hard drive died.

Apple was wonderful to deal with, and again I left the store with a brand-new computer. And again, I set up anew, and migrated everything over.

Only now I was missing the original week’s work, plus five days’ work on the second computer, plus two irreplaceable days on the first new Mac. That was two solid weeks of my time, zapped.

Am I glad I had a backup, any backup? Absolutely. But the missing work was a giant hassle to recreate, and some of it can never be recaptured. In consequence, clients’ time-critical work was late. A new job bid was late, too, and I haven’t heard back from the client.

So in addition to work, and time, and money, there’s a loss of what I’ll call “perceived professionalism.” Trust. Reliability. Who would you prefer to entrust with your business… someone who recovers instantly and completely from a disaster, or someone who has to scramble around trying to recover crucial information?

So. Can backing up your business really make you richer? Yes, in two ways. First, in avoiding needless loss. Losing time and money that could easily have been saved with a cheap hard drive and some free software is ridiculous and–at least in the case of creative work–potentially even tragic. And needless to say, losing two weeks worth of income in a bad economy could cripple a business. If it happened to you, would it be the tipping point?

Second, in addition to averting loss, there’s the positive impact. It’s a great feeling to have confidence that you’ve done what you can to protect yourself and your clients from the unforeseeable. To know that if the ship hits an iceberg, there are more than enough well-stocked lifeboats at the ready.

It’s not a flashy kind of confidence, though. It’s more foundational. It infuses you with serenity. It’s a peace of mind that communicates itself wordlessly to your clients, and contributes positively to your professionalism.

And that’s good for business.

There are two primary styles of mainstream bloggers: conduits, and originators. Conduits help digest, funnel and channel helpful information. Originators come up with new thoughts, observations, perspectives and points of view. It’s far less risky to be a conduit. Sure, it takes work seeking out and filtering information. But sharing information that’s been created by others doesn’t require you to put your ego, your self, your opinions and thought processes on the line like being an originator does.

Conduits find interesting and relevant content and pass it along in the form of blog posts, how-tos, links, lists, reviews and tweets. Conduits can be incredibly helpful in helping us find and filter out important nuggets of information. Necessary even. There’s so much info out there in any given field, especially for those of us in the internet/social media business, that no one can possibly keep up with it all.

Conduits at their best create lively and important forums that may themselves become buzzwords for new trends--”meta-conduits,” we might say. Huffingtonpost.com in news and commentary, mashable.com for web and social media info, lifehacker.com for DIY tips—all of these lively and informative sources of information perform an enormous service. Many of us come to rely on them. And meta-conduit sites can create considerable wealth and attention for their owners.

Originators, on the other hand, help us think and see differently by sharing their experiences, thoughts, reflections and perspectives. Help clarify the blur of daily life.

At their best, originators can become not just trend-setters, but thought-shapers. People like Mark Silver at heartofbusiness.com, Nancy Humphreys at brucenomics.com or Steve Pavlina at stevepavlina.com are people who think and feel deeply about business development and spiritual growth, or what’s really happening in the global economy and why, or how to live a rewarding life. They may have huge personal followings and write on a regular basis for other blogs than their own. Or they may not (yet).

But they’re more than mere conduits. They see and digest the same information as the rest of us do. But before sending it back out, they think. Cogitate. Feel. Process. And when they write, they often share something of striking intelligence or wisdom. It might just change your thinking, or your life.

Are you a conduit or an originator?

Most of us are somewhere on a continuum. We’re a bit of both. On my “on” days, and when I have time, I try to share an original thought. On my “off” or super-busy days, it’s all I can do to find something interesting on the net and share a link. But I always think about it. Because for me, being a conduit is the easy way out. It’s second-best. It’s not challenging me to do my best work, or to be my best self, or to contribute all that I can.

But maybe I’m prejudiced. Making this all harder than it needs to be. What do you think? Which are you and which do you want to be? How do you want your blog to contribute to the world we all share?

The ten most alienating mistakes you can make on your web site.

Are you driving users away—and losing business—because of any of these ten, easily fixable goofs?

The "global handshake" is now a global business cliche.

1. Cliches

Use language and images with originality, precision and skill. If you write in cliches, I know you’re either (1) talking down to me, and/or (b) not offering me anything unique or original. And please, don’t give me boring visual cliches either. I’m not apt to buy, sign up for anything, or even stick around to check out your site.

2. Jargon

Plain talk works best. “I offer my web 2.0 clients techniques for listening to users, establishing full transparency, and  SMO.” If you don’t know what this means, are you going to buy from, listen to, or recommend me? Or even stay on my site? Doubt it. (Jargon decoder here.)

3. Squinting and peering

Can I read it? Avoid text/background contrast that is too low (or too high), and text that is very tiny or in a strange, decorative but unreadable font. If I have to squint, peer, or put on/take off glasses to read your site, I’m probably going to forget it.

4. Nobody home

I want to know there’s a real person or people standing behind your site. If there is no name, no bio, no picture, no address, no phone number, nothing but an email contact form, I’m not going to contact you. Period.

5. Circularity

Give me a simple, logical structure. Can I find, and get back to, information I want on your site without  having to think about it, and without feeling like I’m going in circles? If I can’t find things… or can’t get away from them…. buh-bye!

6. Flash

Steve Jobs isn’t the only one who hates Flash. If you must have a Flash intro, make the “skip intro” link big, front, and center. Otherwise I might not see it before I leave—because I probably won’t wait around for the Flash to load. And if I have to download a plugin just to see your site? Fuggedaboudit.

7. Expired third-party services and content

Check your site regularly. Do you use a third-party service like Wufoo for your contact form? Third-party search? Any kind of third-party-provided content… news crawls, RSS feeds, affiliate banners? If your contact form is non-functional because a service like Wufoo changed its link structure… or because you forgot to pay your bill… it shouldn’t be on your site.

8. Not enough information

Give me information I can sink my teeth into. Yes, hyper-designed, text-minimal sites can be gorgeous. But in order to sign up for your mailing list, I have to be interested, not just dazzled. And to buy something, I have to trust you. Where’s the beef?

9. PDFs

Use html for “perishable” information. I’ll gladly download a PDF if it’s a report, a list, an article, an itinerary … something that I’ll want to print, read later or in installments, study, or carry along. But I really hate having to wait for a download that I know I’m going to have to trash the moment I’ve glanced at it. Put non-download info into browsable html, please, or I won’t bother.

10. Repetition.

Let me choose whether to read repetitive copy. Do I need to read the same intro text word for word on every page, or every similar item you sell? Yes? Then put it on its own page, linked with a “more info” link so I don’t have to skim it over every single time I click on an item. Or use a “hide content” widget like WordPress’ Collapsible Elements plugin (currently due to be discontinued in August 2010) so that I can read it if I want, or skip it easily.

User-friendliness means better business

It’s all too easy to get lazy or rushed and miss something super-obvious on your site. We’ve all done it. But it’s a lot better for your business to give people an interesting, well-conceived, efficient site that lets visitors know that you have their needs in mind.

These days, a good many of the new sites I create use the Thesis theme for WordPress. It’s so easy to install and use that even WordPress newbies swiftly learn to manage their own sites. But there are a few simple, free, essential plugins that make Thesis (affiliate link) work even better. Here they are.

Help Google Crawl Your Site

Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin automatically creates a continuously updated XML sitemap that helps searchbots crawl your site and gives you better search results. Every time you add a page to your blog or site, it’s automatically added to the XML sitemap. If you want, you can also register the sitemap’s URL with Google at Google’s Webmaster Central and with Yahoo to get tons of helpful information about how your site is crawled.

Keep the Hits from Your Old URLs

Redirection. Unless you’re starting a brand-new site totally from scratch, you had an old site before your WordPress Thesis site. That old site was probably around for awhile and garnered at least a little bit of SEO mojo. But now all your URLs are different because you’ve deleted all your old pages in favor of your brand-new spiffy Thesis pages. Ever wonder what happens to all the old links—including search engine links—that went to those old pages? Without some kind of redirection, they’re all lost. And anyone who finds a link and clicks through gets nothing but a “page not found” error. Which is not exactly the ideal welcome.

With Redirection, you don’t have to lose all the clicks and search results that your old pages may still be generating. Just paste all your old URLs into the windows the plugin provides. Then, for each URL, paste in the new URL that you want to send your visitor to instead. Now, visitors are seamlessly and invisibly directed from your old URLs to your new ones, without your losing any rankings. It’s quick, simple, easy, and solves a real problem without any hassle.

Choose What Pages Sidebar Content Shows Up On

Widget Logic. My fave. With old html sites, it could be a challenge to get every page to look uniformly the same. Some table or div tag would always act up just when you least wanted it to. With WordPress and other CMS sites, the challenge is the opposite: how to get pages to look different from each other; how to relieve the terrible monotony of a site-wide template and put relevant content just where it needs to be, rather than all over.

Here’s the answer. With Widget Logic, you can control which pages any given widget will appear on. Want your article list on your blog post pages, but not on your “Services” page? Simple. Want an ad to appear on certain posts or pages, and not on others? Simple. In the interests of full disclosure, I do have to say that you need to look up, and paste in, the appropriate WordPress conditional tag. But the intimidation factor is way bigger than the reality of doing it. In about 20 seconds you can impress yourself by using PHP tags… and you don’t have to actually know any PHP. Awesome! (There’s also a YouTube video tutorial.)

WordPress Database Backup

WordPress Database Backup. Would you like a daily or weekly backup of your WordPress database (that’s where all your content is stored) delivered automatically to your email inbox? Trust me, you would. Well, you should. This plugin does it.

Best of luck, and happy Thesis-ing!

Everyone’s writing about BP these days. Obviously, the platform failure is such a huge screw-up on so many levels that there’s something we can all learn from it.

There are obvious lessons of grace and character which BP has failed: recognize the problem(s), take responsibility, apologize, swiftly do everything necessary and possible to restore—even improve upon—the status quo ante, and finally, demonstrate that you’ve learned from the experience.

And then there are the practical issues. Contingency planning, strategic thinking. The oil industry’s contingency plans were a joke, copied verbatim from responses to the Exxon Valdez spill over 20 years ago, replete with references to outdated procedures and dead consultants. What’s worse is that every oil company’s disaster “plan” was a carbon copy of all the others.

No one anticipated the potential for disaster. The appalling thing is, it appears as though no one tried. As Errol Morris quoted a research paper recently in the NY Times (“The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is“):

“When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.  Instead… they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

In other words, sometimes people are too incompetent to know they’re incompetent. BP apparently thought it was doing just fine. The other companies drilling in the gulf, or the arctic, obviously did (do) too.

How Competent Are You?

So, let’s get down to it. How competent are you? How many of us have contingency plans for our business?

These would be:

(a) plans for how to avert interruptions to our own livelihoods in case of disaster, and

(b) plans for restoring our clients’ business—at least the portion of it that depends upon us—in the event of catastrophe.

Deepwater Horizon rig burning (photo by U.S. Coast Guard)

No, we can’t really imagine the hurricane, the earthquake, the tidal wave. Or the truly “unthinkable” things, like famine, pestilence, war. So here are some web site what-ifs to get you started.

What if your computer hard drive is destroyed. Have you backed up your own and your clients’ work?

What if your computer AND your home/office are destroyed by natural disaster. Do you have secure online or offsite backups of everything you’ll need to get going again?

What if your password file was also on your computer. Do you have another up-to-date copy in a secure place?

What if your web host suffers a disaster. Do you have a backup copy of all the web files you need to restore your site? Does your designer? Are you sure?

What if your site is hacked, and client information is compromised. Do you have backups of the contact info you need to to communicate with every client about the problem?

What if you are suddenly ill or injured, or even trapped in an airport for a week due to some unforeseen event. Is there someone (ideally, someone who is not also your primary partner or caretaker) who can step in to finish any work in progress, to handle billings, to communicate with clients—to keep up the impression of competence and continuity—or at least let people know what’s going on—until you’re back on your feet?

When this person steps in, is the information necessary to run your business—at least to handle essentials—available and intelligible?

• bank info
• accts receivable
• expenses and outgoing payments
• current clients and projects
• online tools and passwords

After sitting at my computer one October afternoon, frantically backing up my almost-finished dissertation onto floppy disks as the Oakland Hills fire burned closer and closer to my apartment, I learned my lesson about backing up essential files, including clients’ sites.

But I confess. Before writing this article, I hadn’t thought about all of these issues. Passwords? Client contact info duplicated somewhere safe? Nope.

I don’t want to be a pessimist, or a Debbie Downer. But as someone once said, “Expect the best, and prepare for the worst.” I sure don’t want to cause even one iota of the pain BP has caused by being thoughtless, careless, or unprepared.

Do you?

We’ve got our work cut out for us.

It’s amazing how many self-employed people hit the wall with their web sites.

Procrastination, delay, and stall become words of the day. Or week, or month(s).

It’s not the difficulty of setting up a shopping cart, or trouble deciding between two typefaces, or a hang-up with javascript  that’s putting the brakes on the site.

It really comes down to that deep inward cringe that so many of us who have a hard time with marketing and promotion feel, when we’re promoting ourselves.

If we’re artists, or in a service business, so often the thing we’re trying to sell to the world is the product of our own unique gifts, our innermost, most sacred self.

And often, although we may have studied and cultivated skills and techniques for years, that gift at its core is something that just “happens.” It’s our magic. Our own secret mojo, gifted at birth.

People in this predicament, including myself, seem to get hung up on three things. One is, how to put our magic into words. Just saying “I’m a web designer” or “I’m a business coach” doesn’t nearly cover it. But how in the heck do you articulate your own gift, the thing that makes what you do special—something that you don’t quite understand to begin with?

The second is, how do you convey it in “buyer-centered” terms?  Once you’re figured out the “who,” “what” and “how” of what you do; once you list the problems you solve and the results you provide—you’ve got to write about it. With marketing syntax. Persuasively.

And then there’s packaging and pricing. Do you break your services out into packages? Charge by the hour? By the project? How do you price it?

All of this is not only incredibly difficult, particularly when doing it for yourself, but it can also feel very risky. You’re putting a very intimate and often vulnerable part of yourself out there, in public, for anyone with a web browser to see. And, you’re asking people to connect with you, to want what you have to offer, and to buy it.

What if they think you’re stupid? What if no one wants it? What if no one comes? What if your old college roomie, now CEO of a megabucks corporation, reads your personal, sincere, non-business-speak little web site and thinks it’s the most ridiculous thing ever?

So many of my clients—and myself—get hung up somewhere along this path. “Oh, I don’t like writing,” so many clients have remarked. But it’s not really writing that they hate. It’s writing marketing copy about themselves that drives them half mad.

What can you do to get out of the swamp?

First, admit that it’s not the javascript, the font, or the shopping cart that’s hanging you up, but your own confusion and—yes—pain.

Then, ask for a little help.

Call a friend. Or two or three. As them to tell you what your magic is. Take notes.

Then, turn to a professional to help shape your notes into finished copy. Marketing guru Robert Middleton has an amazing array of marketing knowledge in his Marketing Club (first month free, with complete access to workbooks, articles, audio programs and coaching calls). If you need a detailed, step-by-step roadmap that covers everything from formulating what you do in buyer-centric terms to writing articles, promotional copy and emails, Robert is your man. I’ve been following and using his info for years, and I am an affiliate.

Mark Silver is an amazing business coach with a spirit-centered practice. He offers freebies, workbooks and classes that can put you in touch with your own inner “big picture” and ease the pain of trying to communicate it.

Work with your designer. Many web designers and web coaches, whether they know it or not, have become experts at helping clients over this hurdle. Give yours a call.

And finally, don’t get hung up on perfection. The web is a very fluid medium. What you write today, you can change tomorrow. So get something up now, even if it’s not perfect. Your clients will be glad you did. Really.

The Heart of Business blog had a great post by Judy Murdoch recently called “How Is a Mailing List Like a Pizza Delivery Truck?”

Judy said that a list is like a pizza truck because they’re both marketing assets. This made me think about web sites. And I realized that for me, a web site is like a house. They’re both highly integrated systems for making your life easier and more comfortable.

We don’t usually think of homes as systems, until we have to fix, renovate, or build one. Then suddenly the “systems” aspect is clear. Not just in what needs to be done first—electrical, then drywall, then floors—but in how it all works together once it’s finished.

A house has systems: water coming in, waste going out, fresh air and light coming in, heat pumping in, a mailbox. Pretty basic? Yes, but let’s say you don’t have all these things, or don’t have some of them.

For example. No plumbing, just an outhouse. I’ve lived in pretty primitive conditions and an outhouse can work just fine. In fact you can be darned happy to have one. But would it be an inconvenience to have to dig and use an outhouse in my little urban backyard? Absolutely.

Running water. When I lived in a small village in Mexico, most people didn’t have running water inside, just outside. And it wasn’t hot, it was only cold. This was a warm climate, and taking everything—dishes, clothes, babies, selves—outside to wash didn’t seem like a big deal to anyone. But if I had to do it here? I’d freeze. And when would I be working on my business?

Or a washing machine. For many years I took my clothes to the laundromat. And compared to having to wash by hand on an outdoor washboard, a laundromat is pretty efficient. But going to the laundromat was an imposition, an interruption, and a hassle which, between packing, loading, driving, washing, drying, folding, and schlepping back home, took several hours every couple of weeks. I am SO glad not to have to do that anymore.

So. For me to live reasonably well and work at maximum efficiency, I need certain things. Indoor plumbing, hot water, heating, ventilation, a washer-dryer, waste pickup.

A house is a system of integrated components that makes life easier. Our web-based businesses are the same. Judy uses the example of a mailing list, and how, when she started, she sent out all her emails by hand. So did I. And I know people who are still doing it that way, even though their list numbers in the hundreds.

It’s like having to take all the dishes outside to wash. Very time-consuming, and unnecessary. With list management software, sending a mass email is the work of ten minutes, not several hours.

Your web site supports your business. For many of us, it’s about as physical as our business gets. It’s where our business “lives.” And it needs systems too. It has an outside, that people strolling by can see, and an inside, where you do your living and working.

From the “outside,” or visitor’s point of view, your site needs to

• be findable
• respond to a need or problem
• be cohesive, coherent, make sense
• communicate clearly
• offer actions visitors can take to engage with you & your business (and increasingly, to interact with each other via sharing on other social networks)
• everything has to work smoothly and transparently

From the “inside,” from your vantage point as the business owner and manager, your site needs to:

• attract traffic
• have a way of creating a pool of people with whom you can connect at will via email or other means
• give you a way of sending out email or some other kind of periodic update and announcement to them
• have a stats package that you can use to test and monitor changes to your site, as well as number of visitors and their search habits
• often, it needs to enable you to collect money—better yet, in a way that links with your bookkeeping systems
• often, to deliver digital goods
• be quickly updatable
• be able to grow with you and your business, not lock you into a technological box
• be cost-effective to maintain

As with a house, you can do without certain things, if you’re willing to live with the inconvenience. No mailing list manager? OK, so you spend several hours entering email addresses into your list, then sending your emails out by hand. Is that an efficient choice for you now?

No stats package? Or one that just shows number of visitors? Fine. But that means you don’t know how people are searching for your site, where they’re finding you, where they enter, where they leave, how long they stay, which pages they spend most time on, how many buy or sign up versus how many visit. Any alterations you make to your site will be based on guesswork, and you’ll have no way to test their effectiveness. Does that make sense for you now?

And just like building a house, when you’re building a site it’s far less expensive to put things in at the right time. Are you going to sell merchandise? Then great, let’s set up for that now instead of having to spend more money to rebuild the site to accommodate a shopping cart down the road. Write a blog? Great, let’s build that into the site design, rather than tack it on later.

The point: to live and work at the level modern life requires, you need a house with all its systems working. Same with a web site. All the site’s systems—email gathering, social networking, selling, download-handling, order processing, bookkeeping, traffic monitoring—need to work together as efficiently as possible, or it will be very difficult to work at the level you need to to make a living from your business.

Recently I wrote about augmented reality and its business-changing potential (“Augmented Reality is Coming, and It Will Change Your Business” and “Postscript: Augmented Reality Now, on Your I-Phone).

Last week, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) and Junaio rolled out a free i-phone app that lets users find stations, check train schedules in real time, and even leave “digital breadcrumbs” for friends and family… your own augmented reality annotations about nearby places that you, the user, find interesting  or useful.

Check it out:

There’s a school of thought that holds that everything we know as “reality” is a form of consensus: that we’ve all “agreed” to see and understand the world in a certain way. And guess what, folks! Consensus reality just got stronger.

When we’re all wandering around immersed in the equivalent of multimedia docent tours of the world that surrounds us, when we’re all busy following and adding to the global stock of digital breadcrumbs… what happens to all the stuff that doesn’t make it into the corporate or collective consciousness because it’s too… odd, different, scary, troubling, ugly or boring? You know, all that implacable stuff we’re alluding to when we use the term “reality”!

Will we be living in a Facebook world?

Opinions welcome.

I’ve been hearing for a long time about the recession affecting other businesses, but it hasn’t really touched mine. Until now. Two different clients couldn’t stave off the wolf any longer. Consequence? Two big, fun, interesting projects suddenly fell through, along with a good chunk of income. Now my calendar is unexpectedly open, and I hear the wolf heading towards MY door.

What to do? My impulse is to leap into manic activity. Do something, anything. Hustle. Work. Move. I think it’s a relic of the post-Depression mentality of my parents and grandparents… to flip instantly into that desperation mindset that says “If you need money and are willing to work, you’ll do anything, anything at all, whatever it takes, just get yourself out there.” The mindset that says, keep pouring over those classified ad pages (but Grandpa, everything is online now!), keep making calls and pounding pavement (but Grandpa, we all have cellphones!), until you land a job. A work-for-wages job, that is.

But here’s a big difference: I’m not looking for a job. I’m an entrepreneur. And I’m determined to approach this situation intelligently, not merely to fall prey once more to an inherited reflex that’s not even based on my own personal experience… and is nearly a century old at that! So what can I do? What can you do? Here’s what I come up with.

1. Retrench. In other words, cut down on expenses. Am I spending too much money or too much time on inessentials that can be cut? Money, no, not really. Time, yes. Staying focused requires constant vigilance on my part. I’m online all day for my work, and there are so many interesting tangents to explore. So for me, “retrenching” means staying focused on the goal.

2. Tap my networks. Remind people what problem I solve, who I solve it for, and that I have an opening. I don’t have a special offer yet, but per below, I think I should concoct one.

3. R&R. Think I’m kidding? Last year I listened to a wonderful audio program called “A Solution to Overwhelm” by business coach Mark Silver. He makes the point brilliantly that when we’re feeling overwhelmed and probably fearful, we’re simply “not being truly effective.” I think he’s right on.  I hate that screechy “spinning the wheels” sound, when you press on the accelerator as hard as you can, hoping crazily that this will get you out of the mud instead of digging you deeper. And not being able to help doing it, because it’s the only thing you can think to do.  Slowing down, tuning into inner guidance, seems counter-intuitive in a desperate situation. But paradoxically, it works.

I have also learned the very hard way that taking care of myself during stressful times is essential. It’s so tempting to neglect sleep, healthy meals, exercise and connection with family and friends while focusing on the “bigger picture. ” But I am here to remind myself and you that there is no bigger picture–in fact, no picture at all–without health. So here’s my commitment to handle my particular challenges in this area: I am going to keep going regularly to the pool, to qi gong class, and playing with our new Wii Fit. Oh yes, and meditating before bed to help ensure a restful sleep.

4. Catch up on deferred “maintenance”… accounting, tax prep, year-end accounting, cleaning up the office, revising the web site, etc. This kind of work can be a blessing, or a trap. I once relined all my kitchen cabinets with shelf paper while my partner and I were undergoing a mold disaster that culminating in our losing our home and most of our belongings. We joke about it now, “shelf paper” now being shorthand for useless busywork that gives the illusion of control, while distracting from the main focus. I have to be careful not to think that getting all the files filed is my main purpose in life.

5. Learn new skills. In my work of web development, learning new skills is continuous and essential. And I love it! Learning something new is exciting and engrossing. But does a particular challenge have a short-term payoff, or is it a long-term investment? Again, big picture.

6. Spend more time marketing/market smarter. I’m thinking that spending a little more time cultivating networks, particularly on Twitter, is a good idea now. I’m thinking about ads in local print media. Continuing to meet people at conferences and other events. Speaking to professional groups. Robert Middleton writes about how to effectively gain new clients by doing all this and more in his Infoguru marketing manual and in his  Action Plan Marketing Club which I just joined. (And yes, I am an affiliate!) Analyzing who my client base is, and how to expand it. We all have our own marketing lists…. so yeah, yeah, OK, it’s time to get to it. Systems, not shots in the dark!

7. Put together new products, new offers. There are at least three web sites and a handful of products that I haven’t had time to launch. They all need some work. And sometimes it’s hard to mobilize myself to take new risks in putting something out there. I’d rather learn more PHP, or organize my receipts for taxes. Yes, really. But it’s time to take some solid steps in this direction. For inspiration, I’m going to refer again to my favorite marketing and business coaches, who both have products aimed at planning projects and mobilizing oneself, Robert Middleton and Mark Silver.

8. Repackage existing products and services. Can I figure out a way to package my services, perhaps on a monthly basis? Something to sell that’s helpful and inexpensive? A “loss leader” special offer? For some reason, this is a tough one for me to think about. I keep going in circles. So I’m going to add one more item to the list.

9. Ask for help. I have a couple of trusted friends who know me well and are very creative thinkers about business and marketing. I’m going to ask them both for help thinking about new products and offers.

10. And finally, prioritize. Some people do this very rationally with lists and project management software and appointments with themselves in their daily calendars. Others do it more intuitively and develop the plans and progress charts as an afterthought, if at all. I’m somewhere in between. So I’m going to meditate, then list and distribute tasks according to time and urgency, and then check in with myself about this regularly to make sure I’m on a track that feels right.

That’s my list at the moment. I’d love to hear yours. What do you do when you hear the wolf howl?

Do you want an up-to-date web site with the latest super-cool techie bell or whistle? Don’t we all?  And WordPress: it’s so contemporary, versatile and inexpensive. So, pick a theme already, and get to it! (A WordPress “theme” is the design template that determines layout, type, color, etc. for your content.)

But wait a sec. I’ve found that there are huge differences among themes, differences that are invisible until you start working with them. Choosing a sloppily constructed one, or one that isn’t updated, can be an expensive mistake. Here’s how to pick the right one.

Premium (Paid), or Free Theme?

There are thousands of free WordPress themes. For a long time, all themes were free. And some of the free ones have problems. Issues I’ve encountered include:

• Themes that “broke” when I upgraded WordPress
• Coding so sloppy that basic customization was a humongous job
• Standard features that didn’t work

This being said, if you have simply a plain-vanilla blog, or simple blog plus a few static pages, and you don’t need a custom look, many free themes will work just fine. A good place to start looking for good free themes is the WordPress site:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

But if you’re planning a more complex site—for example, you need a content management system (CMS), a magazine- or newspaper-style front page featuring many items, an e-store, a digital portfolio, a real estate site, or a photoblog, selecting a theme is much tougher. You need a specialty theme which has the appropriate features already built into it from the start. For these more specialized and complex sites, as well as for any site that will require extensive customization, I would tend to look at a premium theme first.

Premium Themes

It took me a long time to warm up to the idea of paid premium themes. Now I’m a convert. Most premium themes are cleanly coded, work well, and are regularly updated. Prices generally run from $20 to $80 or so for single-site use. Some wonderful themes I’ve worked with come from:

Ithemes: specialized premium themes including magazine, real estate, ecommerce and online gallery/portfolio (I have used several of these themes and am an iThemes affiliate)

Themeforest: many well-designed specialty themes, updated at the discretion of their authors.

Woothemes: many magazine- and news-style themes, with support. (I have worked with several of these am an affiliate.)

The Market Theme: one of the top paid premium theme specially designed for ecommerce (I am an affiliate). (For more on ecommerce and WordPress, see my article “Ecommerce: How to Choose the Best Shopping Cart for Your Site.”)

Theme Frameworks

Recently, “theme frameworks” have come on the scene. These are basic themes which offer the ability to customize the design using more mouseclicks than actual code. (Here’s a somewhat technical intro with a discussion of the pros and cons of each major framework:  including some that are not mentioned here.) So, they’re highly adaptable to your particular purpose, and suffer few update problems. Three of the most popular theme frameworks are

Carrington (free)
Thematic (free)
Thesis (paid premium)
ThemeHybrid (free)

Thesis, for example, allows you to have either a magazine-style home page, a conventional blog page with either 2 or 3 columns, or a simple static home page, with a few mouse clicks and no programming at all.

End Theme Overwhelm!

There are thousands of gorgeous themes out there, and it’s easy to fall into overwhelm unless you have a plan. Here’s how.

• First, know what features you need in your theme and cannot compromise on.
• Then, troll for templates that already have all or most of those features, designed by reputable sources with a good track record in providing working themes.

You’ll end up with a handful—or maybe just one or two—themes which offer the features you’re looking for. At this point, cost might be a deciding factor. Or you may want to experiment among the themes on your short list to find the one that works best for you. Don’t sweat the final decision. If you’ve done your homework, any of the themes on your list will make you happy and serve you well for a long time.

Have you ever chosen a theme that broke? That you love? I’d love to hear your experiences.

There’s just been some big news for bloggers and other Internet writers this month. The FTC has decided that “bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service,” or face a fine of up to $11,000. That’s a sizeable incentive to come clean about paid product endorsements, paid reviews, free products, and affiliate marketing. (For those who don’t know, an “affiliate” receives a percentage of the sale price when someone buys a product or service online using one of their special tracking links. For example, as an Amazon affiliate, I receive a small percentage if you go directly to Amazon from one of my links and purchase something. )

I think it’s wonderful. Affiliate and other paid relationships have long been a gray area on the Internet. As a reader, I want to know someone’s relationship with a product they’re touting. As a writer, I feel scuzzy and sleazy if I don’t disclose my own relationships.

This has always felt a little weird for me, since most of my colleagues and peers have never disclosed. For years, I ducked whole the issue by refusing to affiliate at all. Particularly since the amount of money that an affiliate gains from any one sale is often minuscule.

But then two things happened. First, I noticed that I was recommending the same products over and over to my clients. They were products I had rigorously researched, tested, compared, and used. So I wasn’t being fully dispassionate, anyway. Some products are simply better than others.

Second, a couple of clients actually asked me to send them my affiliate link before they purchased products I’d recommended—because they out-and-out wanted me to get my “cut.” It was a revelation to me that, far from diminishing my credibility, being an affiliate sometimes enhanced it.

Now, I’ve got a special page on my site on which I list all of my affiliate relationships. They also happen to be all of my favorite, most used and trusted Internet tools and services. Full disclosure… it feels so good.

What do you think about this issue, whether as a blogger, consumer, or product rep? I’d love to hear from you.

Does your site feel boring, outdated, and passé… because you’re sick of its colors? Do you want to revamp it, but don’t know how to go about choosing new ones, or even whether to try?

It’s worth the effort. Your web site has ten seconds to make an impression. Color is a plays a critical role in that decisive moment. And color is not only how people get drawn into your site, it’s how they recognize and remember it to come back.

Color Provides the Visual Cues that Are Key to Having a Memorable Site

Do you need a designer’s help to get started picking a great color palette? No! Here’s a simple worksheet for choosing a complete color palette for your site.

1. What feeling(s) do you want your business to convey? Express this in a minimum of three, and a maximum of six, words.

2. Does your business currently use distinctive colors—in its logo, business card, storefront, etc.—that “must” be used in your web site? Add it, or them, to your potential palette now.

3. Think about warm colors (yellow-orange-red-brown) as opposed to cool colors (green -blue-indigo-violet-gray). For example, blue is a frequently used in business because it creates a sense of calm, trustworthiness, solidity and confidence. However, it is “cool” rather than warm. If one of your chosen adjectives was “warmth,” or if you have a “people” business, blue might be better used as an accent rather than a major component of your site.

Red, the quintessential “warm” color, conveys vitality, health and playfulness. But it also can imply a sense of urgency and alarm. Many colors are ambiguous in this way, with meanings and associations which vary from culture to culture. Keep in mind any strong color associations of your potential audience(s). An excellent short article by Rob Mills on how color communicates meaning is here.

4. Right now, choose a “draft” palette of 5 or 6 colors (a palette is a collection of 3 to eight colors that work well together). You can use swatches from the local paint store, colored pens, a scanned image which contains the colors you want, Photoshop—whatever you feel comfortable with. There are some very helpful online tools as well. I like Adobe’s Kuler, and Color Scheme Designer, both free. (And yes, this should be fun!)

5. Consider contrast. Bright, strong, and dark colors work well for headlines. Very light colors make lousy headlines, but can make wonderful backgrounds. You can lighten or darken some colors on your palette for the sake of contrast. Getting stuck? Browse sites you admire, and observe how they have used warm and cool, light and dark, bright and dull.

6. Check for readability. Is your color vision normal? Approximately 15% of the general population have some kind of distortion in the way they perceive color. There’s a good visual simulator of various kinds of color blindness here. Your site needs to be legible for these folks. Modify accordingly!

7. Will people be printing out your web pages? If so, use dark type on a light or white background for the printable versions.

8. Now, let’s get down to business. It’s time to finalize at least two strong colors which can predominate on the site. Designate another one or two that can be used as accent or background colors. It’s better to have too few than too many colors—designer Roger Black, for example, gained international fame for his distinctive magazine designs using just black, white, and red, period.

Once you’ve done the right-brain choosing, and the left-brain tweaking, you’ll have a color palette that you can use on any site or template. Still aren’t satisfied? Try one of the online palette-creation sites mentioned above. Or, look at photos (travel photos are especially good), paintings, or design books for more ideas. The book Living Colors: The Definitive Guide to Color Palettes Through the Ages, is a particularly good source—authors Hope and Walch have extracted gorgeous color palettes from the art and décor of many ages and places, which can all be adapted for the web.

But above all, have fun. Color appeals to a primal part of us, and its meaning and impact can’t be fully explained. So savor the inexplicable. If you’re enjoying it, chances are your site visitors will too.

Have you experimented with color palettes, or found a really helpful color-picking tool? I’d love to hear from you.

When I wrote about augmented reality the other day, I was assuming that AR was still a short way in the future. I was wrong! “Collaborative annotation of the physical world.” That’s what Marshall Kirkpatrick describes in his October 2 NY Times blog. And it’s here, today, right now—if you own an iPhone 3GS.

Several augmented reality iPhone apps have been released:

DA Transit, for finding rail, light rail, and subway information in the U.S. The company notes that the information is available via various interfaces: superimposed on the video screen above stops, on a map, or as a listing.

Cyclopedia (web link)(iTunes link), an app which selects any of the 65,000 Wikipedia entries that have been geotagged (encoded with locational data), and then uses your own location, a compass orientation, and a range setting to superimpose this information onto your iPhone screen.

Wikitude uses location information from Wikipedia, from the international review site Qype, and from Wikitude’s own info entry interface at Wikitude.me. These bits of information, including your own and others’ notes on a place, appear in “bubbles” on your iPhone screen as you look at nearby objects.

Another app, from Layar, has just been submitted to Apple for review. It’s currently available on Google’s Android phone, but is not, in Kirkpatrick’s words, “mindblowing.”

And a side note. Here’s one forecast I didn’t make the other day: will the new immediacy of user reviews bring back customer service? If every business has to, in effect, post a placard in their window listing customers’ reviews and reactions, perhaps a new era of caring and service will commence. We can hope!

Further note: for very good ongoing coverage of trends in augmented reality, check out the “Augmented Reality” category on the blog ReadWriteWeb.com.

Imagine that instead of looking at an online street map, you’re looking at “real reality” through a special high-tech set of glasses. As you look at the objects around you, you see pieces of information visually super-imposed upon their images. Look at a building, and you suddenly see, in print that appears in your visual field, when the structure was built, who owns it, how many units it has, whether it’s for sale, its latest property tax assessment. Look at a person, and the device displays what social networks she or he belongs to to, their CV, publications, workplace, position, etc. Focus on a print publication, and your visual display might automatically pull up photos, videos, maps and wikipedia entries directly related to the topic. And, you can “click” any of these informational displays to dig deeper.

Can you imagine living 24/7 in this kind of “total information awareness,” where the real world is not just hard, unyielding and impenetrable—instead, it’s laden with hidden dimensions and information? It would feel like having ESP, or X-ray vision, or a perpetual personal research assistant.

Think this sounds a bit futuristic? Not by much.  Check in out here, http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/09/20/three-videos-of-augmented-reality-for-business/.

How Will Augmented Reality Change Your Business?

Usually, successful early innovators become rich. Who will they be? Think about it. Who is poised to combine the most online data with the most advanced and ubiquitous geographic database around? If you’re saying “Google,” I’m with you. So, number one, we all might consider buying stock in the Big G. And creative entrepreneurs and programmers who know how Google works, and are able to use it, will have a huge opportunity to become very innovative.

Secondly, if your business web site is “googleized” now (Google Sites, Google Analytics, Google Toolbar, etc.), you can bet that any data they have on you will be deployed via… what shall we call it, Google Reality? I have a hunch we’ll all want to be much more careful about managing our business information.

Third, remember those thick old things called phone books? If we haven’t already tossed ‘em, we might as well. Imagine layers of geographically keyed business information that is visually accessible merely by “looking” at a storefront or street. This info may be offered by different, competing networks to start with. Who will your business pay, and how much, to be listed?

Does your business have a storefront? Is it urban, rural, in a mall? It’s easy to imagine lesser-trafficked and rural areas being informational backwaters. But will parts of cities be “off the information grid” because they’re commercially dead? The disincentives for locating a business in an “information ghetto” might shift entire trajectories of urban growth and development.

What about businesses that are mostly virtual already? Right now, your business is probably turning to Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, etc. These networks currently have rudimentary communications and connections among them. Imagine total integration and ready accessibility. What information about our business do we put out there, and how much control do we have over it? How much personal information do we want visible, and will we have any control over that? What information already is online, and will be mined and displayed to all comers, with no digging necessary? This issue isn’t going away, and it’s going to get worse.

And finally, certain occupations could become totally transformed. Buying, selling, and developing real estate. Web design. Advertising. Information sciences. Teaching. Probably your own occupation, once you start thinking about it.

The Uh-Oh Factor

On the minus side, it’s all too easy to imagine everyone being implanted with a readable chip containing personal information, financial data, medical history, current location… so, walk down the street, and any anyone with appropriate access or equipment can “see” who you are and what your info is. Medical emergency? The EMTs “see” your previous medical issues—and even your current vitals—as they visually assess you. Credit check? A bank merely obtains clearance to read your chip.

In terms of privacy, “identity theft” might not be a metaphor anymore. Can you imagine it? “Oh my god, I’ve been hacked!”

I can easily visualize a whole generation of folks slipping ever-deeper into this seductive information soup, swimming in it comfortably and competently…  and in the process unknowingly, or uncaringly, sacrificing yet another layer of that quaint old right called privacy.

What’s Next?

Have you been left in the dust by technology already? Have you missed being an “early adopter” of the last “big thing” that came along and transformed the business landscape? This might be your chance to make up for it. New business and social models will arise that we can’t even imagine today. Which is why now is the time to start imagining them.

Want to see what augmented reality might look like? Take a look at these three short videos:

Augmented Reality in Education

Augmented Reality in Business—Social Data

Read more about augmented reality here:

Augmented Reality for BART Users in San Francisco
Augmented Reality Now, on Your I-Phone
Augmented Reality is Coming… And It Will Change Your Business

Share what you think about where this could go.

If you’re a sole proprietor just starting a new venture, you may not want to pay a designer for a custom web site—especially when you can test your market, concept, and business model with little or no investment of time and money. Here are some web site options that can get your site up and running fast, with no stress about time or cost.

Some require that you already have a domain name ($10) and a web hosting account ($4 to $5 per month); some are self-hosted and totally free.

Free Downloadable Web Site Templates

Do a quick search on any major search engine and you’ll find thousands of free site templates, many of them quite good looking and well constructed. Caveats? Read the terms of service—some require a link back to the site or template author. You’ll need some basic html knowledge in order to input your content and upload the finished files to your web host.

Use Your Web Host’s Free Site Templates

Many web hosts, including Godaddy.com and Yahoo, offer free web templates. You purchase a low-cost hosting plan, then pick a pre-designed template that most closely matches your business. Customize it using built-in or downloadable tools, and voila, there’s your web site. You don’t need to know anything about coding or html. True, you don’t have total and absolute control over the appearance of your site. But it’s quick, and it’s cheap.

Free Google Sites & Blogs

Google offers a totally free online site-building tool and hosting service. You don’t need any expertise whatsoever, you don’t need to pay one dime, and you can use these sites for business and commercial purposes. You can have your own site up in half an hour, no technical knowledge required. Check them out at sites.google.com. Remember to read the terms of service, privacy, and policies pages.

Planning a blog? Google also offers a free blogging service, blogger.com. Your own very attractively customized blog can be online in five minutes.

More Totally Free Site Services

Check out the free services out there, like GoGoPin, or blogging guru Seth Godin’s Squidoo (single-page sites called “lenses,” that gather information on a particular topic, product, project, or business), or the free start-your-own-social-network site, Ning. (Again, always read the terms of service and privacy policies. Be aware that a free, hosted site service offered by a brand-new company may or may not be a long-lived endeavor.)

WordPress for Web Sites, Blogs, Ecommerce and Membership Sites

WordPress was originally developed as a free, open-source blogging platform. It has evolved into a powerful site tool that’s used by major newspapers, universities and businesses—and it’s still free.

WordPress is not the simplest option out there, but it is the most scalable. Starting with a simple one-click template, you can later evolve your site into an extremely sophisticated and powerful system. WordPress allows you to start small and end up big, without ever having to change platforms or portage your content from one interface to another.

WordPress.org offers free downloads to install on your own domain. Many web hosts (including my favorite, Westhost) also offer free, one-click installation.

WordPress.com offers free, hosted blog sites on their domain.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect

The web is not a permanent medium. It encourages flexibility and experimentation. Yes, you can get started now, on a shoestring! A very short shoestring. Or even no string at all. Your site isn’t perfect? That really doesn’t matter, because it will continue to change as you learn and grow. Sometimes it just makes sense to begin simply, even when you’re aiming high.

Do you have your own free site source, comment, or experience to share? Please join the discussion.

I just read a speculative article on Mashable.com about Apple’s rumored tablet computer … a light, slim, Kindle-like standalone screen that could be drawing tablet, computer, internet browser and e-reader rolled into one. Maybe phone, camera, videocam, ipod and bread-slicer as well. It’s exciting as hell, but also maddening, isn’t it? Trying to keep up with new technology, I mean.

There’s the coolness factor, of course. (I tell myself frequently that this should be a minor consideration.) Closely related to coolness, for me anyway, is the little-kid-loves-colored-lights phenomenon. And then there’s the money thing. Can this gadget/software/etc. help you make more money? As a businessperson, does it help untether you from the many demands of running your own show? Make your life easier? Allow you to do things you never did before?

Some technologies entirely transform the way business is done. The web itself, for example, back in the early ’90s. People who figured out how to use it, early and well, made a ton of money. Remember Netscape? Ebay? Paypal? Google’s IPO? The founders of these now-giants cleaned up. And many of the early adopters, like the ones who figured out how to sell things on eBay while the rest of us were barely cranking up our copies of Netscape 1.0, also made fortunes.

This is still going on today—the revolutionaries and the early adopters reap amazing benefits. Then the rest of us straggle along trying to imitate their success. And eventually, that early success turns into a formula which others try to sell. Take blogging, for example. We’re not all Chris Garrett, or Darren Rowse. But how many of us have bought e-book after e-book, trying to make our blogs as successful and profitable as theirs?

I call this the Magic Ticket Syndrome. I would love to find a Magic Ticket to instant fortune and prosperity. Wouldn’t you? Innumerable folks find their own Magic Ticket by selling what purports to be your Magic Ticket to a profitable online business or blog—getting rich through publicizing your business/product/site/self, or being on national TV, or writing killer landing pages, etc. etc. I’ve got at least a dozen of these things in a “to read” folder on my desktop. I’ll bet you do too.

And then sometimes a technology comes along that really can help your business. For example, a client of mine manages vacation rental properties. Yet she herself could never travel, particularly during the summer, because of the logistics of collecting rents and deposits from renters and potential renters. A typical web-based shopping cart wouldn’t work for her, because her payment amounts always varied according to which property was being rented, for how long, in what season, how many people, etc.

Solution? I researched online invoicing software and services, and after extensive testing, suggested an online invoicing software called FreshBooks. Now, my client and her potential renters come to an agreement on dates and location, she emails a link to a custom invoice, and the renter pays online via credit card before arrival. No more checks, no more hassles with foreign exchange. And for her, no more being stuck in the office.

After seeing how smoothly FreshBooks worked for my client, I gave it a whirl in my web development business. I used to hate invoicing. Hate it. I’d procrastinate weeks before sending out my old MS Word invoice template. This handy little tool, however, makes invoicing—dare I say it? Not only easy, but almost pleasurable. And, it offers value-added statistics that I used to have to track in a separate Excel spreadsheet. So now my invoices get sent out on time and my cash flow has improved. Simple, huh? (In fact, in the interests of full disclosure, FreshBooks’ proven track record, speed, reliability, and responsive support have met all my stiff affiliate criteria. So yes, I am a FreshBooks affiliate and will make a minuscule amount of money if you click these links and decide to become a paying customer.)

I came across another business using this technology in a different way. WPhelpcenter.com offers technical problem-solving services for WordPress site developers. You describe your WordPress issue or glitch over the phone, they ask some questions, then give you an estimate. If you decide to have them do the work, an email with a FreshBooks invoice link appears in your inbox a few minutes later. As soon as you’ve paid, the guys at wphelpcenter are ready to start working. Again, simple.

Is this bit of technology a Magic Ticket? Nope. But does it enable business owners to be happier and more productive? Yes and yes, for my property manager client and for me. Does it elegantly facilitate a web-based business model that might otherwise be unfeasible? In the case of WPhelpcenter.com, yes.

Invoicing software isn’t exactly super-cool. Nor does it totally revolutionize the way business is done. But it’s useful. And it’s just one of dozens or hundreds of such products that appear with astounding regularity these days. How can we possibly keep track of them all, let alone figure out which ones will truly be helpful, let alone transformative, in our particular business?

March 2010 postscript: I’ve started a free weekly tips sheet to–one usable, bottom-line-enhancing tech tip per week. Sign up here: http://creatingwebsuccess.com/free-stuff/

And if you’d like to go one better, and give your business and your bottom line a shot in the arm of motivation, inspiration, and practical steps you can take right now to jumpstart your business, check out my new product, 99 Ways to Use Social Media and the Web to Grow Your Business, Reach More Clients, Sell More Products and Services, Make More Money, Make Your Life Easier, and Change The World!

So let’s forget the coolness factor for the moment. Is there a new piece of software or technology that helps your business work better, differently, more easily? I’d love to hear about it.

At least half my clients have come to me because something wasn’t working with their previous web designer. Generally, what’s bugging them is the communication process. And because they’re not comfortable communicating, their sites have gone stagnant. I’ve heard things like “He only communicates by email; I can’t ever just phone him.” Or, “I was shocked when I got my bill, he never said it would cost that much.” Or “He said he can’t fix [fill in the blank problem] without buying [fill in the blank expensive new technology]—do I really need it?”

Usually, these businesspeople suffered in silence over a period of some time before their paths crossed mine. They’ve had to shrug their shoulders about work that never got done, plans that stayed in limbo, money not made, money spent unwisely, and precious time wasted.

Do you want the site of your dreams, and depend on your designer to get you there? Here are eight ways to have a more comfortable, productive, and ultimately, profitable relationship with your designer.

• Use your designer as a consultant. If you discuss your thoughts and plans for changes with your designer while your thoughts are still in gestational stages, she or he can often give you feedback, ideas, and suggestions for cheaper/better/easier ways to accomplish your goals. They’ll also have time to research new technologies they may have heard or read about that might help you achieve what you’re looking for—before the last-minute crunch.

• Batch your changes. If you batch your web revisions together rather than sending 15 individual emails, it saves your designer time, and saves you money.

• Don’t pretend to understand what your designer is talking about. Keep asking questions. “How will that help me?” “How will that save me time/money?” “How will that (technology, process, proposal) help me achieve my goals for the site?”

• If your designer asks you to sign a contract, read it carefully! One client, Erica, came to me for web site changes which required the original Photoshop files used to create her site. Her former designer responded with a snippy note instructing her to read her contract. Yes, he owned the Photoshop files… and charged her over a thousand dollars to ransom them.

• Which brings me to the next point: clarify up front whether you own your site design and artwork.

• Communicate proactively and clearly about money, pricing, and what you’re willing to spend. Never be afraid to ask “Is there a less expensive way to accomplish the same goal?” And the follow-up question to that one, “What are the trade-offs of doing it that way?” When you ask—and you must—your designer should be able to state clearly what can be accomplished given the funds you have. That said, all technical projects occasionally run into unexpected glitches that aren’t anyone’s fault. Which leads me to the next item.

• Be accessible and easy to communicate with, without being a micromanager. You may cut yourself off from crucial information by being either inaccessible, or overly invested in details. Give your designer room to work while letting them know you’re available when needed.

• Choose a collaborator, not a web site Nazi. Your designer is there to give you their most skilled support and advice to help you achieve your goals, not to impose a vision, style, or business model upon your site. If you can’t communicate with your designer, look for another. Immediately!

If you have a designer already, these are proactive ways to get a lot more out of the relationship. If you don’t, they’re selection criteria. Whether you need a designer once a year, or once a week, you and your business deserve the best.

One of the best marketing consultants in the business just used Twitter to ruin his brand.

This is a guy who has been the model of small-business marketing integrity for me, and thousands of others. I’ve bought his products, subscribed to his newsletter, been his follower. And then he sent out these tweets:

LOOOOK!!! If you want more followers check out this site: http://EasyFollowers.com
about 14 hours ago

HEEEYYYY PEOPLE!!! Want more followers? Check out this site!!:
http://EasyFollowers.com
about 16 hours ago

ARE YOU KIDDING ME!! I love this site! I just got so many followers: http://EasyFollowers.com
about 18 hours ago

HOLY MOLY if you want more followers you need to check this site out: http://EasyFollowers.com

My first thought? Hmm, that’s odd, he doesn’t usually talk like this, or repeat himself. But if this guy, whose work I respect so much, recommends this site, I’d better check it out. Of course I want more Twitter followers! But a niggling suspicion still bugged me. The capitalization, hokey language, multiple exclamation points, and repetition were very uncharacteristic of this person. Was this for real, or had his account been hijacked, or what?

I went to easyfollowers.com. It’s a membership site; you have to log in with your Twitter account info to get in the first time. It says on the home page that there are two levels of membership, “VIP” and free. There were only 13 VIP members when I checked… so VIP membership must cost a bundle. But you can’t find out how much it costs without using your Twitter login to sign up, and agreeing to the Terms of Service (a link in very pale print, already conveniently auto-checked).

What are the terms of service? Whoa. It’s a short document that sounds like the Twilight Zone. You have to relinquish control of your Twitter account. Here are the TOS, complete with typos:

1. You agree to submit your twitter accout [sic] credentials.

2. You agree to allow us to store your account information in our database.

3. You agree your account will be used to automatically tweet an update on your account for promotional purposes every 4 hours with the exception of VIP members. [Note that the account above tweets a message every TWO hours.]

4. You agree upon loging [sic] in you allow us tweet an update on your twitter for promotion.

5. You agree when buying vip there are no refunds or returns what so ever [sic].

6. You agree to allow us up to 6 hours to put your twitter user name on the vip section.

7. You agree if you spam our site you will be banned from our service forever with out hesitation.

Bad spelling aside (would I want these guys tweeting typos under my name?), why would I give up control of my own Twitter account, even if it netted me hundreds of “followers”? And I still didn’t understand how on earth could I gain followers by spamming them.

Another click led me to the “About” section. Here I found the following description of the service.

“… Here you will gain more followers for your account. This concept is quit [sic] simple and works very well. The 1st thing you will need to do is login your account (The same info as your twitter credentials) Then after loging [sic] in your [sic] taken to page with a list of vip members and regular members. The vip members are paid members and will gain the most followers on our site. Right now vip members are getting anywhere betwenn [sic] 400-1500 followers a day. The regular members are free members. Before anyone can join this site you are obligated to click and follow all the vip members and the last 20 regular members. After doing the following you can then join the site to get more followers.”

Aha! A pyramid scheme. But… if you’re just a free member, doesn’t that mean you would just get 20 followers before your name cycled out of the last 20 on the list? And many of them, surely, would unfollow you as soon as they get out of Easy Follower. What good is that? It seems to me that they’re casting an awfully wide net to get free members who then make the VIP membership a paying proposition. And VIP members would probably get hundreds if not thousands of coerced “followers,” regardless of the content of their stream.

I think this is both sleazy and counterproductive. Pyramid schemes are called that for a reason: they generally “work” for the first people who sign up, but not for the later ones. The ones at the tip-top profit from the greed and credulity of the suckers below… who end up getting ripped off. Case in point: the rise and fall of Bernie Madoff and his investors.

And then there’s the question of quantity versus quality. We’re bombarded with quantity-based marketing all the time, and we tend to hate it, or at best, ignore it. When sheer numbers matter most, we get junk mail in our home and business mailboxes, spam in our email boxes, and stupid repetitive tweets from people we might have respected. We’re treated like mindless drones. We all know the yucky, impatient, dismissive feeling this engenders all too well.

And the marketing guru whose work I so respected, until last Friday… he even had a written Twitter policy upon which I modeled my own. It would not permit him to engage in this kind of sleazy scheme! (Did they pay him? Did he not read the TOS? Could he really be that desperate?) Well, he shall still remain nameless for now. I unfollowed him. But I’m hoping he’ll come to his senses and admit a terrible mistake. And I suggest everyone else boycott easyfollowers.com, too. Unless you want more of this kind of sleazy s*** on the net!

I’ve tried them all. Time-management techniques like setting a goal and an intention for the day. Budgeting time by day or by week. Making appointments with myself. Relying on last-minute-itis. Calendars. Reminders. Tickler files. And on and on. None of them work for longer than a few weeks at most. And now I know why. I’m not enjoying what I do.

I’ve got a huge project going on right now. It’s for a client I adore, who is doing something worthwhile in the world, and pays well. And yet each day I spend more time “working up to working” than I do on the actual nuts and bolts of the project. And why? Because it’s boring. Excruciatingly, mind-numbingly, boring.

Here’s the chain of foolishness that ensues: my biggest-paying gig right now is boring. I procrastinate doing it. Yet all the while I feel so much pressure—gotta get it done—that nothing much else gets done either because “I don’t have time.”

So my books aren’t balanced, my letters not sent, other projects getting dangerously deferred, my office a mess… and this project’s not moving ahead very fast either. AND I’m stressed. And feeling crummy and ashamed. And reading news/writing blogs/playing games to try to get back in the groove, or get “warmed up.” But not taking time truly off, either, to exercise, rest, work in the garden, visit with friends.

And the problem? It’s not news addiction, or game addiction, or procrastination. It’s that I felt trapped into doing a job I don’t enjoy. And now, I’ve simply lost the muscles I used to have that allowed me to force myself to do things anyway.

These muscles worked for years. Years of working in offices. Years of school, and graduate school (you can’t get a doctorate without having a pretty strong “do it anyway” muscle). And now? Nothing, zero, nada. Total flab.

I don’t know why this ability is failing me now. But I do know that the answer isn’t to force myself harder. Or find the latest time-management technique or trick. It’s to revamp my work schedule so that I’m doing more of what I enjoy, and less of what I hate. Will I ever be a person with a pristinely cleared desk and all the items on my to-do list ticked off? Nope! But the goal is to be functional, not perfect. And that I can manage, if I like most of what I do.

How about you. Is it really time management we need, or is it choice management?

Note. I wrote the first draft for this post over a year ago. Since then, I’ve made choices that bring me a lot more satisfaction in my work. Do I still procrastinate? Sometimes, but not often. And I’m not bored! How about you? Are you bored? How do you handle procrastination?

When I wrote my MA thesis, back in the late 80s, the computer lab in my department had just been opened and stocked with a handful of Macintosh computers. They were grayish-colored plastic boxes with tiny black-and-white displays about 6” by 8” or so, just big enough to see half a page of manuscript. Each one was equipped with a screensaver called “Stars.” The display was nothing more than tiny moving points of light radiating out from the center of a dark screen… almost exactly like the displays on the U.S.S. Enterprise “Next Gen” just before entering warp. When I was the first one to step into the pitch-dark lab on a weekend morning, and all the computers were running “Stars”… well, I felt like the world was hurling into the future, and I was part of it. No screen-saver since has been quite so exciting.

Writing a thesis can be tedious work, though. Another student showed me something else I’d never seen before… a computer game called “Tiles.” It was a series of squares, alphabetical, I think. You had to slide the letters into alphabetical order by maneuvering them in careful sequence to take advantage of the one blank spot on the board.

And this is how, while learning the wondrous advantages of a computer over a typewriter for writing, I concurrently discovered the Procrastination Mode of computer use: playing basically boring games which offered just enough challenge to keep the mind off the problems at hand.

Over the years the games have gotten prettier and slightly more complex, though no less silly, repetitive or pointless. At any given moment, my procrastination aid of choice has been Tetris, Weltris, Solarian, Columns, Brickle, Qbert, Tritryst, Pegleg, Luxor, Bedazzled, Gooball, Jewel Quest….

And when I have a job I’m bored with, or intimidated by, or I’m depressed, upset or out of sorts, it’s SO tempting to play just one round. Just one! I promise!

Of course I’ve tried not playing during work hours. And not playing at all. This year I had a “Game-Free January.” Of course I then became addicted to global news, learned to use a new RSS reader, and spent over an hour a day keeping up with my favorite blogs. Another habit.

So what to do? Sure, I could deinstall my games. Forbid myself news. But then I ask myself, what fun would that be? I love the action, the color, the tests of skill and concentration. The mini-mental vacation. No games? I might as well be in a cubicle! No news? Isn’t feeling connected that the whole point of the Internet? I might as well cut off my hand to stop scratching an itch!

Denial isn’t really an option. The only thing that works for me is to be conscious. Of when I want to play, or read. Of  why, how much, what I’m really feeling, what I’m avoiding. It’s a juggling act: being mostly present, but allowing little bits of respite along the way.

How about you? How do you procrastinate, and more importantly, how do you stop procrastinating?

Have you ever clicked onto a web page, a long page full of description, bullet points, yellow highlighting, red dashes, astounding testimonials… and you’re instantly overwhelmed with the feeling that (a) you will regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t buy this product NOW, (b) you will suffer terrible consequences—or you’ll be sabotaged by your own lack of daring, money, willpower, etc.—if you don’t buy this product NOW, or (c) you suddenly feel so hooked into the fantasy of doing/having/being what this page promises that you absolutely NEED and WANT this product NOW…?

So you click. You pay. You download. You start the ebook, watch the video… but get stalled a third of the way through. It wasn’t as interesting, or maybe as easy, as the sales copy promised. Then you tell yourself you just don’t have the … time… right now to finish it. And there it sits, in a folder on your computer along with all the other e-books you’ve bought, and free handouts you’ve collected about how to make  your business better. You know… the ones you plan to read when you have time.

This is when I usually realize that I once again fell into the fantasy of thinking I could achieve or attain something I want, without working through whatever it is that’s been keeping me from doing it in the first place. And I usually feel a vague sense of shame, an unpleasant "yuck" feeling that comes from shame.

Some of us are always suckers for these fantasies, though, like Zack, a friend who is an internet marketing junkie. Whenever he sees a new sales gimmick, he wants it Whether it’s a Facebook site, a Twitter account, Youtube videos, an autoresponder ecourse, audio, video on site, voiceover testimonials, a dedicated sales page bursting with hypey marketing language… if he sees it, and some so-called marketing guru is charging hundreds or thousands for it, and promising it will earn Zack millions … he wants it.

Never mind if the advertising is filled with half-truths and exaggerations, and the product itself is wildly overpriced. Never mind whether or not the product, even if it performs as advertised, is a smart use of time and resources to achieve his site’s goals! Zack spends a ton of time and money on tools which can be valuable in themselves, but may not be practical for his site right now. And then he wonders why his sales just don’t keep pace with his expenditures. It’s a frustrating (and expensive) situation.

I have many clients who sell products or services over the Internet. The ones who build a profitable business that’s sustainable over time—without wasting thousands of dollars and many hours in wild goose chases along the way—tend to have one big thing in common. They have a plan.

How Can You Plan, in this Time of Rapid Changes?

Simple. Your plan, roadmap, whatever you want to call it, has three key elements. Here’s how to get started.

1. Know what and where you want to be. Dream big. In your wildest dreams, what does success look like to you? How much do you want to work, what kind of work will that be, what dollar figure would you like to earn… ask yourself as many concrete questions as you can. Don’t be afraid of the answers! This is "Point B," in other words, it’s where you’re going.

When you measure everything against an explicit goal, rather than a half-articulated fantasy, you know when to say yes, or no. For example, if your goal is to spend all your working time writing, say, and support yourself easily this way, then you probably shouldn’t plunk down your money for a course on cold-calling, or videocasting, no matter what kind of fame and riches it promises. What about a copywriting course? Well, does writing sales copy help you achieve, or is it part of,  your ultimate goal? If so, that’s a possibility to consider. If not, say no.

2. Budget. What’s coming in, what’s going out? How much money do you have? How much does your business earn now? How much or little time and money can you devote, right now, to achieving your goals? Be thorough, honest, and realistic. This is "Point A," your starting point.

Your budget is another kind of yardstick. Even if that ebook normally sells for $500, but—for today only!—it’s $150… do you have the money, and is this how it’s best spent to achieve your goal? Does this purchase enable you to progress toward your ultimate goal significantly faster or better than you would without it? If the answer to all questions is "yes," then the purchase is one to consider.

3. Strategy. Wikipedia says, "A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal." In other words, it’s a roadmap which tells you how to get from point A, where  you are now, to point B, where you want to be. It’s a sequential to-do list that will progress you from here to there.

Make a list. "Chunk it down," as my friend Connie says, into bite-sized steps. Write down every stage and step towards your goal, and every concrete task needed to achieve each step. Do as much research as you can—whether online, at the library, talking to people, hiring a consultant—to fill in the blanks. Put each tiny step in a logical, chronological order. This is your "strategy." It will change and evolve, but at any given point it is your best and most informed guess as to what you need to do first, next, and later.

It may not be perfect. Your timeline may be off, you might miss a step or two, you might decide to abandon step 3 and go directly to step 5. But this plan provides you with a structure—a guide into the trackless wilderness of the future, based upon your best understanding of the steps needed to reach your goals, and your available budget for doing so.

Flexibility and an Open Mind

Now that we have your plan, we also need to be able to alter or even abandon it. (Note: it took me many years to understand that this is not at all the same as not having a plan in the first place!) If a new technology comes along, a new opportunity comes your way, a new product is released, a seminar is announced… you need the flexibility to evaluate it rationally. Can it enhance or speed your progress? Will it require complete retooling, yet ultimately enable you to achieve your dream? Your goal, your budget and your strategy give you structure. Balancing the structure, we also need to give ourselves permission to abandon it when to do so serves our greater goals.

Ensure Success by "Paying Yourself First"

No, I’m not talking about money, I’m talking about time. Now that we have a roadmap to our goals, that has to become our priority. Do a step on that list every single day, before you do any other work, before you read your email, before you go online to get the news. Devote the first half hour, or hour, or two, of your work day to achieving YOUR goals. Otherwise, it’s too easy to get swamped by the pressures of day-to-day tasks. Do you want your plan for 2010 to look exactly the same as the one you did back in 2005? No? Then "pay" yourself first.

What has worked for you? Do you have a plan, did success just "happen," or are you still waiting for it? Please add your comments.

Being a business owner these days means you have to be adaptable. Trends and technology change quickly, and every time there’s a new online tool (blogging software, Twitter) or a new paradigm (social networking, web 2.0), entire business models can be conjured seemingly out of thin air, while others are relegated to the backwaters of Internet commerce.

How do you adapt to the new? Most of my clients feel a combination of excitement and overwhelm. The possibilities are incredible… but the act of just keeping up with what’s possible can feel like an unbearable and unfair burden.

The Myth of the Business that Never Changes

Even now, we can all think of a few businesses whose essence hasn’t changed in decades or even centuries. The London Times. Macy’s. Twinings Tea. This old paradigm, though terribly challenged by the current crisis, has the status of a legend.

For those of us in sole proprietorships or small businesses, the effort to create and build a brand sometimes results in the same kind of marriage to a business model. Wouldn’t it be great to create a “classic” brand? Yet this desire can have one potentially disastrous results for a business.

New Technology, Old Paradigm

I have one friend, James, who has been a visual artist for all of his working life. He believes in the traditional model of success: artist seeks reputable gallery representation; gallery handles all marketing and sales; artist achieves fame and fortune.

In this model for success, a web site is useful… but only as an adjunct to the traditional process of hauling a portfolio around for gallery owners to see, or sending out a box of slides. Internet tools can help publicize the work. But they don’t really change anything.

What if James used the web to turn his business upside down—and rather than courting traditional success, he used it to create a hierarchy of products (t-shirts, inexpensive prints, tickets to private showings and previews, special day-long studio art “classes” in the artist’s medium and style, all the way up to the sales full-scale works)—that would build a Thousand True Fans, as Kevin Kelly calls it—fans who provide a living income? (Find out more about this idea and many other new media business models in David Mathison’s Be the Media.)

The possibilities are endless for making a living doing art in a new way. But it’s risky. It’s scary. And it means the artist must be a bit more of a marketer than before. Gone is the isolated studio, the ivory tower, the focus on “pure” art, unsullied by market considerations.

Ego and Habit

There’s fear of risk, financial ruin, loss… and then there’s the role of ego, and habit. My grandfather, for example, owned a grocery store in a small town in Minnesota. When he purchased the business in the 1920s, the store had no refrigeration, made no deliveries, stocked no fresh produce. He turned it into an up-to-date business that thrived even during the Depression, all the way through the 1960s and beyond. But then when the supermarket chains came to town, business dwindled until the store finally closed, following my grandfather’s death, in the 1980s.

During those decades, my grandfather had turned down invitations to expand. He had found a working model, and he stuck to it. He could not imagine how to reinvent the store in a changing business landscape, nor did he want to. He loved interacting with customers, packing up groceries for home delivery, and keeping up with all the stories of the entire cast of characters he had come to know during so many years. And as long as those loyal old customers were still living, the store survived despite stiff competition. Even my uncle, who took over an increasing amount of the store’s management as my grandfather aged, couldn’t imagine fundamentally changing his father’s ways of doing business.

Visiting my grandmother one winter after my grandfather’s death, I drove her to the supermarket. I dreaded the trip, knowing their decades-long hatred of and boycott of any and all supermarkets. But once inside the store, my ancient half-blind grandmother careened from fruits to vegetables to the meat counter with the manic enthusiasm of a wild dervish. She loved the vast selection, the fresh array of produce, the spaciousness, the freedom to choose.

“Ray and I never had any idea what we were up against,” she said later. “No idea whatsoever. We never even set foot inside a supermarket.”

I was shocked. Their emotional investment in their own ways of doing things kept them locked into a mindset that kept the business from expanding, surviving, and supporting their kids as well as it had them.

Are You the Problem?

Chef Gordon Ramsay comes up against the same issue on his TV show “Kitchen Nightmares.” Ramsay offers a proven formula for restaurant success: good food that fills a local market niche, served quickly and attentively, in attractive surroundings. But so often the failing restaurants that seek his help can’t make the turnaround. And the reason isn’t lack of desire. All too often, it’s the emotional baggage of the owner: an attachment to a menu, or dish, or style of cooking, that just isn’t cutting it in today’s market.

And yet sometimes, old is good. Sometimes, the tried and true really works. Sometimes, the stubborn attachment of a business owner to their own authenticity is the key to their success.

So how do you know? How do you choose when to change, how to change, what to change? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Are you sick of hearing about Twitter? I know I am. So here’s a different image, from the movie “A River Runs Through It.” Recall those gorgeous shots where everything is sun-gilded and glowing? The water sparkles. The man (Brad Pitt, as it happens) casts, and the line snakes gracefully into the air and lands delicately on the reflective surface of the river. That’s what we’re doing here. Fly-fishing. Every tweet is  a lure that lands ever so gently on the water. We’re very lucky fisherfolk, too. We reel in a fish, or two or three, or a dozen, every time we send the line out. And the best part: no hours of standing on wet rocks. Just five minutes a day of quick brainwork, and type a few characters.

Here’s how.

1. Sign up for Twitter using a separate account and user name for the site or blog you want to promote.

2. Under the “Settings” link on your new Twitter page, make sure that the box “Protect my updates” (near the bottom of the page) is NOT checked.

3. Open another browser window and sign up for a free account at snipurl. You’re doing this for 2 reasons. Snipurl shortens URLs so they fit easily into a Twitter post, and it also lets you track how many clicks each link gets. You can use this information over time to see what your readers are most interested in, and give them more of it.

4. Decide what page or post on your blog you want to promote. Copy the link, and paste it into snipurl to shorten it (make sure you’re logged in first). Copy the shortened version of the URL and use it in Step 5.

5. In one short sentence, say what the reader will gain or learn from your blog post or web page that will help them in their lives or business.

The jargon for this is “adding value.” Marketing guru Robert Middleton says this about adding value:

When your focus is the welfare of others, you win every single time. If I write an article or an eZine, if I give a talk, or help a client, if I share a realization or a strategy, it’s all about making a difference….Businesses based on this principle thrive.

Share something with your followers (and anyone else who might search Twitter for information on your topic) that helps them solve the problem your business exists to remedy. Try to use a keyword or two. This one sentence will be your “tweet.”

Do NOT say what you had for breakfast, that you’re on your way to a dentist appointment, or that you’re having trouble finding a parking space! The point here is to give people something useful, helpful or entertaining. Also do not try to hard-sell anything. That’s not the point either.

For example, a useless tweet (for our purposes): “Stuck in traffic in the rain, commuting really sucks.” True, but not helpful.

An obnoxious tweet: “Buy my incredible product X [fill in the blank] now.” Just plain bad sales technique, anyway. (For more on how to identify Twitter spam, check out Bernard Moon’s post at Mashable.)

A tweet that adds value for my audience of business web site owners: “18 reasons to choose WordPress for your blog or non-blog web site, new post at http://sn.im/iaxm3”

6. Type or paste your tweet into the box at the top of your Twitter page where it says “what are you doing.” Add the “snipped” link from step 4. Press the “update” button.

Do this once every weekday. If you temporarily run out of new material to tweet about, link to a helpful, related post on someone else’s blog.

Voila. That’s it. You don’t need to understand Twitter. You don’t need to follow anybody until you want to. And, you don’t need to worry about who’s following you. Just track your site statistics, and watch your traffic stats improve. And enjoy the river.

Most virtual project teams work like a dream. Everyone’s doing what they like to do. People like and respect each other. The team enjoys the excitement of creating something new. There’s a synergy. There are all the benefits of working with a collaborative group (creativity, support, fun), and none of the drawbacks of working with others (having to actually go to the office, sit in a cube, deal with annoying coworkers, etc.).

And then there are the projects that don’t go well at all. The one where someone’s trying to sabotage you. Where you’re being micromanaged. Where, if you’re the person hiring everyone else, people are trying to inflate their hours or their egos, or produce poor quality work and are non-responsive to your needs, or your team won’t communicate with each other.

Then what? How can you avoid having your project sabotaged by virtual politics? I’m not a management consultant or an MBA. But here are some thoughts, based upon my own experience.

If You’re the Project Owner

You may be the project owner, but have little or no “management” experience. You like and trust the people working for you. Why else would you hire them? But if costs and timelines start to get out of hand, you might need to take drastic action. How can you prevent costly headaches from escalating?

1. Planning, planning, and planning. Either by one knowledgeable person in consultation with the others, or collaboratively. Planning allows timelines to be set, deliverables to be determined, costs to be estimated, and roles and contributions to be clarified. On the other hand, failure to plan allows competing agendas to flourish and time constraints to disappear. As a friend in the construction business once told me, “Remember the seven P’s… Proper prior planning prevents piss-poor production.”

2. Collaborative project management software is a tool to help get a handle on unwieldy projects and facilitate communication among participants. Opening 20 or 30 or 50 project-related emails a day, filing, tracking and organizing them, can be a real pain. Make things easier on everybody, and bring some transparency to the process.

3. Clear decision-making… who’s in charge? If it’s you, are you actually qualified, or is your insecurity causing you to micromanage? Are decisions made collaboratively, collectively, or by you, or one manager, or a point person? Clarify. Delegate. (Helpful hints here from management coach Steven Cerri.)

4. Are you paying by the hour? Again, with competing team members, this can backfire badly. Consider taking bids on the whole job.

5. Are you, or the project manager, losing touch with one or more team members? And—key question—are you also being sucked up to by another team member? And does this person tend to complain about the others? This person may massage your ego ’til it purrs, but it’s bad news for your project. Get a clue: your project may be headed for 23 skidoo. Take the reins firmly now, or be prepared to spend a lot more time and money than you care to.

If You’re a Member of the Virtual Team

If, on the other hand, you’re a consultant or contractor who’s gotten embroiled in a “team” effort that’s turned into anything but, you can of course think about bowing out. But before you do that, here are some things to consider.

1. Are you being paid by the hour? Your colleagues as well? With a poorly matched team, this can be a recipe for disaster. Consider pointing out current cost and time overruns, and offering an aggressive bid on the whole job, by assembling your own team.

2. Are you an expert, or an employee? Is your opinion repeatedly ignored in the areas of your expertise? Are you getting squeezed out? Are you even becoming the project scapegoat? You’re probably the person who’s trying to keep your head down and get the job done without making waves. But if this is happening to you, you must confront the situation.

3. That back-biting colleague? The one sucking up to the client…The one you finally figured out is trying to sabotage you? Confront her. Hard, fast, and at the earliest opportunity. Do it by phone, not email. Do not let her off the hook. (“Jane, yesterday you emailed Richard that you were having trouble with a video file because I hadn’t saved it properly. But that wasn’t true—the file was fine. I want to know what’s going on that you didn’t come to me directly, but went to Richard instead.” Don’t argue, don’t insult, but keep asking questions. “Why did you email Richard, instead of just me?” The point is not to get an answer, an apology, or—above all—to become defensive yourself. The point is to let the person know that you’re willing to call them on their shit, and that you don’t mind making them uncomfortable when they overstep. Usually, the behavior changes. If it doesn’t, this person means problems, big-time. Being “nice” does not work with people like this. Do you enjoy constant confrontation? If not, consider…

4. Getting out. If despite all of the above you’re second-guessing yourself, dreading your inbox and stewing over emails when you get them, hating the people you’re working with… I hate to say it, but getting out can be the wisest course.

The economy might be suffering… but that’s no reason to recreate the cubicle, or to suffer toxic people when you don’t have to. Within days after virtual office politics finally pushed me to let go of one of my “best” clients, inside of a week I had five new, interesting, well-paying projects…. with literally no effort on my part. I couldn’t even have considered them if I had still been busy with the difficult client. As a self-employed person, never feel that you have to stick with situations that are not working for you. They can cost you money. More importantly, they can cost you your peace of mind, your happiness, and even your health.

Read Part 1, “Are Virtual Office Politics Sabotaging Your Project” here.

What’s involved in a web site redesign? A little, or a lot. It depends upon two things:

(1) what your goals are, and

(2) how the site was created in the first place.

Your Goals

I’ve helped people redesign their sites for a lot of reasons:

• Adding features to an existing design. 
• Wanting a more flexible system that allows them to change and update the site themselves. 
• The site feels totally outdated and limiting; they want to redo the whole thing. 

The first step in a redesign is figuring out what your real needs are. Are you looking for higher sales, better data collection, easier purchase process, more clients, more memberships or subscriptions, fewer customer service calls, no more emails asking the same questions over and over, etc. Do you need your site to express who you and your business are now, not who you were five years ago?

Make a list, and prioritize what you want from a revamped site before you start.

The First Secret: Design

There are three parts to any web site redesign: the design, marketing, and technical aspects. All of them tie into and effect each other.

First, is the actual design portion. This includes:

• Adapting new content or technical options without compromising an existing design, or
• Creating a completely new site, including layout, navigation, colors, typography and imagery.

The Second Secret: Marketing

Second is marketing. By “marketing,” I mean the entire user experience created by the combination of content and visual interface. Questions to ask yourself here are,

• What actions do you want people to take on each one of your pages?
• How are you persuading them to do this?

“Marketing” is tied into every aspect of your site, from the visual look and feel, to what kind of payment system and shopping cart you choose. A redesign is the best opportunity you can have to think about how your users’ experience can be enhanced—added to, simplified, clarified—in ways that grow your business. You want every page on your site to steer the user to a single action, whether it’s to sign up for your mailing list, purchase a product, or simply click to the next page in a sequence.

“Marketing” also encompasses the selection of keywords and keyphrases that you use to get organic and/or paid search results. If you need professional help to determine your keywords, by all means, get it.

The Third Secret: The Technical Portion of a Redesign

The technical area is the most difficult one for many non-technical people to assess, and yet it too can determine the success of failure of the site. It can also be the source of large unexpected costs. We’re talking here about:

• What scripting language(s) your site is constructed with—HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript, etc.
• Where your site is hosted,
• Whether your site is tied to a particular template system, like Shopify or Yahoo Stores,
• What software or platform is used to build the site—Dreamweaver, Cold Fusion, WordPress, etc.,
• How much flexibility is built into the site, 
• Whether you or your staff can alter and update it yourselves, and
• How search-engine friendly your site is (actual keyword and keyphrase deployment in the site, see Is Your Site’s “Invisible Sloppy Web Design” Sending Visitors Away?)

There may be cost (or other) advantages to making changes in one or all of these areas during a redesign. Web technology changes very fast, and what was effective five years ago may no longer be the way to go now—or tomorrow. Some designers know nothing about business needs; some programmer-types know nothing about creating a visually pleasing site. You need to work with someone who is aware of the benefits to you and your business of planning ahead for maximum flexibility.

Bottom Line

A redesign is an opportunity, a moment when careful planning and analysis now can save you hours of effort and a bundle of money down the road. Sometimes, the word “redesign” is a misnomer, because you’re really creating a whole new site. In other cases, a redesign is exactly what’s called for to fix or add to a working site.

Whichever route you take to revamp your small business web site, your designer—or your design team, even if that’s just you and your designer (or just you!)—needs to understand the trade-offs among the three key areas: esthetic, marketing, and technical. Handling these three areas well will give you a site that can be phenomenally successful.

More Web Redesign Resources

Two of the best marketing-type guides I know to putting together a successful small business web site are Sufi master business coach Mark Silver’s Heart Centered Web Sites, and marketing coach Robert Middleton’s Web Site Toolkit. Both will tell you what kinds of pages you need and what kinds of language or “calls to action” to use in order to create a site that improves your business.

If you’re just starting out in business, I also recommend that you pick up a copy of Middleton’s Infoguru Marketing Manual. It covers the basics—how to talk and write interestingly about your business, and exactly what tasks to do to market your business. Yes, I am an affiliate! I’ve been using and recommending Middleton’s products for nearly ten years because he’s made such a huge positive difference in my own business.

Writing recently about how to choose a shopping cart, I realized that you can’t really talk about carts without talking about payment collection. How do you actually collect your customers’ money? To get your online store to work the way you want, you’ve got to to hack through the whole confusing mish-mash of shopping carts, payment gateways, merchant accounts, and third-party processors. It tends to make people’s heads spin. So, in the interests of sanity, here’s the quick-and-dirty on what’s what with payment processing.

When you buy something in the grocery store, you choose your items, put them in a cart, then check out by getting your stuff run through the scanner and paying the total. The transaction path, the mechanics of transferring the money from your pocket to the store owner’s, is something like this:

In an online store the process is similar. You put your items in a shopping cart, which is actually a bit of software that remembers your items and computes their cost when you’re done. When you check out, instead of a cash register where you fork over your money, there is a “payment gateway.” The gateway sends your money along to the bank, where it goes into an “Internet enabled merchant account,” a business account which is specially configured to receive money from the gateway. With an online store, the transaction path looks like this:

Here, the payment gateway is the conduit between the online shopping cart, and the bank.

Each of these three components is essential in order to process transactions. They’re independent of each other, yet must all work together… or, in Internet parlance, they must be compatible. Sometimes a particular bank sets up their accounts to work with one gateway; sometimes your bank gives you a choice of gateways. So, for example, you could mix and match by selecting one item from each of the three columns below:

This kind of setup works great. You have control over the entire purchase process. There are good fraud protections in place. No one else’s brand goes anywhere on your site, unless you want it to be. So what’s the catch? For many start-up web retailers, the hangup is price.

Sample fees for each component:

If your credit history is poor, or you’re running a business considered “fringe” by banks (astrology readings, energy healing, etc.), or you don’t have much in the way of tangible assets, you’ll rates at the high end of the range. Banks scrutinize this kind of account much as they would a loan. In fact, because of the delay between the computerized transaction and the money actually moving from one place to another, they consider it to be a loan. For a sole proprietor or microbusiness who wants a web store to pay for itself, it’s hard to pony up this kind of bucks before the site has made even a cent.

Third Party Payment Processors

But all is not lost. This is where “third-party payment processors” come into the picture. There are two basic types of payment processors. First, there are the kind who take a percentage of your sales, hold the money and distribute it on a weekly or monthly schedule, sans their percentage. 2checkout.com and ccnow.com are two well-known ones.

The second type of third-party payment processor is what I call the “pseudo-banks,” services like Paypal and Google checkout, which process your transactions, take a smaller percentage of your sales, and hold the money in your account until you withdraw or transfer it. Percentages taken are generally less with this type of account. They can supply a free shopping cart, too.

In either case, the transaction process looks like this:

Both types of processor can supply shopping carts too, so that your entire transaction process is handled, start to finish. Most can handle multiple languages and currencies, and can accept all major credit cards. Additionally, most third-party processors can be used like gateways, that is, you can select your own shopping cart, and you use your own bank account. They simply process the money for you.

Here are comparable costs:

So what’s the catch here? Control. You pay little or nothing in setup costs, and the percentage fees are reasonable. But, your 3^rd-party processor hosts the checkout page, and controls its entire appearance except, perhaps, for the placement of one logo image by you. It may not allow you to process certain types of transactions, like subscriptions, or memberships.

Additionally, there is a 3^rd party interposed between you and your customers. If there’s a transaction issue, people can be aggravated and confused by having more than one party to deal with, whereas with a merchant account, your business is responsible for the entire transaction, so a customer only has to deal with one business entity.

Finally, In the “pseudo-bank” kind of account, However, they tend to require users to already have an account with them, or to sign up for one during the transaction process. This can make for a confusing checkout process, and one that many people will simply skip. And, they are “pseudo-banks,” so generally your money is not insured.

What Should You Do?

If you want to give your customers a seamless purchasing experience from start to finish, a merchant account plus gateway plus cart is the way to go. If you’re on a tight budget, take a look at the reputable third-party processors who have a good track record, a long history of successful payouts, and few online complaints. Make that whatever combination you choose can handle the kind of transaction, and the types of payments, that you need for your business model. And happy selling!

If you’re setting up an online store, read my post on how to choose the best shopping cart for your site.

Do you wonder how to start a web site—whether you should hire an expensive designer, or use one of the off-the-shelf template systems that promise an “overnight site”? It’s a decision that can paralyze people before they even begin their business. And many clients have come to me some ways down the road, realizing they made the wrong choice and their business is suffering for it. When you’re just starting out, how do you know what kind of web platform to choose?

Is your vision modest, or ambitious?

One business owner I work with, Jim, runs a huge web site selling workshops, e-books, audio downloads, hard copy books and DVD packages. This site is the source of most of Jim’s income. But three years in, Jim found his template too restrictive, even though he spent a lot of money to customize its look at the beginning. Updating the store was very tricky (one expert Jim hired accidentally brought the whole site down for a week), and expensive. Jim felt frustrated that he couldn’t easily create custom landing and sales pages for co-branded products and events he was developing with colleagues. He couldn’t “escape” his template. What could Jim do to make his site work better for him?

Another client, Deborah, is a bodyworker with a large long-time clientele. Deborah, unlike Jim, simply wanted a place to display her office info, briefly explain her techniques and philosophy, and announce special workshops from time to time. She has no merchandise to sell, nor is she interested in developing any. Ever! Deborah sought a very simple web presence with zero maintenance. Does she need to pay a designer for a totally custom site?

Do you have the budget for major changes?

Jim’s livelihood depends upon developing products based on his expertise, and selling them online. After I started working with Jim, we decided to migrate his entire site to a custom Dreamweaver-based design which, along with 1shoppingcart, allows for a unique look, and relatively easy updating and alteration.

The ubiquity of the platform means that anyone who knows html and CSS can easily modify his site. As his needs evolve, he’s not stuck forever with one design, or one designer. In the long run, this new setup saves Jim money and gives him the flexibility his business needs in order to grow. However, the time and expense of porting the whole site over could have been avoided, had Jim known the restrictions of his original choice.

Deborah, on the other hand, knows herself, her clients and her business—and she knows she’s not going to going to need more than a “brochure” web site. We set Deborah up with a simple WordPress template whose blogging platform offers a quick and easy way for her to announce special events and workshops without knowing anything about web technology. She isn’t likely to outgrow this site for many years… but if she ever does, the WordPress platform offers enough flexibility for her very small site that a complete “redesign” will be neither time-consuming, nor expensive. This is a good decision for her.

Are you particular about color, layout, look, branding?

Another client, Terry, wanted a masculine, professional look for his business consulting site. Terry is a do-it-yourselfer who’s often in a hurry. To create his first site, he purchased a template package which included a number of design and color selections, one of which matched the look he wanted. However, after spending six hours one afternoon trying to figure out how to position an image in precise alignment with the text on a page, Terry called me in frustration. It took me another hour to determine that the package Terry purchased didn’t allow the fine level of control that Terry was after.

Terry had made an impulsive decision, which, luckily, didn’t cost much money. However, it cost him a good deal of time before determining that he needed a more customizable platform. For many of us small business owners, time is the most precious commodity of all.

Which brings me to the last question.

Do you have the desire or expertise to modify and update your own site?

If not, is the expertise required to help you change your site widely available, or is your platform so unique or “techie” that you’ll have to either find a super-specialist, or pay someone for their learning curve? This happened to a client, Thomas, who bought an expensive blogging system which did everything he needed, and offered lots of flexibility. But, you had to be a programmer to run it!

Thomas is not a programmer, and he discovered too late that unfortunately, experts on his platform are few and far between. Thomas couldn’t make simple changes himself, so he procrastinated on his updates and got way behind what his active mind was able to dream up. His income was suffering from the limitations of his web platform.

After Thomas and I began working together, we migrated Thomas’ site to a WordPress platform, with a custom design. Thomas now happily does all his own modifications and updates, and is quick to take advantage of the latest plugins to add cutting-edge functionality to his site.

The best of both worlds

For many years, a custom Dreamweaver site was the gold standard of small business web design. However with the explosion of database-driven content management software, this is no longer the case.

Open-source blogging and content management software such as WordPress and Joomla have matured to the point where they offer the best of both worlds: flexible design platforms, plus the ease of ready-made templates (which exist by the thousands).

You don’t need to be a blogger to take advantage of these systems. These days, more designers are working largely, if not exclusively, in CMS systems like WordPress to create ordinary business and ecommerce sites as well as blogs. And if you’re a do-it-yourselfer, these systems let you handle a lot of your own updates without needing to know any code at all.

So what should you do?

If you need a small, quick, inexpensive site which you don’t expect to grow—and you aren’t fussy, or really like a ready-made template design—go with an inexpensive template system. There are very simple WordPress templates for small business sites, as well as many available from reliable providers like Yahoo Stores and GoDaddy.

If you’ve got, or plan to have, a large, unique, and constantly changing site which makes money from merchandise, and you have no interest in doing any updates or maintenance yourself, a fully customized site, whether using a CMS/blogging system or not, will give you the flexibility you need in order to grow. Hire a designer and get to it!

Finally, if you’re a do-it-yourselfer with big ambitions but starting on a shoestring, a WordPress site is the perfect choice.

The question I am asked more than any other is how to choose a shopping cart. It can be an intimidating decision, because there are such differences in price, capabilities, and setup. And, the wrong cart can seriously cut into your sales. So, after working on hundreds of sites, here are my simple guidelines to help you find a cart that will do everything you need, as easily, flexibly and affordably as possible.

There are five types of carts I” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”ll mention: template-based carts, all-in-one services, free carts used with Paypal or Google Checkout, WordPress carts, and last but not least, my favorite and most recommended carts.

1. Template-based carts

Yahoo Stores, Miva Merchant, Shopify and Zen Cart are some of the most popular, although there are dozens, if not hundreds out there. To actually collect money, these carts usually require you to have an Internet-enabled merchant account, and a payment gateway such as Authorize.Net, Payflow or CyberSource. For the merchant account and gateway, you” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”ll pay a small percentage of sales (1.5% or so to upwards of 5% depending on your credit rating), plus a fixed per-item sales charge (usually $0.25 to $0.35), plus a gateway fee—in addition to the purchase price of the cart.

Many people are very happy using these template systems. However, I tend to feel they” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”re not worth the time and trouble. First, being template-based, designing the appearance of a store using these carts can be a real pain. If you” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”re particular about the look, feel, and layout of your store, you” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”ll tear your hair out in frustration again and again… and still not have it looking ” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”right.” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)” Second, because your store is tied to a template, you” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”re pretty much wedded to this cart for the foreseeable future. Locking yourself in can feel like a costly mistake once a cheaper, better technology comes along. And finally the killer: I find the entire system to be too costly for low-volume or novice sellers.

2. All-in-one carts-plus-payment-collection

For example, 2checkout.com and ccnow.com. These carts advertise themselves as ” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)”merchant account alternatives” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)” because they handle the entire transaction from start to finish, collect and hold all sales proceeds, deduct their own fees, and send you the remainder by check or direct deposit on a monthly or weekly schedule. You don” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”t need a separate merchant account, gateway, or payment collection service of any kind.

They generally offer a web-based interface through which you can create purchase links for products on your site. They handle multiple currencies, offer a clean, easy interface for your clients, don” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”t require much up-front investment, allow you to accept a variety of credit and debit cards, and are easy to administer.

Pitfalls? First, expense. With 2checkout, for example, you” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”ll pay a $49 setup fee in addition to a per-sale fee of $0.50 or so, plus roughly 5% of each sale.

Second, what if the company you” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”ve selected goes under? A client of mine lost a month” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”s sales, over $4,000, when her all-in-one company (located in another state) went belly up without warning, and without paying out the money it had already collected for products already sold. State agencies were useless in attempting to recover the funds. She lost all her Christmas sales that year.

Third, the payment page tends to prominently display their brand, and offer limited customization.

And finally, these carts don” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”t usually support affiliate programs.

This kind of cart can be a good choice when you” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”re not too concerned with pinching pennies, want to easily and quickly ” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)”test the waters” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)” with marketing a product or two, don” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”t have a track record selling online, or want to provide a multi-currency option for your customers. But, caveat emptor.

3. Simple, free carts that require both the merchant and the buyer to have an account with an online ” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)”pseudo bank” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)”

E.g., Google Checkout and Paypal Web Payments Standard. This is also a cart-plus-payment solution. For payment processing, Google and Paypal charge a per-fee transaction of $ 0.20 to $0.30, plus a tiny percentage of each sale. Both services ” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)”hold” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)” your funds, acting as a clearinghouse until you choose to transfer them to the bank account of your choice.

The carts tend to be simple, bare-bones carts with elementary shipping calculations. Using them is quick, cheap, and easy. They have the benefit of brand recognition and financial credibility.

The drawbacks? First, some buyers simply won” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”t buy if they have to sign up for a Google or Paypal account. And Paypal buries the ” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)”no Paypal required” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)” option, so many potential buyers won” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”t spot it. Second, the payment pages are not beautiful, and are customizable only to a limited extent. Third, and often most imporotant, these services do not provide hosting for secure digital downloads.

These services are a good choice if you” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”re on a budget and can work around the digital issue.

Very importantly, the payment processing portion of both Paypal and Google Checkout can be used with many other free-standing carts.

Also note that Paypal offers another payment processing option for an additional $30 per month, called Web Payments Pro. It must be used with a third-party cart, but it makes credit card payment sans Paypal account a much more visible and easy option.

4. Carts that work exclusively with the WordPress blogging platform

There are ecommerce WordPress themes which have the cart integrated into them, like the specially designed Market Theme and the Ecommerce Theme. There are also free plugins which can be incorporated into any existing WordPress site or blog, such as the Ecommerce, the eShop, and Shopp plugins. The themes tend to cost from $50 to $100; the plugins are usually free.

These can be a great alternative to standalone carts, although in my experience, the plugins can be slow and slightly glitchy. Both themes and plugins require a payment processing service (either a merchant account, a ” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)”merchant account alternative,” onclick=”return TrackClick(” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”" onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”,” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”%3Ca+href%3D” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”)” or Paypal/Google).

I don” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”t recommend any of these carts (yet!) for high-volume sites.

5. In a class by themselves

There are two carts I most often recommend, based on their ease of use, features and flexibility: 1shoppingcart.com and e-junkie.com.

The luxury model. 1shoppingcart is used by so many high-volume Internet retailers and marketers for good reason. It” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”s a web-based cart (nothing to install) which generates product links to be added to your existing site. You can handle thousands of products, and generate discounts, cross-sells, upsells, and specially priced bundles. You can use automatic recurring billing to sell subscriptions or create installment payment plans. You can automatically put buyers on product-specific email lists, and send them as many automated emails as you wish. You can also manage your newsletter or mailing list in the same interface. Both hard products and digital downloads are well supported. The interface is generally straightforward, both for you and your customers. Technical help is available via phone and email, and the technical staff is responsive and helpful. The cart works with most payment services and gateways, including Authorize.net, Cybersource, Paypal, and 2checkout.com.

This cart is expensive. It will do everything but slice your bread. But if you” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”re serious about selling on your site, this is THE top-of-the-line cart and helps you do everything possible to maximize your revenues.

The economy car. E-junkie is the up-and-coming low-budget alternative to 1shoppingcart. It” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”ll get you where you need to go, with quick, inexpensive, and no-frills secure sales of digital or tangible products.

It” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”s got most, but not all, of the features of 1shoppingcart: secure download links, somewhat-customizable cart, some shipping options, product bundles and gift coupons. It works with about half a dozen of the most popular payment processors, including Paypal, Google Checkout, 2Checkout, and Authorize.Net. It also offers the ability to manage your own affiliate program.

Downsides: It does not offer programmable autoresponders or recurring billing. Its interface is sometimes convoluted and slightly confusing. Limited number of payment gatweays accepted. Simple but ugly checkout/download pages.

Bottom line

My final answer:

• If you want to sell very cheaply, don” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”t mind appearances, and don” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”t need secure download links, use Paypal Web Payments Standard or Pro and/or Google Checkout to process your payments. As your shopping cart, use a WordPress ecommerce theme/free plugin, or use the free Paypal/Google carts.
• If you need secure download links for digital products—ebooks, mp3s, video, etc.—then your quickest, cheapest, easiest option is to use Google or Paypal to process your payments, and pay a small monthly fee to use the E-junkie cart.
• If you want a top-of-the-line experience for you and your customers, with maximum flexibility and ease of use, use 1shoppingcart, along with a merchant account and gateway like Authorize.net or Cybersource.

And th-th-th-that” onclick=”return TrackClick(”,’%3Ca+href%3D’)”s all, folks! Happy selling to you.

Ahhh, the joys of working for oneself, of being a sole proprietor, a lone creative entrepreneur. We have clients, not bosses; colleagues, not co-workers; and hire independent contractors rather than supervisees. We’ve never even met most of the folks we work with, and probably never will… because we communicate via phone, email, fax and chat. Office politics? Are you kidding? I thought I was done with all that. Didn’t you?

Scenario 1: Low-Level Sabotage

But consider this scenario. You’re working on a project for a client. In the routine course of the work, you need to send a file to someone else who’s also working with your client. On their end, something goes wrong. They don’t look at the file soon enough, they asked for the wrong thing, they don’t have the right software and can’t read it… whatever. Pretty soon you get a verging-on-snippy email (and here’s the kicker) cc’d to your client, telling you there was a problem—on your end—with the file you sent. This kind of finger-pointing tactic is annoying, but so petty and transitory that it’s easy to handle.

Scenario 2: Virtual Back-Stabbing

Scenario 2. The stress escalates. Now, in order to complete the client’s project, you have to work with this same person on a long-term basis. It soon becomes clear to you that there is a pattern to their behavior. They seize opportunities to make themselves look good by making you look bad. Worse, you begin to realize that there’s method to this madness: they actually want to take over parts of the work you do for this client.

You, of course, want to keep your client, your billings, and your self-respect. The client doesn’t care who actually does the work, as long as it gets done well and cost-effectively. But how is the client to decide between the two of you? The snippy back-biter is very convincing. The more sniping they do, the worse you look.

You find yourself beginning to dread your interactions with these people. How do you handle it? Go on the defensive? Go on the offensive? Meditate, ignore it, hope it goes away? Aren’t you working for yourself precisely to escape wasting your time with this kind of b.s.? Do you think that the work is getting done as well or as quickly as it could and should be? Are you giving your best? If you have to sit and stew, or seethe, or carefully craft a reply every time you read an email, I doubt it.

Scenario 3: Total Fiasco

Now let’s kick things up another notch. In Scenario 3, your client assembles a team of several different individuals and their subcontractors to finish one project. You have expertise and problem-solving ability in the project area, but you’re not “in charge.” You have no authority over your colleagues, nor they over you. Your client has authority, but no expertise. Nominally, your client is in charge. In practice, no one is.

Because the participants were brought on board at different times and weren’t able to coordinate planning in the beginning, the work goes slowly. As progress lurches on, key portions of the project run into roadblocks. Communication is difficult—some of your colleagues don’t answer crucial calls or email for days at a time. Everyone also has work to do for other clients, which they may have postponed thinking that this particular project would be finished within a certain time frame. You’re in the same boat. When you scheduled your time, you were imagining everything flowing smoothly… not the disorganized, frustrating mess that things have become.

The project gets finished months behind schedule and way over budget. Your client is understandably angry and unhappy. He admits “I have no management skills. I just want people to do what I tell them.” (True, but not helpful.) The back-biting colleague, with whom you’ve managed to work all this time, can hardly wait to heave you under the bus. And you? On the one hand you feel terrible for the client, who spent so much more time and money than would have been necessary with good planning and communication from the start. On the other hand, you’re so fed up and aggravated that as soon as you’re done, you say a permanent sayonara to him.

Did virtual office politics sabotage this project, not to mention this client relationship? You bet. How can you avoid this situation—as a contractor or consultant, or as the project owner? Stay tuned for part 2.

Have you experienced politics in the virtual office as a contractor, contractee or consultant? I’m eager to hear from you.

Now more than ever, business IS change. Your focus, your processes, your technology, your products, your services, your interests, your employees—which of these isn’t continuously evolving, shifting, changing and growing?

To cite an extreme, one of my clients was called crazy for moving his retail location four times, to three different cities, in his first ten years in business. But during that time he built a thriving business and a loyal clientele. Recently, he’s had such great success with his latest move—putting his business online—that he doesn’t have to maintain any brick-and-mortar retail location at all.

Those who risk nothing, gain nothing. How can you create a web presence that changes and grows with your business… and continues to enhance your image, effectiveness, and profitability?

Old, Inflexible Web Technologies

Some web technologies create web sites that are much more difficult to alter later. In earlier web days, there wasn’t much choice among site technologies. You’ll often find these in legacy sites, and in poorly designed sites as well.

1. Nested tables. Altering the structure of a site with tables can be time-consuming (read: costly) beyond belief. Until recently, most sites used nested tables, so don’t be alarmed if your site does too. Just make sure any new site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for layout, rather than tables.

 2. Graphic sites. Even recently, I’ve worked on sites that were nothing but Photoshop files exported as jpgs. To change the tiniest comma on one of these pages means opening a Photoshop file, making the change, re-exporting the file as a jpg, piecing the page back together, and loading it in the browser to verify. And doing that whole process over if for some reason the page didn’t look as it should. If you’re trying to update the site and don’t have the original Photoshop files, you’re out of luck… you’ll need to re-create the entire page from scratch. If you have one of these sites, replace it!

3. Flash. Flash is a way of creating animations that look very slick and gorgeous on the right site. But can be difficult to find a developer who knows how to work well with Flash, and a site that is built entirely from Flash is not search-engine friendly and is tough to update. Unless  you’re an architect, videographer, filmmaker or game designer who really needs cool animations on a site, use Flash sparingly.

Building a Web Site That Can Change and Grow with Your Business

On the other hand, there are technologies that lend themselves to allowing easier alterations down the line. I’m talking about common, ubiquitous site-building tools; nothing that requires custom programming or is beyond the budget of most small businesses and creative entrepreneurs. 

Some of these tools, like CSS and include files, can often be grafted on to an older site to extend its lifespan. Others, like Dreamweaver templates and WordPress or other blogging/CMS platforms, are best implemented as part of initial site construction.

Here’s a quick list of common technologies that can bring more flexibility to your web presence:

1. Dreamweaver templates & libraries. Dreamweaver has been the web site workhorse for the past ten years. Even with a table-based site, Dreamweaver templates can make site-wide alterations much easier. Using Dreamweaver templates to set up your site, you can:

• Instantly make site-wide changes in things like background color, headline styles, or minor layout adjustments.
• Add or subtract menu items, sidebar, header, or footer include files.

CONS: Dreamweaver templates tend to be error-prone and temperamental to create and maintain for large sites. Implementation and updating requires Dreamweaver. And they’re very difficult to apply to a preexisting site, so they’re best included from the beginning of the design process.

2. Include files. This is a way of including a smaller file within an html or php page, such as a menu that appears on every page of the site, a header, a footer, etc. The main benefits of include files are that:

• Updating these site-wide “include” files requires only one file change, and one upload. In some ways they’re easier to manage than Dreamweaver templates because, for a large site, you only need to upload one file per change, rather than reloading every single page in the site.

CONS: sometimes require special URLs & host setup, so best to be added as part of the initial site (.shtml vs. .html) Because include files can become unwieldy if there are a lot of them in a site, they’re best used for clearly demarcated functions, like a navigation block, or an ad block, rather than for general layout.

3. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS has tremendous versatility. With a site that’s been set up in CSS, you can:

• Alter the entire layout, color scheme, type size and spacing by changing one CSS files alone. Check out Zen Garden for examples of how changing CSS code (and artwork) can create completely different “looks” for the same material.
• Create visually rich and varied designs that would have been impossible using old-style web pages.

CONS: CSS can get very complex. Trouble-shooting can be quite tricky.

4. WordPress or other content management system (CMS). With most of these, you can:

• Easily migrate your site to other blogging or CMS platforms
• Change the theme (look) of your site in minutes
• Quickly add and configure plugins and new technologies
• Automate your site with auto-archive and auto-RSS capabilities
• Add content with no html knowledge
• Post to your site via email

CONS: WordPress or another database-driven site can be costly and labor-intensive to customize. If something goes wrong, you may need a programmer to troubleshoot.

If you’re planning a revamp, or creating a new site, it’s important to think about the issue of flexibility up front, and talk about it with your designer. You’ll save time and money down the road with a site that’s easier to update… and, your bottom line will benefit from a site that stays current with what you’re actually doing in your business.

While  we can’t predict all the changes and adaptations we’ll be called to make in the coming years—who knows, the next generation of web sites might be 3-D spaces accessed with virtual reality goggles instead of monitors!—at least for the foreseeable future, your business will be more likely to prosper in changing times with a site that has the ability to grow and change built into it from the start.

So what’s the big deal about RSS… it’s just another intimidating ingredient of Internet Alphabet Soup, right?

Not quite. RSS is a way of putting a message into an envelope. The message can be anything digital: an article, an mp3, a video, whatever. The envelope is a few lines of code (XML, to add another ingredient to the soup). With it, you can send your messages to anyone who can read the code—anyone who has a newer browser, or an RSS or “feed” reader. Once a person sets their browser or reader to “tune in” to the URL of your RSS feed, they can receive all of the messages you broadcast, in sequential order. Why is this a great thing, and how will it make your life easier?

You Don’t Have to Know Any Code

To read RSS, you need a newer browser, or an online reader like Google Reader or My Yahoo. Or, to read an audio RSS message (a “podcast,”) you can also use an audio RSS reader like iTunes.

To create RSS, you can use a simple program like Feeder or Feed for All. Or, you can use almost any blogging platform—Blogger, WordPress, Moveable Type, etc., to create RSS feeds automatically, without lifting a finger.

Why Bother Using RSS? Time Savings.

Well, first, let’s start with the reader’s point of view. Is there a subject that you’re really interested in, or follow, by regularly checking certain web sites? Suppose, for instance, you have a Macintosh computer, you write on and about Macs for a living, and you need to keep up with everything Mac. Does this mean you click on a list of bookmarks to log into 40 or 50 web sites several times a day to check breaking Mac news and rumors?

Absolutely not! You use your RSS reader (I personally favor Google Reader) to cut the time you’d spend checking sites in half, or even less. 

Speed Through Updates and News Using RSS

 How? Simple. First, subscribe to a site’s RSS feed by entering its URL into your feed reader. Often this can be done with one click of your mouse. 

 Once you’ve subscribed, a list of articles, audio files, etc. will appear in your feed reader or browser. In Google Reader, for example, the list of sites you’ve subscribed to shows up like this:

On the left is the topic, “mac,” and below it, a list of sites with RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to. The numbers in parentheses indicate the number of unread messages. (The sites that are not bolded contain no unread messages). 

Say we want to check the site “9 to 5 Mac.” We highlight it with our cursor. On the right, appears a list of recent updates from 9 to 5 Mac, by title and date. The white background means they’re unread; the blue means you’ve seen them already. 

Click on any one of these titles, and you can read the entire article… without ever having to leave your feed reader.

See what I mean? You can scan all the latest headlines and news—or simply see whether or not there is any news—on dozens of blogs or web sites. You can do this just by opening your reader and clicking down your list—and you can do it in five minutes.

RSS, An Easy Way to Communicate

Now, from the site-owner’s point of view, why publish an RSS feed? Well, so people who are interested can keep up with your site quickly and easily. If you have a static site which rarely changes, this will be less useful. But if you own a blog, or frequently post newsletters, software updates, talks, music, etc., RSS is a fantastic and simple tool for keeping in touch with your fans, clients and customers. And, with the current blog explosion, it will be used more and more.

Blogs and RSS

One of the really great things about using a blogging platform to create your web site is that the software is automatically set up to publish RSS. You don’t have to do a thing! All your updates are being automatically streamed to readers who “sign up” by bookmarking your feed’s URL in their feed reader.  This is one of the great benefits of creating sites using WordPress or another blogging platform rather than creating a static site.

But no matter what kind of site you have, RSS can help you keep up with news and new developments more quickly and easily. Try setting up your own feed reader, and when you’re reading a blog you like, and see a (usually orange) graphic like this one… you’ll know exactly what to do… and you’ll have one more little way to make your life easier.

Two clients came to me recently, wondering why their sites didn’t come up at all in search engines. Both sites were created by the same web designer, and both clients were very pleased with their site’s appearance. But where was their traffic? Why couldn’t they find their own sites on Google, or any other search engine?

If You Build It, They Will Come… NOT!

When I took a look behind the scenes at the actual coding of both sites, I found the culprit. There were no title tags, metatags, alt tags, or keywords. The designer built attractive sites… but by these omissions, guaranteed their invisibility.

I don’t think he meant to cause problems. But he didn’t take the extra step and add in these small things that in today’s competitive environment make such a huge difference to the success or failure of a site to attract business. But who knew? His work was sloppy, yet invisible to anyone who doesn’t know how to read the source code on a web page. It’s as if these web sites had an undetected saboteur who secretly, quietly, and invisibly, sent all their visitors away before they’d even knocked at the door.

Search Engines Look for Text

How do search engines find your site? They look for text. If there’s no text, your site has a hard time being “seen.” Does this mean that sites with images, video, and animations are always invisible? No. But it does mean that you need to use text to describe the contents of your site. And for the text to be effective, you must use it in certain ways, in certain places. Here’s how to do it.

A Simple Search Engine Optimization and Visibility Checklist for You and Your Web Designer

Whether you’re building your own site, or hiring a designer, here’s a list of simple things to check before your site goes live.

1. Domain names count. Try to use your keyword(s) in your domain name (“bluewidgets.com”). If you’ve already got your domain name, don’t worry about this one, just focus on the others.

2. File and image names are even more important. Don’t just name your page files and images “products.html” and “image1.jpg.” Use your keywords! (“bluewidgetstore.html”, “bluewidget1.jpg”.)

3. Do not leave spaces in the name of any file that is used on your site (“bluewidget.html,” or “blue-widget.html” but not “blue widget.html”).

4. Fill in ALL the “image alt” tags with text that uses key words to describe the image (alt=”blue widget 1, frontal photo”). Do this for EVERY image on your site.

5. Super-important: fill in the “Title” tag on all pages! Use descriptive terms that use both the site keywords, and the contents of the page (“Blue Widgets Store – fine-tune your rotilators and improve your flipsacalcs with precision-engineered carbon steel blue widgets”).

6. Fill in the “Description” metatag with a client-centered description of each page. A few search engines will still use this tag on their results page (“Fine-tune your rotilators! Precision blue widgets, list of all sizes in stock”).

7. Fill in the “Keywords” metatag with a list, from most important to least important, of your page’s keywords. Although these are not so important anymore, it won’t hurt, and it may help, to have them. Important tip: don’t bother putting any keyword in this tag that doesn’t actually already appear on the page. So, if you don’t have a widget named “Famous Blue Widget” on this page, don’t put the word “famous” in the metatags just because you think it might help. It won’t!

8. Internal navigation—is it done with images, or with text? If your navigation links are actually images, be sure to put a redundant set of text-based navigation links on the page as well. Often, the footer is a good place for these.

9. Use link titles, and put page keywords in them!

10. Very important: instead just using bold text, or a larger font size, for headings, use the “h1″ and “h2″ tags. Try to put keywords in these headings.

11. Avoid Flash navigation! (Ask your designer.)

You and your designer don’t have to be rocket scientists or search engine pros to do this simple search engine optimization. Does it sound like extra work? Yes, a little. But it makes a huge difference in how many people actually find you. And it takes much less time to add these touches when you’re building the site than it does to go back and add them later.

Don’t sabotage your own traffic! Be visible! Make sure the invisible, behind-the-scenes code in your site is ready, and welcoming, to those search bots.

Has a site you’ve owned suffered from ISWD (Invisible Sloppy Web Design)? Have you fixed one yourself, or had to hire someone to do it for you? Join the discussion.

What do Martha Stewart, Discover Magazine, the NFL, the Royal Navy, the Wall Street Journal, and Danielle Steele have in common? They all use WordPress.

But these are mega-money megastars. And besides, you say, I’m not a blogger. I don’t want to have to write every day or even every week! So how can you, the entrepreneur, small business owner or sole proprietor, benefit from using WordPress over hand-coding a traditional site?

Here’s the thing. Blogging software—any blogging software—automatically handles chores that traditional, hand-coded sites (yes, we can call five or ten years “traditional” on the web!), built with Dreamweaver or other coding programs, need lots of human attention—i.e. time and money—to do..

• A blogging platform allows you to publish to the site without knowing or doing any html or web coding
• You can change the total appearance of your site with—literally—one click
• The software automatically publishes your updates as an RSS feed (more on this in another article click here to learn how RSS can make your life easier)
• And most wonderfully, blogging platforms automatically archive your published articles without any action whatsoever on your part.

But Why WordPress, Rather Than Blogger, Moveable Type, Expression Engine, or Some Other Platform?

A couple of years ago, the choice wouldn’t have been clear-cut. Now, more top-100 bloggers use WordPress than any other single platform. It has evolved from a promising but clunky tool, back when I first encountered version 1.0 in 2003 or so, to a thriving, highly extensible platform that has managed to maintain its accessibility to the novice user while offering professional-level technical and design sophistication. It’s a stand-out among blogging platforms.

The 18 Reasons I Recommend WordPress to My Clients

1. It’s free. There’s nothing to buy, no subscriptions, no editing software needed.

2. Ready to use, right off the net. All you need is a web host.

3. Infinitely customizable. You can download a selection of free themes—and apply them yourself, instantly. Or, you can purchase premium themes for special purposes (real estate site, business site, ecommerce site, etc). Or, of course, hire a designer to create your own custom look, feel and function.

4. You can easily create, organize and update your own site, without knowing any coding.

5. Like other blogging software, it automatically archives all your posts.

6. Like other blogging software, it automatically creates RSS feeds, and pings the services of your choice when you update your blog.

7. You can publish to your site via email, or your phone.

8. You can use it to podcast, videoblog, photoblog, or write.

9. You can also use it to create a totally non-blog site or an integrated blog-plus-conventional-site.

10. Reader comments can be configured in a variety of ways to enhance the sense of community on your site.

11. Twitter, microblogs, and other new platforms can be integrated into your WordPress site easily.

12. It’s continuously updated and supported by a huge team of users and developers.

13. It can be quickly extended to perform many additonal functions via hundreds of plugins.

14. Can be updated automatically… no need for tricky reinstalls.

15. Comprehensive support and instruction, both written and video, is widely available at little or no cost.

16. It’s very SEO-friendly. Traffic, traffic, traffic!

17. There’s a quick learning curve.

18. And last but not least, has an easy-to-use admin interface.

With all these advantages, why would you use anything else for your blog or site? That’s exactly what I started thinking, and why I have redesigned this site in…guess what?…WordPress.