Entries Tagged 'Call For Help' ↓
August 29th, 2007 — Call For Help
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On the web, no matter how much time you spent preparing, or how accurate your estimate is, a client is gone with one mouse click. Why? There is no explanation. - Jeff Knooren
The Bad News
I suppose you’ll want to get a job at some point. Given that you have such a short window to learn, and you have a family, I can’t be all that encouraging. Most of the things you’ll be asked to do, will suck. See, learning on your own is fun, because you get to go to the library, and get any book you want, and it’s all so new and limitless. But when you’re under the eye of managers, and being commanded to calculate interest rates on some crappy, hacked together software, and customers bitch, it’s no longer fun. Maybe it beats scrubbing toilets, but I question if that is true.
Secondly, all corporations make you sign an At Will Employment Agreement. That means they don’t need a reason to fire you. They monitor all your activities, log all communications, and you’re a resource to be allocated like a piece of furniture. That’s another good reason to build your own applications, even if they’re just examples. When a company escorts you out of the building with security guards, they don’t need a reason to fire you, or even give you screenshots of what you’ve worked so hard to build. Then, you have nothing to really show the next potential employer what you’ve been working on. I’ve seen it done, and it’s been done to me.
Finding a job doesn’t get easier with experience. On a daily basis I encounter NOT knowing the right skill, or have the right program, operating system, or qualification to get that next job. And yet I’ve been rejected for being overqualified too. Sure, there have been times when I’ve made $5k in two weeks. But I’ve also worked for less than minimum wage. Just the other day, someone needing their wedding photos scanned, thinks I charge too much. So, he wants me to supply him with references. There is no way I’m letting him call people I know, asking if I’m qualified to operate my own scanner. It’s so absurd, I can’t explain it properly. Keep in mind, most of my work is freelancing, and desk jobs are the exception for me. So I probably deal with more people who don’t know what they’re doing, than the average “techie” person would.
But what will make getting jobs easier, is demonstrating that you can solve problems. Like that address book thing I mentioned earlier. If you can show a potential employer, how you had a problem finding your contacts, so you built this whiz-bang gizmo that finds them. Show them database tables, code snippets, describe the issues you ran into during development, and how you solved them, did you design the interface? All that will be more impressive than any team project done for college credit.
Since chess is our common ground, let’s make some analogies. You know how there are millions of people play chess because it’s fun, but only a handful rise up to master level? They only get to that level, after many years of study and practice. A tipping point is reached, and you have to decide if becoming a master is worth the time and effort. At some point, the game is no longer just fun, and becomes your job. It would be cool to be as good as Kasparov, but could you devote 10hrs a day to study? That is what it takes to play at his level. That is exactly what happens being a web developer. Millions of people want to do what I do, but rising through the ranks is difficult and frustrating.
The Clients want an unlimited number of price quotes. It’s like competing for a mortgage, and all parties loose, except the ones providing the system for our failure. They get paid up front. - Jeff Knooren
Anyone can learn to build websites, given enough time. It’s all basically simple. HTML is easy. CSS is easy, and yes, eCommerce is easy. But all those easy things must come together seamlessly to build a website. All those tips/tricks/shortcuts you learn along the way can only come from doing it. That’s the hard part. I hope that makes sense.
Summary
My advice is to ignore whatever you hear about how much money people are making on the internet. Be careful about falling for scams. The only people making $6k in one month, with no experience, and no computer; are the people selling the information on how to make $6k in one month, with no experience, and no computer. What is really dangerous, is that a lot of these scams, prey on people looking for jobs. It’s really evil that in your most desperate time, someone is there to rob you.
August 17th, 2007 — Call For Help
Building websites is much harder than people think it is. Since I’ve been Internet Consulting for almost 10yrs now, I get questions about where to start in this industry. Recently, an artist who does custom oil paintings has asked why they’ve invested hundreds of hours into their eCommerce website, and not made a single sale.
I am a small business operation. I tested the website using Google and Yahoo pay-per-click. I generated quite a bit of traffic, but not one single order. I also published in a magazine with 26,000 sent to homes with a big discount coupon in the add (full page). It also did not produce one single sale.
My prices with the discount I offered was the lowest in the market! I need an experience designer who can know the sales creation aspect of the design. The nuts and bolts of my website are OK. The problem is that I am not getting any business! This is where experience is required.
I have seen other websites with similar type of products and their websites are much nicer. In my very limited knowledge of the matter, I think I need to be able to offer a sort of video tour (flash) of the main art pieces so people can appreciate the quality of the work that we do. Let me know what you think and what kind of concrete suggestions you can make.
First, I will say a nice looking site, will not guarantee you sales. That is where many people stop when having a business. They build a nice site, and expect sales to roll in. But “nice” is no good unless people know about what you do. I’ve made that mistake myself.
It is cheaper in the long run to market anything on website. But promoting anything is the boring and hard work that most people don’t do. At least with a website, you can do a little promotion each day and build up over years of effort. With any other medium, you have to shell out a lot of money up front.
The lesson you should take away from that experience, is to decide if the next client is worth working for. - Jeff Knooren
In my opinion, what you need to change is your method of promotion, and lead generation. For your sales, face-to-face with 10 people who want to buy your product, is better than 26,000 who threw your coupon in the trash. I can’t prove that of course, but you couldn’t do any worse. You mentioned showing people the process of your artwork. Certainly that could be done on a website. For examples, simply Google “How to draw…” and there is no shortage of ways to present a process.
I don’t know if you have special physical needs. However, in doing some research, I spoke to a few people who draw caricatures. They said they make their money at events, street fairs, conventions, etc… Meaning, they rent a booth or something, and people can watch them work. They sit down to have silly picture drawn.
This seems to be what a lot of craft people do, like ice sculptors, wood carvers, etc. The artists I spoke to hand out nice brochures or business cards at these appearances. They use their websites and blogs as a showcase. Much like how a photographer would use a website for a gallery of photographs.
What might work for you is to do something similar to a caricature artist. Except, have those nice oil portraits behind you as you draw these quick sketches. That will give you a chance to talk face-to-face about your business, to people who are already interested in having likenesses of them made. People could watch the process of painting a portrait too. Additionally, you can use the blog, to promote the event you will be at. Have someone take pictures of you working, and that can be posted to the blog.
They will give you a lot of freedom in terms of design, and achieving the final result, as long as you don’t mire them down in the details of how you go about it. You also tend to get additional side projects that this person doesn’t want to deal with. - Jeff Knooren
The Department of Commerce in your town will give you a list of every street faire, home show event, along with contact info, if you ask them for it. I used to book shows, and do live demonstrations, so if you go that route, I have more advice. Anyway, the idea is to cover the cost of renting the space by drawing caricatures, and the real money comes from commissioned portraits, which you do later. Anyone who sits down at your booth is a pre- qualified lead.
- You mentioned “generated quite a bit of traffic”. But just out of curiosity, is that 100, 1000, 2,000,000 visitors a month? And how much did you spend on generating that traffic?
- Photos - They need to be big. You’re selling point is the quality and detail of your work.
- Video - You suggested doing some panning and zooming thing. My warning to you is this could be very expensive to have a developer make it in Flash. I would recommend using Photobucket Slideshow instead. The benefit is you can learn to do it yourself, in just a few minutes, even with no experience in building websites. That is important as you create more portraits, you wouldn’t want to be forced into paying someone like me to update presentations for you. I would also recommend NOT using music. However, if you really want music, Photobucket has something called a “remix” which allows music to be incorporated. Again, something you can do yourself with minimal training.
Recommendations you could probably do yourself:
- Spell-check - Nothing says unprofessional like spelling errors.
- Slideshow - Photobucket Slideshow
- Gallery page, that’s pretty easy, and a good idea.
- What is the name of your business? “Rubens Art” or “Artistic Oil Painting and Frames” or “Artistic Oil Portraits and Frames”? You seem to have three business names.
- You need a blog. A way to talk about yourself, what you do, and how you do it.
Recommendations someone with experience should do:
- Set up, and optimize the blog for you. Then give you the crash course in how to use it. They’re not difficult to figure out on your own. But spending an hour with someone who can show you the tricks and shortcuts, will save you months of discovery.
- Maybe a better shopping cart?
- Changing hosts might be in order. I don’t know enough about your site at this point to say for sure though.
Summary
I won’t pretend to know anything about portrait painting, or your business. So I might have just given you the worst advice possible. Renting booth spaces, street carnivals, all that might be more trouble than it’s worth. But obviously Google ads aren’t working. But either way this business sounds like it’s going to take years of persistence, unless you’ve got a bankroll stashed away to dip into.
August 13th, 2007 — Call For Help
Building websites is much harder than people think it is. Since I’ve been Internet Consulting for almost 10yrs now, I get questions about where to start in this industry. Recently, a childhood friend of mine, decided to leave the military, and get into the world of computing.
I have a few questions for you. I am taking some Ruby on Rail courses here at City College and have a stack of over 40 programming books. I guess I feel like a kid in a candy store, everything LOOKS good, but everything has a different flavor. I was getting into SQL when I heard about Perl, then Pyton and now Ruby. I’m utterly confused.
I have 1 year and 8 1/2 months left in the navy and Im out (after a total of 9). In that time, is learning a language feasable? And which one would do best, and how can i get started? I am not technically a novice…I know some XML, HTML and SQL (because of RoR and Apache). I also only have Mac’s in this house…all 3 new, OS X.
One last thing, Just today I bought 2 books (used from the local Point Loma library) on Flash 8 (for learning Animation and Interactivity) and Macromedia’s Director MX 2004 (the training from the source one). I assume (after purchasing them) that they were probably the wrong direction to head in. In your opinion, are they supercilious? If I want to be a Web developer, I should start else where right?
Gaining Experience
I don’t know what the job market will be like where you are. But RoR is a niche field of study. The place you live, may not have an abundance of Ruby jobs to apply to; so keep that in mind. Myself, I though ColdFusion was going to be “the next best thing”. Consequently, I missed the PHP and ASP wave. I cornered myself into knowing a language no-one really uses. That isn’t always a bad thing; there is value in knowing something most people don’t. However, you must be THE expert in that obscure subject. And becoming an expert, takes years. I’m good at ColdFusion, but it’s been years since I’ve actively used it. I’ve had trouble getting even entry level jobs doing it now. So all I can really do is putter around with it on my home computer.
IMO, college is a waste of time. I’ve been in position to hire people in the corporate world, and there is nothing college can teach you about the internet, that you couldn’t find in any bookstore or simply Googling it. If you were studying to be a Doctor, then obviously college is the only place to get that knowledge. The best way to learn web development is to solve a problem you have at home. For example, do you have a address book that needs organizing? If so, then figure out how to build something that does it. In fact, I just wrote a blog entry about this subject.
Reading your situation, I still say WordPress Blogs are your best option. All websites need graphics and code to work. Those are two, very different disciplines. If you create graphics, you’ll be studying color theory, and you’ll need expensive programs to make graphics with. Coding takes a more analytical mind, but the software is cheaper. If you’re not artistic, even simple graphics will be hard to make. If you’re not interested in optimizing, then coding will be tedium. It is left brain, right brain activity.
On the web, no matter how much time you spent preparing, or how accurate your estimate is, a client is gone with one mouse click. Why? There is no explanation. - Jeff Knooren
With a blog, there are plenty of themes available. The free themes may not be exactly what you want your site to look like, but the point is you don’t have to learn graphics. And the best part is someone else regularly updates the core base of code for security flaws and such. So, you’ll be able to use the community of developers for assistance with code, and graphics…
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July 18th, 2007 — Call For Help
Fantastic post from Google Blogoscoped, covering Google, the search engine world, online research, and other related (and unrelated) topics. It’s run by Philipp Lenssen and the basis for many stories are news tips sent via email or posted in the forum.
Phillip finally connected after a few weeks. After reading The Power of Approachability, he posted about adopting the principles from the book to websites
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More Approachable Website
- Put every piece of contact info possible: name, addy, cell, IM, everything. People want to talk to THE guy. You won’t be flooded by messages by providing all those methods to contact you. It’s a garanteed they’ll not download Yahoo Messenger specifically to talk to you, if they never use Yahoo messenger.
- Accept comments, good and bad on blogs, boards etc. You need to show that you are open to critcism, and accept it gracefully.
- When people come to your site, they have to think “OK, what’s the one thing they want me to do?” Make it clear, big, bold, etc. Too many sites have SO much stuff that people get intimidated and walk away.
- Easy, memorable URL. And do a redirect to your blog.
- Have pictures, personal stories, anything that tells people who YOU are. I wouldn’t go overboard, and talk about closet skeletons though. That’s just my opinion. I’d rather not have a whole community of people drudging up the minutia of my life.
- Forget the term “customers”. The most important rule of marketing is TO CREATE FANS. Make sure your site makes people say, “I love your stuff.” Then find a way to bring them back and stay in front of them. What could you do to make people want to come back and wonder, “Hmmm…let’s see what they’re up to now…”
- If you don’t have a blog, you’re a putz.
- Make your about page like a “meet Steve” or “who is Steve”, maybe throw a picture in there. People need to connect your name, and therefore your website, with your characters.
- Don’t have one of those stupid forms that says “we’ll try to address all entries and get back to you.” Forms are too “corporate” and impersonal. Put your actual email link and tell fans to email YOU. If you get spam, there are javascripts out there to be found that hide email addresses from being harvested by spammers.
- Go to http://www.websitesthatsuck.com and make sure they look nothing like yours.
About the author: Scott Ginsburg is a nationally recognized author, professional speaker, and the only person who wears a “Hello, My Name Is…” nametag 24hrs a day.