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You know what they say about the word assume?  It can make an Ass out of U and Me.  Or something like that.

I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to set up times to meet with people online in the US.  But somehow it never gets through to them that because I don’t live on their shores I have no idea what city might be inside which timezone and how a timezone relates to me specifically.

I mean, I don’t know what city is in CST or CDT.  I do know that means Central time but does that mean I have geographical knowledge of their country?  uh uh.  It doesn’t.  Same with MST, PST and so on. I do know that New York is EST/EDT and I do know that is 14/15/16 hours behind Melbourne, Australia depending on the time of year and which side of daylight savings we’re in.

Make it easy on your audience please, and those you email. If you’re setting up a telephone or online meeting, webinar, podcast, etc and you’re inviting people to participate or attend, then be kind to them and make it easy for them to look up the time difference. Give them the name of a MAJOR CITY and not the timezone.  Or give them options for finding out the relevant time in their own city. I have seen links on sites where people are registering for an event, and they can click on it to work out the time and add it to Outlook if they wish.

Stop making assumptions that everyone knows and understands the geography of your country.  You may find you’ll get even more attending events because you’ve made it easier on them.

By the way – I’m not picking on those in the US because they’re in the US. This can well apply to anyone in any country. It’s just that the majority of people I deal with for events are in the US and I don’t really want to have to take up studying US geography just to work out the right time to attend an event.

Tags: Business Operations, Working Online // 1 Comment »

You’ve heard of the 6 degrees of separation I’m sure. It relates to an experiment during the 60s and 70s in the US where Stanley Milgram set about to prove that anyone was literally only 6 people away from contact.  The experiment had some success but only mildly. But let’s not let the facts get in the way of my story.  After all, the web and LinkedIn didn’t exist then.

Two weeks ago my husband and I were watching a movie on TV and the lead guy reminded me of Clint Eastwood. I wondered if it might be his son.  I googled the guy to find out information about him and wasn’t able to ascertain if he is related or not (different name and no mention of his parentage) however one of the google links led to a LinkedIn profile of the guy. And would you believe he was connected to me – 3 levels down!  I immediately sent a request to connect to him direct and introduced myself to him and why I was writing. He accepted 2 days later!  Amazing.  Who knows if it will lead to anywhere but now I’m connected to a Hollywood movie star.  woo hoo!

Tags: LinkedIn, Networking // 1 Comment »

Ever had one of those weeks when everything you try seems to turn out wrong? Well, some things anyway. I’ve had one of those weeks and I want to share about it to help you prevent any of the problems I’ve had.

Let me outline what problems I was having:

1. Login problems for a client’s blog – it just wouldn’t view the wp-admin login at all and kept coming up with error messages.  Research via google finally told me to look for ‘white space’ in the wp-config.php file. That means empty lines or spaces that shouldn’t be there. I got rid of every empty line and space I could find, saved it and uploaded and voila!  I could log in again. whew!  That was the easy fix!
2. My family blog – I had files all mixed up on the server from a few years of trying out different things so decided to remove them and then do a reinstall of WordPress to a new folder – I was just basically tidying up the files on the server as it was getting full.  However the new installation just wouldn’t take and I ended up with a blank screen – you couldn’t view the blog at all.  I removed that folder and created a new one and started again. Same scenario. I was stumped.  Further if I added /wp-admin/ to see if I could log in I would just get gobbledegook on the screen – no dashboard at all.  Investigations on wordpress.org and google seemed to indicate my server might be full (it wasn’t) and/or that WordPress hadn’t installed properly – I would need to do a manual install.  ughh!
3. I upgraded another blog that I run for my husband and his mtb racing team to wordpress 3.0 and experienced the exact same problem as no. 2.
4. I accidentally deleted a couple of files from my business blog when thinking I was logged into my family blog (see no. 2) and didn’t stop it in time.  Checked blog and it seemed ok and I wrote a new post to it this morning but when I went to view the blogpost once published the site produced an error message and I could no longer access the blog or view the posts.  I had to call in help from a friend who specialises in this type of work to fix the problem. Reinstalling the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in this instance did not solve the problem.

If you manage one or several blogs then it’s important to have some backup systems in place. I don’t just mean having a backup for your blogposts (you should have that without saying and if you haven’t then login to your blog immediately, go to the plugins section search for the wp-backup plugin and install it – then activate it) but I mean a back up of your actual wordpress files too.

Fantastico which is in my control panel online does not seem to have the option to reinstall or repair WordPress – only to do a new install or remove an existing one.  That’s been fine for most of the time but I’ve had 4 blogs this week (one client, one voluntary and 2 of my own) that have had problems and all of them when I’ve done an upgrade to 3.0 or attempted to change something in 3.0.  Not sure if that means there’s a problem with that version or I’ve just been unlucky this week.  But I did not have copies of the original files – only the edited ones I’d been playing with at some stage.

That means having to do a manual reinstall of the program and the version I’m using is no longer available for downloading from wordpress.org.  So then I had to consider downloading the 3.0.1 version and printing off the instructions for the manual installation.  However, I already had databases set up as they are existing blogs so I wasn’t sure how much of the installation process I could ignore or should take notice of?

If I’d had a clean copy of WordPress 3.0 I could have reuploaded the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in the hope that would fix the problem. I do know enough to keep a copy of the wp-config.php file and not overwrite that one – that’s the file that holds the database, login and username information.

So, what did I do? I looked through my various blogs (I own several) and found one I believed to have clean copies of the wp-admin and wp-includes folders and copied them over to the folder of one of the blogs I was having challenges with. I then proceeded to upload those folders by FTP to the web and waited for the results. Would it succeed or wouldn’t it?

What lesson have I learnt? To make sure that every single WordPress site I manage or own, that I do a full download of each of the folders and files that are installed online and keep them safe (and backedup) in case I need to reupload them at any time.  Having the posts backup file (xml) isn’t enough.  And if you have the tgz backup file, then you need to know how to restore that file.  In the meantime I’ll go back to what I was doing – manual installs of the latest wordpress files in the hope that they’ll become visible again.

Tags: About Blogging // 2 Comments »

… unless you do something to let people know you exist.

I  have recently taken on some new clients – all of them requiring websites to promote their new businesses.

I love doing this type of work.  Setting up a brand new site, giving them an identity or brand and helping them to let others know they exist.

But their level of knowledge or expectation vary considerably.

There are those who really put the research in, know exactly what they want and in what order and then are ready to do the promotions and marketing as soon as the site is ready. They’re raring to go and can’t wait to take over the site (by the way, did I tell you I build CMS sites so that clients can have the control?).

And then there are those who have a loose or vague idea of what they want. They’ve heard if they build a website they can make a lot of money but they have no idea what it will take to get them from their idea to the reality of that goal. There’s a lot of information missing inbetween and I have to try and draw it out of them:

• What will their domain name be?
• What information will be on the website?
• What will the site look like (colour, number of pages, style, etc)
• How are they going to promote the site?
• Do they want to write articles, have a blog or newsletter, build a subscription list?
• Do they know who their competitors are?
• Why do they think they need a site?

And the list goes on. These clients are harder to service, or should I say more challenging?  I still enjoy the work but I wonder if they really understand what’s involved, other than having a website up one day and then they’re expecting the money to come in a few days later…

I frequently feel like I’ve shifted from webmaster to business coach as I try to get them up to speed on the information they should be providing me with.

If the content is there and they know what they’re talking about, they will get an audience… eventually. But they need to spend time networking online and offline, letting people know they exist and understand their topic well.

If no-one knows you exist they are not going to find your website, except by chance.  The site needs to have worthy content and if your name is not well known, then no-one is going to be searching for you by name at all. Only by topic and you’ll already have at least tens of thousands of sites to compete with out there.

And if a logo is all you want on the front page, well I’m sorry but that’s not going to work for you – unless you’re Coca Cola or some well known brand.  No-one wants to click on an image to see what’s behind it, unless they already have some idea of who you are and what you do.  All sorts of nasties live on the web and they won’t know you from Adam, so why would they want to click on a logo or image if they don’t know what you do or what your site is about?

Apart from that, search engines need text on the home page of the website – how can they catalogue and list your site if they have nothing to work with?

So, if you’re looking to get a website – that’s just the seed.  It needs to be planted, nourished and fertilised in order to grow and develop so that your site becomes an integral part of your business.

Oh, and if you’re a website virgin, then here is what you need to get started:

1. A domain name – that’s the address people enter into the web browser to find your website.
2. Webspace – you need to pay for webhosting to get webspace. Your webhost will help you get the domain name pointed to your particular webspace so people can view your site after entering the URL or address into the browser
3. Website – this is what is built to show up on your webspace at the address you have for your site.

And that’s just the beginning. Next there is content, images, logo, decisions to be made on how people will contact you, what email addresses you might use, what your site will look like, what colours you will use, how you are going to promote the site so that people will visit it, how often it will be updated and so on.

Once that is done the rest is up to you – the website owner.  You need to be networking, meeting people, speaking to people, adding your web address on all your printed material, in your email signature block and anywhere else that people might see it. After that, they will come…

Tags: Business Operations, Working Online // 3 Comments »