Can you put a price on being nice? The chances are you already have. When you go to a restaurant, do you sometimes tip a little bit more if the serving staff were extra nice/professional/helpful? When you shop somewhere and the assistants are nice (not pushy) and give good advice, you go back next time, right?

Although you cant always equate these experiences to exact amounts, it is easy to see the value in being “nice”.

Of course, sitting here with my coffee it is easy to say these things, and reading them you may well agree, but out in the real world, when we are running at a million miles an hour, it is not always quite so obvious.

We’ve all been there, trying to do 5 things at once, only to get an email or take a phone-call from a customer (or potential customer) with a question. That’s when we need to remember the value of being nice.

In actual fact, the value of being nice far outstrips the cost of being nice. If you go out of your way to be helpful the customer will remember it. Whether you reap the benefit of this now or later, either way it will be remembered.

The same can be applied if you are not so helpful, always remember that.

The actual cost of being helpful is zero, or close to it. If you can greet every request, every phonecall and every email in the same positive manner it really does not cost you anything, but the rewards can be immense!

So next time the phone rings or you hear the chime of a new mail arriving, remember the value of being nice, it’s worth it, I promise!

A week ago I got an email letting me know the forum software I use had released an update. As one of my sites runs on this software I planned to do the update this Sunday (today). I awoke at 8:30am and decided to crack on with it, but as I turned on my laptop I received another email… there was ANOTHER update!

“Great”, I thought!… oh… how wrong was I?!!!…

The problem was, the forum I run is quite a large one, with lots of members and a few modifications. As it is a worldwide forum there is a mod on there letting members display a little flag showing their nationality. This is a great little mod, and people like it a lot, but upon upgrade it broke! After the upgrade happened the flags were no more.

The problem

The problem is the way the forum software works is not very “mod friendly”. It’s not like Wordpress where your mods are protected somewhat, modifying a forum required major surgery to the core files… not nice when it comes to upgrade time!

Anyway, all in all there were two mods that broke, the flags and the “quick reply” feature. The quick reply was an easy fix, as it only involved alterations to a single file, so fairly low maintenance, but the flags mod was a lot of work to find out what went wrong.

By the time I had finished with this fiasco it was well into the afternoon. This made me think, are these mods really worth it? Fair enough, if the version of the forum was fixed, great, but it’s not… there will always be fix released and bug patches going on, each giving the possibility of your mod breaking.

…and so…

I have learned a lot of the the past year or so, but I am learning that sometimes it is necessary to simplify things in order to give the reliability necessary to keep a site running, in order to maintain your own sanity, and not give your entire Sunday up in the quest to get “the little flags working”.

By the time I think about all the time I have spent making sure these modifications survive all the upgrades, these aren’t half expensive little flags!

I posted recently about the importance of setting the correct blog post title. This made me think of something I came across a while ago. Once again it is something quite simple yet very important, that is getting your blog post title right, first time!

Here’s why…

If you blog like I do you may blog fast and furious manner, in a quest to hit that Publish button. You may or may not give a tremendous amount of thought to checking things like spelling (you should, but then it’s easier said than done) until after it’s published.

In the case of spelling it’s not the end of the world. Enter the admin panel again… manage… posts… select… edit… save… DONE!

Where things come unstuck occasionally is changing the title, or more importantly changing the permalink that goes with it.

Why is this?

Basically, under the hood of your Wordpress installation lies the UPDATE section (under settings/writing). This contains something like http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ and means when you post a blog article it updates various feeds from Google to Yahoo to Technorati.

This is all well and good, but what happens if it updates them with your latest and greatest post, only for you go back in there and change the title and permalink? That’s right, it won’t be able to find it!

I would have thought it was intelligent enough to go back in there and update these services, maybe it’s supposed to, who knows? All I know is I have looked at my stats on occasion and found attempted visits trying to find the old page, only to be greeted by a 404 error.

There are plugins out there that will handle this sort of thing and maintain a list of old pages and their corresponding new ones. Personally I find it easier just to spend a little time hovering over the Publish button, checking the permalink is correct before I submit the post.

The benefit of taking time doing this is you can craft your permalink to take out the irrelevant words, leaving a short, accurate, keyword rich description of your post.

The importance of a blog post title is something I thought I had covered before, but looking back it seems I never posted it.  The title of a post is one of the most important aspects in terms of getting your post seen. The content of the post is actually more important in terms of the total post, but if you rely on visitors from search engines then they need to arrive at the post before they can read it, right?

There are several things that dictate how well a post is ranked by the search engines, some of the most important are:

• The title of the post
• The URL of the post
• The title PROPERTY of the post (in the browser header)
• The value of the headings
• The amount of keywords in the body

The list does go on, but for the purpose of this post I will focus on the title.

If you are anything like me you will be quite enthusiastic about your blog post. When you write it you may be brimming with ideas, full of enthusiasm and excited to post. You write your post and come up with a great (sometimes funny) title to give the post the POW! factor.

This is a very easy trap to fall into, I have done this many times myself. It is easier to illustrate through an example.

Take this post… it is basically about the title of a blog post. Instead of naming it :

How important is a blog post title?

… I could have called it:

The risks of the POW factor

Ok, that’s not necessarily the best title in the world, but what I am getting at is I could use the title to make a newspaper headline type statement, to intrigue the reader and make them want to read on. There is an argument that actually that is the right way to do it, but we need to be aware that while a reader may be enthused by that, Google may not.

Of course, the holy grail is to combine the two, but in my opinion it is more important to optimise your post to allow people to find what they are searching for, not just from google, but from your internal search engine. If someone searches for this post 6 months down the line they may search for “post title”. This post will appear on the list, whereas it may not (or be lower down the list) if I gave it a funny title.

Some of this may seem like common sense, in that case great, but like a lot of these simple aspects to web design and blogging, it’s only simple once you know about it.

As always, comments (and other angles) are always appreciated.

Well I finally did it. After a few weeks of messing around with the free account, I finally signed up for the basic paid package from Freshbooks. There are several reasons for this, which I will get to in a minute, but I wanted to write a concise review of this product, along with comparing it with it’s competitors, so here goes.

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of the features I would like to let you know about the reasons I stood up and took notice of Freshbooks, aside from the very extensive feature set.

Excellent Pre-sales

When I first setup my free account I did a test. I integrated it into the 2Checkout account I have not used in a long time, since a lot of people prefer PayPal. I have since changed my domain name, and so updated my 2Checkout account to reflect this. The problem was, in order for the integration to work I had to provide the Freshbooks url instead, meaning that I couldn’t sell from my site as well. After going round in circles for ages with 2Checkout, eventually one of the Freshbooks team contacted them on my behalf and ironed the situation out! At this point I wasn’t even a paying Freshbooks customer. Now THAT’s service!

Later in the week I was experimenting a little more, and I found that the 2checkout page that takes payment wasn’t as neat as it could be. Mainly this is due to their interface not being the best. Anyway, I posted on the forums and within an hour or so one of the Freshbooks team asked me for a screenshot. I uploaded one and he went and asked the developers. He then came back to me and said they can and will do something to improve this. Again, great service considering I had yet to sign up!

Ok… enough of that, onto the review!

First Impressions

The initial impression of Freshbooks is just how polished it is. The interface is simple and intuitive enough to be called slick, and everything everything is exactly where I would expect it to be. At first it looks almost too simple, but after a bit of playing about you see it is actually very feature rich.

Look and feel

I took the time to customise the look and feel. This consisted of uploading a logo and giving it 3 colours for the menu (the bar, the active tab, and the other tabs). Once I had done this and saved it, the interface was transformed. Even the login screen embraced the new look!

The whole process took just a minute or two. This sounds like a small thing, but I have worked with several other systems that make this sort of thing either impossible or surprisingly difficult.

Ease of use

I can’t fault the system for ease of use. They have done a fine job of selecting the features people want, and implementing them in such a way they are a joy to use. From adding clients, to invoicing is seamless. One of the great selling points for me is being able to provide an estimate, and later take the estimate and turn it into an invoice.

Feature rich

I could go on about this all day, so rather than do that I will simply list some of the features I like most:

• Recurring Invoices
• Estimates
• Automated payment reminders
• Comprehensive reports
• Outputting of data
• Online Payment (PayPal, 2checkout, Authorise.net.. and more!)
• Custom branding
• They even deliver snail mail, if you like
• Time tracking (they even have an OSX desktop widget!)

This product is really quite rich in features, and looking on the forums they are very focused on keeping the features people want and not filling it with crap that just a few people ask for. That said, there is one thing that is in the pipeline that I do very much like the idea of, and that is Google Checkout integration - some people don’t like PayPal, and Google checkout takes less % off the seller. This to me would be a great addition!

Cost

I was going to leave this til last, but it is quite important so I will talk about it now. The basic paid package is $14.95 and includes up to 25 clients and unlimited invoices. This is not bad, and for $10 more you can add another 250 clients… enough for most people, I’m sure you’ll agree. This price point is actually fairly similar to the competition, and of course the free account is great for deciding if you want to sign up for a paid account or not (the free one gives you up to 3 clients).

Comparison

The main competitor in my opinion is Blinksale. Blinksale is an invoicing system but not much else. On the face of it, it does exactly as it says on the tin, and it does it well. It has online payments (PayPal only) and email invoices.

Where the two differ mainly is Blinksale is invoice centric and Freshbooks is client centric. Allow me to explain.

If I am selling we hosting, for example. I will have a silver account. A customer signs up and in blinksale I open up the silver account and add the customer. This sets them on recurring billing and off they go. Simple!

Simple, that is until they come back the next month and say they want another account… ok, back into silver account, try to select the client… can’t… not there… WHAT? This is the crux of the problem for Blinksale, it completely misses my business model.

Freshbooks deals with it in a different way. I set up the products as items and for a new sign-up I select new recurring invoice… select the client, select the product, and away we go… same result, but a whole lot more flexible.

Where Blinksale is different though is they allow unlimited clients on the free account, but a limited number of invoices per month (3). In theory you could remain free longer on Blinksale, providing your billing is spread out throughout the year. That said, $14 is hardly breaking the bank.

Final thoughts

I don’t want this to sound like a party political broadcast for the Freshbooks party (maybe too late?) but my first impressions of this product are great. It is feature rich, easy to use, and has an enthusiastic, professional team working behind the scenes.

I will post in a month or two when it has bedded in. I’m sure there will be niggles along the way, no system is perfect, but for now I am happy.

Signup for a FREE account and try it for yourself

I just dug up the following about the delay to the 2.7 release of Wordpress:

WordPress Development Team on delay of WordPress 2.7 release-

“Speaking of the final release, it will not be available on November 10th as originally scheduled.  We are two weeks behind schedule at the moment.  We need a little more time to finish the visual design, do a round of user testing against that finished design, and do a proper round of public beta testing. Our plan is to keep working as if Nov. 10 is still the release date.  However, instead of releasing the final 2.7 on the 10th, we will make a release candidate available instead.  The release candidate is intended to be a high-quality, almost-finished release that we are comfortable recommending for broad use.  After Nov. 10, the focus will be on fixing high impact bugs turned up by those of you testing the release candidate. I suspect 2.7 will be ready for final release by the end of November.  A specific date will be set as we progress through the public beta cycle and get a feel for how solid the release is.”

The buzz in the blogosphere (oh no, I can’t believe I just said “blogosphere”!) is that Wordpress 2.7 is due out. This looks to be a really worthwhile update, and brings to the table some much sought after features such as threaded comments, sticky posts and a completely re-vamped menu system.

Word on the street (what street exactly, I don’t know!) is that 2.7 was due out November 10th 2008…. well that has come and gone (in the UK, at least) and no sign of it. I am not too bothered… I am sure it is coming soon, and I would rather have a stable release than a rushed one, but I feel like a kid at Christmas….!

I will be sure to do a full write-up when it finally arrives, but for now I am off to bed! I am going to leave a mince pie and a carrot by the fireplace tonight, in case the Wordpress development team come’a'visitin!

Does your site look good when viewed on an iPhone, on a PDA, or ultra-portable laptop? Does it really matter? What percentage of your visitors use these platforms to browse sites?

This is a question I have been asking myself recently. With the roll-out of the 3G networks (pretty much globally) the speed of Internet browsing via mobile devices had increased to a now acceptable level. Couple this with reasonable mobile data tariffs, wi-fi hot-spots, and a plethora of gadgets to go with them, surely more and more people will be experiencing your site through a mobile device.

That said, I have not made the jump myself. Yes, I have RSS options on my sites, so mobile users could use those, but for the casual browser I don’t make any changes to suit their platform. I think this is for two reasons. Firstly it takes a lot more effort to develop a site and tailor part of it to be specific to the portable platform, and secondly the percentage of people using these platforms (certainly according to my stats) is too small to make it worthwhile.

I think blogs are possibly the ideal platform to take advantage of the mobile platforms. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t have a Wordpress theme installed that is tailored to mobile computing, and it gets served based on the header information transmitted when the page is loaded. That way the effort would be minimised, while maintaining the user experience. Good idea?

I do think times are-a-changing though, and the market is growing and growing. Sales of laptops now generously outstrips sales of desktop PC’s, and almost all phones now have some kind of browser in them. At some point it will become necessary to make the changes, but when that will be I’m just not sure.

Have you designed a mobile website? How was it received? Do people use it?

I am currently juggling several large projects, as well as some small ones, and it is quite an exciting and busy time for me. This is the main reason my blog posts have been few and far between this past couple of weeks.

I am experiencing a period of intense motivation and innovation at the moment. I have no idea where it came from but I feel a certain inertia to keep going, to ride the wave and see where it takes me (ok, maybe that was a bad choice of metaphor, as most waves end up crashing into the shore, but you know what I mean!).

As much as I love “riding the wave of enthusism” (ok Jim, step AWAY from the metaphor!) it is a lot of hard work, long hours and a little bit of frustration of not getting things ready as soon as I would like.

My present situation let me to wonder how others deal with the pressure of juggling projects, when different people are pulling you in different directions. Do you get frustrated or overwhelmed?

Do you wish you could finish one job before starting the next, or are you good at juggling multiple things at once?

Personally I tend to do quite well under this sort of pressure, when expectations are high and timescales are tight.

I do however find it very different when it is myself that puts on the pressure. If i have one project I can get stuck into it, but when I have many I tend to focus on one at the expense of the others, and because there is no client associated with these other projects I do tend to allow them to drift.

So, I am interested to hear how other people deal with “multiple project madness”.

Do you work better when a project is your own, or when it is attached to a client? Does “juggling” make you excited, or frustrated?

It has been over a week since my last blog post. This has been down to a number of factors, but mainly being busy and not having the time to spend thinking about blogging and writing a post.

Actually, reading that first paragraph out loud, that sounds like an excuse. There are 24 hours in a day and, once you allow for work and sleep, you are left with a fair chunk of time, certainly enough to write a blog post.

The real reason I have not posted (I think) is, due to how busy I have been, I have not allowed myself to be inspired, and when I am inspired is when I feel like I have something worthwhile to write.

I have come up with a theory I am going to try over the next few weeks. I am going to have a list of topics to blog about. This list will start with maybe 15 topics. When I feel inspired I will pick a topic and write about it. When I am busy, or not feeling like blogging, I will just add a couple of topics to the list.

For me a lot of the mental energy is expended in the process of thinking about what to blog about. If I am not in the mood then I find it difficult to think of a subject. I am hoping this ongoing list will enable me to choose a topic to write about more easily. This will allow me to take advantage of those times when I am feeling inspired but only have a limited time to write, as the subject is already taken care of.

Of course, like every theory, the proof is in the pudding. I am going to run with this one for a few weeks and see how it goes.