I’m a website designer & programmer. I can work with anyone, anywhere in the world. I chose to be different and do most of my work in the local region. But like I said, that’s different. Many of my colleagues think more is better, and try to price low and gain money on quantity rather than quality, both of their clients and of their services.

When searching for a service online, I don’t care if you’re looking for website hosting, website design, logo design, custom graphics, or an alarm company (the only item in this list that I’m not providing), you probably want — or need — to know where the person is.

So how do you figure it out?

I wanted to use a specific set of examples in this post. Top-of-the-search engine results with fantastic prices, and absolutely no phone number or address to be seen on their website. Sites that ended up being in other countries. Websites with blatant grammatical errors that obviously still rake in enough cash to get to the top of Google search results on pay-per-click hot topics that are highly competitive.

But they asked me nicely to remove their website address and information from my blog. So I’m removing it. Not exactly sure what offended them about the post, as they were only a live example and it was true that they were in a foreign country, but I’ll remove it to keep the peace.

Some cliches exist for a reason. “You get what you pay for” is one of them. In a vast sea of choices and no education, people choose the products by lowest price. There’s either too much information, or not enough, to educate the consumer into making informed choices.

There are real dangers in sending your money to a foreign corporation. They can be of the most stellar reputation, 100% honest, hard-working people, but you are still never afforded the same protections and conveniences you have working with someone in the same town or at least the same state. It is much less convenient to do business out-of-state, or out-of-the-country. If it’s out-of-state you have the additional complications of figuring out which state/jurisdiction to interpret your contract in, and where you have to travel to in order to arbitrate disputes. In foreign matters, unless you have the type of money it takes to go to International court, you don’t have legal protections no matter what the contract says.

If you are going to a local company, you can check their mailing address, their reputation, get a real referral from someone you know to someone you know you can trust. You can track their professional affiliations, check the Better Business Bureau to see if there are complaints against them. And more.

So how do you figure out who people really are? There is a database that stores their legal domain registration information. There is real consideration to abolishing this information on the web, but in the meantime the more of us who are using it for legitimate reasons (to check on the idenitity of a service before purchase) the better. This database is accessible at http://www.whois.net/

If you enter theirdomainname.com into Whois you can see their registration record. Enter “theirdomainname” in the field for looking up domain registration data. Make sure the right suffix is selected (”.com”) and click GO!

Not all domains show legal registration information online. The domain owner can hide that information by paying their domain registrar a few extra bucks to make even that anonymous…. Then you need to get into some website gymnastics to figure out who these people are, and I am not sure it’s worthwhile. If they’re hiding, maybe they have something to hide. More often, though, people are banking on ignorance. This blog post is to help some people wake up and smell the scandal. The flip side of this idea: If you run a legitimate business, you should not be anonymous on the web, and prospective clients shouldn’t need to resort to the “whois database” method above, just to figure out where you’re located. I get a few junk mails and a junk fax or 3 for having my information up — the worst is the domain-registration related spam, but that’s a hazard of doing legit business on the web.

I suggest you look at people’s Contact Us page and check that their information matches their WhoIs registration — check their professional affiliations and their memberships in local chambers of commerce. Ask if there have been any complaints against them.

If you’re in the local region, you could ask for a face-to-face with the person you’re doing business with. The only way to see eye-to-eye on any project is to actually be able to look someone in the face.

Moral: You pay for what you get.

Good luck!

Here’s my low-tech tip for how to organize all those business cards you (should!) have been getting at all the networking events you have been going to (you HAVE been networking, right????!?). I have an address book in my computer, I have a Palm, I have considered whether or not to enter “ALL” business cards I collect into an electronic medium, but so far I’ve found an easier (for me) way to keep business cards at my fingertips.

It involves several 1.5 & 2 inch 3-ring binders, and Avery (or similar) business card sheets — these sheets hold 10-up — putting cards back-to-back to display on 2 sides makes it 20 cards per page… There also are tabbed business card sheets so you can use some of the sheets as dividers. I also get 100% post-consumer recycled college-ruled 3-ring binder paper, which I keep in clipboards on my desk, normal section dividers, and a set of A-Z section dividers I had laying around for years.

Here’s how I set them up:

One binder (about 1.5 inch right now) is the “Business Cards” binder and that has a section for the Orange County Chamber, Sullivan County Chamber, Orange Networking Alliance, each BNI chapter I visited, Toastmasters, etc. When I meet someone at an event by a specific group, their card goes into that group’s section. Later, when I’m trying to connect people together, all I have to do is remember which group I met someone at to find their card. Within sections, I’m not terribly picky about the order I put them in: most of those groups don’t have enough people/cards in them to get too anal about how to organize the section.

I keep a 2″ binder for warm/hot prospects, a 2″ ring binder for current clients, and a 1.5″ binder for clients “in support.”

Prospect book: I set up the book with a few business card sheets, a plain piece of filler paper for an index, then the A-Z dividers. When a prospect calls, I grab a clipboard and start taking notes on the filler paper (or on 1-sided scrap, more on that later). Then it’s time to file their information. If I have their business card, I slip it into the business card sheet in the front of the book. I write their name & business name, perhaps how they were referred to me, on the index in pencil, underline the letter in their name or business name that I’m filing them under, and file them in the binder in that section. Now when I need to touch base with that prospect, I can easily take the binder off the shelf, start dialing or emailing them just from their card, then turn to the divider section and have my hand-written notes at my fingertips.

If that person becomes a client, their information gets moved to my client book, and their name gets erased from the index in the prospect book. Their business card goes in the front of the client book, and I now use a complete divider section for the client. I still use an index in pencil for the front of the book, but these sections are numbered. I file notes on phone calls, timesheets, contracts, and other documentation in their section. Once the client’s job is finished, they migrate to the In Support book.

All the books are labeled and sit in the hutch of my desk.

This works best for people who aren’t trying to cold-call every business they’ve ever contacted — and people who can remember where they met someone but not their name or business name, although some electronic systems allow you to track when and where you met someone. However, if you are going to cold-call everyone, I’d recommend adding small post-its to your collection. Why add people to an electronic database if they’re not interested, and probably will never be interested, in your product? Keep a notepad nearby, a small post-it pad, make the initial call off the business card, and if they’re not interested now, put the post-it on the card with the date you called and that they weren’t interested. … or a date they said to call back. You might only manage 10 business cards per sheet, but you could take some notes on paper, fold them up and stick them behind the card in question. Now you can try them again later, but don’t have to spend much time on someone who is not making you money.

Another person I know writes the event & date on the cards when she brings them home. She’s going to start using my binder system, rather than have the cards in piles, but I like the idea of putting a date on them. I’m not going to, but I like it

Even if I had a business card scanner, I would want to hold on to the business cards themselves. I find they give me important clues to who the person is — the style of card often helps me remember who the person behind the card was. If I only had the information, I might not remember the person. Also it’s easier to pass along a business card if you have it than if you scanned it. I have been known to bring the whole business card binder with me to speed networking events.

Now, there are some cards you should not have in this system. These are your preferred vendors, other members of your own referral group, cards from terrific places to bring a client for lunch or dinner, and the people you feel most comfortable referring to others. If you’re in a larger organization you might include your colleagues in this category. For these types of cards, I have a small portable business card book, because I’m most likely to need these cards on-hand at any event. I can leave the big binder at the office and bring along my smaller binder.

When buying your supplies, shop local! Please find the nearest mom & pop stationery store and open a business account with them. I use Charles B. Merrill Office Products in Newburgh, NY — they deliver the next day.

Another thing I do is keep a stack of half-used paper, usually Chamber flyers that were printed only on one side, folded in half. These make great notepaper that I grab when I get a phone call and start taking notes on. Until I know someone is going into a binder, why use the virgin paper? They still fit in the book with 2 holes from a 3-hole-punch. It’s a great way to re-use before recycling. With a stick of re-stickable glue, I can quickly make any note into a post-it.

Phew. Good luck!!

There is an awful lot of clutter on the web. There ought to be a fine for littering in cyberspace. You’ve seen the kind of junk I’m talking about here and there: content that is there for the sole benefit of search engines, such as white keyword text on a white background, people who spam in blog comments, and even the harmless pages of nonsense that grows like weeds on each of our websites.

In June I tightened ship on my own website. I’ve implemented some new security on the blog software, notably reCAPTCHA, a captcha project by Carnegie Mellon University. Captchas use images containing distorted text that you have to re-type into a form field. The reCAPTCHA project uses portions of scanned/OCR’d books that failed to be recognized easily by computers to test users. Once the text is verified to be read by a human, it helps add books to electronic libraries. So using this method not only foils spammers, but helps with online literature projects.

I’m also working on editing down my website. I am guilty of using my ability to create web pages so easily as an opportunity to be too wordy. Some websites don’t have enough information, and you leave disappointed that you couldn’t find what you needed to know. Others are too wordy: “Welcome to (this website). We’re so glad you came… have a seat. Would you like some tea while you’re waiting for real content? The bathroom is down the hall.” I’m guilty as charged, in a court of my own self-examination.

I altered the navigation on the site, so it should hopefully make more sense to someone at least passingly familiar with websites. I started out with really obscure labels for the links, now I’m back down to the basics. Practice what I preach: I’m always telling my clients what should be on their homepage, how their navigation should be labeled. I have finally followed my own advice.

As a new service, I’m helping clients with their website “talk” — a website needs to be the executive summary of a longer proposition. The longer proposition can be there, behind the scenes, and you can bring on the content in layers that are carefully crafted to build detail into the subject. However, people don’t need to be hit over the head with a heavy sales pitch, proposal, or autobiography from the get-go.

Tightening up the wording, reducing babble, using bullet lists for main points, taking advantage of proper linking, and proper keyword integration.

People don’t have time to sit through a long reading: they came with something in mind, even if it was just to learn more about you, and then they’re going to go on to the next thing in their life. I’m working on other ways to increase website traffic to my client’s site other than the stinking, lying, cheating ways that some search engine optimization businesses have taken up. It’s a definite art, and it’s easier to do on content that you didn’t write yourself, so for me it’s slow going between projects, and for clients, hopefully it won’t be as slow and inconsistent.

Some of my new philosophies about optimization of websites were covered in my second workshop at the QED Business Edge conference yesterday: “Who’s your website for?” It went over well. More about it later.

Because I’m expanding my business into content development and website planning, I’m starting to subcontract some design work out so I can make room for adding new services to my business. To see what this looks like, see the Rhthym and Rhyme Childcare and Simply FlawlessFaces websites.

I’d like to tackle the theory of AJAXification for a moment, mainly because I was just in the middle of an AJAX-rendered hellish portion of an otherwise OK website.

AJAX is a buzzword and people who even know it are probably some of the few web programmers out there still able to compete over 6-digit salaried jobs.

The simple definition is that AJAX is a browser-side technology — in other words it doesn’t run on the webserver, it runs on your home or office computer — that sends data and fetches data to and from a web server without the need to reload or load the webpage. Only the portion of the webpage that needs to be changed is changed, rather than the whole webpage. It can save time and looks better to the user because the pictures and background of the page don’t need to reload. It can also be a waste of time, as shown in the example below.

With the proper use of AJAX, a web application can swiftly and seamlessly load information and change something on the webpage. Perhaps it can be used to anticipate the user’s next move, load some data on the sly, and have it ready to slip in with some slick javascript maneuver when the user clicks. “Ha, ha! I knew you were going to click that!” This is especially cool when there are fewer choices for what the user might do. Not so great when there is a lot of data to pull from the webserver and not so great when there are too many choices to properly anticipate the user’s next maneuver or when the data being pulled is directly dependent on the user’s input.

The result of AJAX used correctly is a user experience that resembles a desktop application. Google (gmail at least) has it right, and I sure hope their programmers are getting the 6-digit income they deserve.

What annoys me is when AJAX is used to “be cool” — not to enhance the user’s experience.

The application that annoyed me today is the largest area newspapers’ online calendar of events. Perhaps the application ran “slick” in testing with only 5 or 10 events listed. I’m sure it ran very nicely. Especially from their high-tech offices with terrific web service, or even with the servers at the same location.

There’s a mini calendar which shows a bit into next month, and underneath it, starting with “today”, is a huge detailed listing (date, time, name of event, location…) of the area’s events for the next several days.

Each date on the calendar is a link that, when hovered, brings up a floating list of that day’s events. If there were 3 events per day, this would be bright. There’s more like 40. It takes as long to load the floating list as it would to reload the web page. You have to sit there hovering your mouse over the date for what seems like an eternity as it makes a call to the database to pull up and format the day’s events. There’s a nice swirly thing that shows up if you hover over the mini calendar. Without the swirly thing, if I went to the mini calendar to click, I wouldn’t ever know that a “cool” list would eventually pop up. It pops up next to my mouse with a listing so long that when I then move my mouse down the list I eventually hit the bottom of the browser, and the whole AJAXified listing goes away. It doesn’t scroll as I move down. That’s real helpful.

Ok. Well, one could live with that — instead of hovering and getting a hand-cramp, how about clicking on the date. As one would expect, the listing under the mini calendar changes to start with the date selected. However, this incites another AJAXified call to the database to fetch several days’ events and replace the vast majority of the content on the webpage. Again, this data pull results in a long “load time” for the javascript (AJAX) to pull the data. It’s nice that the sidebar dancing ads don’t change, but exactly what time are you saving? Does this make you look “smarter” and “slicker”? Maybe…to the advertisers since you suddenly have nothing to do but stare at their glowing undulating ads.

But let’s say I want to peruse today’s events, and pull up the event details for items I’m interested in in another window, or in another tab, of my browser? Then when I’m done selecting a bunch, I can look through the event’s details…

Because these aren’t real webpage links, it ignores my attempt to open the link in another window. They’re all “javascript links” and when I click them, the entire page goes away, even if I’ve attempted to open it in another window or tab. To get back to the mini calendar or listing, now I have to get the whole page by going “back” in the browser. That’s not the way I want webpages to behave. At all. I’m a tab-oriented person. I let pages load in another tab and look at them when I’m good and ready.

All this time my laptop fan is going nuts, the load on my laptop was increasing, my laptop was getting hotter, and it was a waste to even be on the page. I have better things to waste my time with, like ranting about the abuse of AJAX!

This is just one example of a webpage that needs an AJAX Anonymous support group. Perhaps they never thought through what the user would do, how they would expect it to behave. They created a webpage Frankenstein monster based on what was “cool”. It’s not EASIER. It’s not CHEAPER. It’s their self-aggrandizement at stake. “Look, we have AJAX!” — so what?

It doesn’t help that I went for an interview with that company a year ago and they kept asking me if I knew AJAX and I kept saying “Not Yet.” I still say not yet because I’m still not convinced that anything good would come of it. I’ve seen very very few things that would REALLY be enhanced by the use of AJAX. AJAX is not the killer tool to make a website cool. A website is either cool or not, regardless of the technology behind it. If doing something in AJAX would really make the experience better, go for it. Gmail is cool because it rather closely replicates the experience of a desktop email application. I hardly use it, but when I did, I was suitably impressed, then went back to my own email app.

An online shared calendar doesn’t need to be AJAXified like this one was, though. I would have preferred to load each day’s events in a separate tab, or view event details for selected dates in different tabs so I could keep flipping between them and comparing times and locations to see how many events I could attend.

What this AJAX stuff does to search engine optimization: Since search engines ignore javascript, all that data means nothing to them. Terrific on a private area of a website, horrible in a calendar application.

So, in conclusion, if you’re looking for AJAX because you heard that AJAX is cool, ask to see some good and bad AJAX in action and talk to an expert to decide whether or not AJAX would enhance your users’ experience given what you’re doing on your website.

If you really do know AJAX, please stop people before they ruin their websites with it. You have a moral and ethical responsibility to guide people correctly in how they use their websites.

Please curb your AJAX. Good boy. Sit.

Bank acquisitions have become so commonplace around here that I’m not at all surprised to walk into my nice local upstate-only bank and find that some global giant is gobbling it up like yet another Pac-Man pellet. I look on with concern, watching them rip apart the interior of my local branches to change the branding so that we can know for 100% certain that our money is no longer helping a local institution.

They even tore out the ATM machine and replaced it with a Diebold monstrosity. It has all the bells and whistles, or should I say beeps. Every number in your password elicits a LOUD beep so everyone in the bank knows how many digits there are in your password. When the cash is coming out, it beeps loudly. Thanks for letting everyone in a 12-block radius know I now have cash in my pocket. Wheeeeee! I hope they’re not rolling out these monsters in NYC proper, but they probably did. Now they’re infiltrating upstate New York. As if it weren’t bad enough that the bank is changing, the new regime has installed monster equipment from the same company many people suspect have rigged elections. I’m scared to death to put my credit cards and debit cards into it’s gaping maw. The only thing I can say in its favor is that it has an exquisitely sensitive touch screen. Everything else — and I mean everything — disgusts me. Every. Shiny. Millimeter. And I’m a geek.

I had 2 accounts at this bank. One personal (free for life — *cough*) and one business. The business account’s days were numbered already — I never have enough money in the bank to escape monthly fees — the bank gave me my first year in business for free. I threw enough of a stink that I got my second year free. But any day now, the account is going to start costing me $12 a month. That’s enough chicken to feed my family for 3 weeks!! Forget it — I was SO out of there. I started shopping around for a new bank. One that respected that my miniscule business needs every penny it works so hard to earn.

The DDay was to be March 23. I needed that account closed before the official 100% turn-over to the other bank. I didn’t want them to send me new checks with a new routing number. I didn’t want their promises that things wouldn’t change too much. I didn’t want their new signage. I definitely didn’t want the Diebold ATM.

I had an outstanding check floating around in the wild, so I called the payee, and I made arrangements to send a money order and I was to put a stop payment on the check in question. They wrote a note in my account not to cash the check. I went to put a stop payment order on the check. Note the check is only for about $40.

It would cost me $33 to put a stop payment order on the check. For crying out loud, that feeds my family chicken for over 2 months! That’s a lot of rice & beans. I hope they sleep well at night! Who would put a $33 stop payment order on a $40 check??!?

So, given that it could cost me $40 if the check goes through after I get the money order — or $73 if it goes through but there are insufficient funds (but wait, then another $33 on top of that if the fee for insufficient funds sends the balance into the negatives!) — or $33 to put a stop payment on the check, I chose the best thing. I’m closing the account out. Right now. It’s cheaper. They’re absolutely INSANE. They’ve sold their soul to someone out there, and I’m just another cow to be milked for my money.

Good Bye. Good Riddance.

I want to tell you about my savior. She came into my Thursday morning referral group and mentioned Federal Credit Union and lightbulbs lit up and chorusses of angels began to sing. Nancy Finn of Mid-Hudson Valley Federal Credit Union said the magic words of lower fees, lower (or non-existant) minimum balances, non-profit bank-like institution. Magic. I promise.

I opened accounts in December, and started the confusion of having my money spread out in too many places, too many accounts to juggle, etc. I waited until after the 30 day probation period required at a new banking institution before moving all my money over. Now I’m doing all my banking at the Federal Credit Union, and only keeping the personal monster account open so that my ex has an easy place to deposit child support payments if needed.

When you open a business account at a for-profit bank, you pay probably $20 for 50 business checks. It doesn’t last long. I paid $10 for a whole box of personal-sized business checks.

None of my accounts have a minimum balance, except the $5 minimum for my savings accounts — which is more like a membership deposit. When you quit the credit union you get $5 back. Who would quit?

All my accounts, including joint accounts, are on one screen when I do online banking. They’ve created such a simple interface for banking online that I’m very impressed.

I feel like the cow that woke up from a dream to find out they were human — was I a human dreaming I was a cow? Or am I a cow dreaming I’m human? Who cares as long as I’m not getting milked! heh

They’re friendly, they’re not out to get you. There are some fees if you do something stupid, just like at the for-profits, but the fees are lower, sometimes very significantly lower.

The best thing, though, is that they’re local, non-profit, and they’re going to stay that way. The big for-profits won’t gobble them up. No Diebold machines. Please. *phew*

Liberate Your Website (part 1)

I’ve come to realize that people aren’t “getting it” when I tell them that my websites are “easy to edit” so I’ve created a movie (6 minutes 10 seconds) to demo it.

It isn’t one of those build-your-website applications you always see on the web — those force you to do all the dirty work and BOY can you break the website, create some hideous Frankenstein-monster website contraption that frightens away clients.

No, that’s not at all what this is.

You can’t really break the website when you use this application. Maybe you can make some poor content design choices, such as making all your content text bold, or italic, so that you have no means left with which to emphasize a word. Maybe you can type in all caps, make everything on the page a headline, etc. But you aren’t playing with the design, only the content, of your website, and changing styles and colors is not an accident.

So, take a look at the demo and see how this is a simple CONTENT management system, and don’t frighten your clients away anymore! In the demo movie — which is only 6 minutes! — I play with several real live websites, so you can see how easy it is to edit your own content. In 6 minutes I could hardly explain to a web designer what I want them to change on a website; I’d rather do it through the Easy-to-Edit system. That’s why all my websites are using this system: in spite of being a web designer, I want to have a quick and easy way to add and edit website content on my sites.

I’ve changed my prices on everything except my hourly rates, as promised.

Now I’ve gone and put a sale on blog additions to the Easy-to-Edit website package.

Whatever it is that you have to speak about, I’ve got the software to help you say it!

Watch the sale page each month for specials. Most specials apply to the Easy-to-Edit package, so get the base package before the price goes up hire — all my prices will slowly be escalating for the next several months, and proposal expiration dates will be strictly adhered to.

Last month, at the Orange County Professional Women’s Network, we did an exercise about holiday stress, and how to relieve it. Many people’s answer to mall traffic and stress was “shopping online”.

I have a better idea: Shop Local Online.

I saw a Times Herald-Record article today about shopping local. I couldn’t agree more.

I have to remember to toss my e-commerce sites on sale around July-August next year, to have them ready by October-November. I might only be able to serve the first 20 or so clients, put up bare-bones undesigned sites, or I may have to hire a helper or three, but my goal, as always, is keeping the local economy thriving. I’ll come up with great ideas for increasing the economy locally, but everyone has to help me out.

If we can spend the next year in a concerted effort to get local businesses online, and find unique ways to deal with the crunch shopping period that seems to now start from Halloween preparations through January, we can pull some of that economy back into the region.

Anyone with more great ideas for how to help out the local economy, let me know. Meanwhile I have more and more ideas to unleash slowly over the next year or two.

Here are some great ideas: 1) Mention to local businesses when you would have chosen them to purchase from but you didn’t have the time or patience to do anything but online shopping. 2) Sponsor a local business’s e-commerce site! I can put a banner ad on the e-commerce site that points to your business’ site, you help the business pay for the site set-up and installation. A custom designed e-commerce site goes for $1000 and has space for 4-6 banner ads — think of that; an e-commerce site with up to 6 $100 ad spaces with ads running for a year can slice the price down to less than half! [Ed - this price is going to be going up over the year!] 3) Mention Eclectic Tech and my Shop Local Spree that will be starting next summer — I can start taking names on a waiting list for businesses that would get in on my sale before the sale begins! Heck, maybe I’ll have 20-30 sites lined up before the summer vacation! When I officially announce the waiting list, I’ll figure out how much the sale will be for ($100 off? maybe more! I only hesitate because e-commerce sites are really cumbersome projects that suck up a LOT of my time) [Ed - as of Feb 1st the plan is for $200 off on the base site, and more than half off non-product pages in July & August - with a complimentary sale for Easy-To-Edit sites with PayPal Buy Now buttons], and whether I require a small deposit to be on the list (like $50 non-refundable deposit?).

Ideally more than just gift-selling retails will want to get in on it, from a “Buy Now” button for a gift certificate on a normal site, through pizzerias and delis with website-to-fax order placing for deliveries. We just have to get creative. Give me ideas I can run with.

Criss

Often the topic of starting a “great” web business comes up, and in my age and wisdom (being both old to be a freelance web programmer, and one of a minority of women in the field) — there’s two ways to go: thinking “in” the box = come up with new brilliant technology, patent it and hire people to program it better and faster than anyone else can so you can quickly market it. If it climbs to the top before it is cloned you become the next target for people trying to out-do your website. This track is getting VERY old, VERY fast. Mainly you and your absolute best friend need to be programmers to do this (think Microsoft, Google…) because you can’t trust anyone with your terrific idea. Also it has to be so ground-breaking that only the best (read: smartest, wise, long-range thinking) of venture capitalists will see the end of the rainbow where the pot of gold sits. If it is easy to get the funding for your idea, someone probably is making it already.

Thinking “out” of the box = coming up with a way to use normal everyday technology to do something that fills — rather than creates — a real need or niche. It’s cheaper, faster, and if it really IS filling a need, it’s going to spread by word-of-mouth, and it won’t be “just a fad”. This technique aims lower and comes in under the radar — no billion dollar baby here — but it’s safer, less stressful, and you don’t have to be a programmer, generally speaking. The programmer is unlikely to run off with your baby if it doesn’t look like a “google killer”.

The problem is that great ideas are easy — the means to really make them work is the harder part (invention = 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration). I’m frustrated with people who want to “share” the rewards of their great web program idea (equity sharing) of up to 50%, but won’t be doing any of the actual work to make it hang together and be practical. If someone comes to me with a truly great idea (and I have NDA’s if they don’t), I can find them a great programming team, but the team will probably want cash on delivery, not equity. More “google killers” die every day than make it. They’re not original ideas, and if a site dies before it makes money, there’s no equity and it’s a huge waste of the programmer’s time.

Imagine that someone turned to you and said, “I have a great idea for a newspaper! I’ll give you the ideas, you develop the newspaper and run it, staff it, write for it, etc. I’ll give you 50%.” That approach frustrates me. People don’t get it. I can translate it to dozens of other fields — “I have a great plan for a house, you just have to build it. Then you can live on the top floor, and I’ll live downstairs. Ok?”

Somewhere in there people are cheapening the act of programming. After all, it’s just bits and bytes, right???

The Internet mimics life in a “survival of the fittest” way. I don’t pretend to know what’s “cool” or “hot” anymore — I work with “useful” I won’t get rich but that wasn’t in my personal game plan. I have my own great or good ideas, some might make me money, some won’t but will look really good on my resume.

Then there’s the flip side of this: If you’re not the head of the programming team and you’ve paid someone to build the google killer — what if it works? Now you have to program new features, fix bugs, etc. You either need to re-hire the same team, or get a programming staff. You go on Craigslist and choose the person who claims somehow to be able to fulfill your great Internet dream, but if you have this beautiful web baby together, are you really ready for that long-term commitment with a total dweeb with no business sense?

I can’t wait to be so busy with people I’ve looked in the eye and shaken the hands of that I can’t afford to even GLANCE at another Craigslist ad. I love my clients dearly, but you don’t know how rare it was that the people I dealt with BECAME clients at all. I certainly wouldn’t want to become business partners with some guy with the “next killer app” idea and had to actually look on Craigslist for a programmer. So wait — your only experience is the front end of websites as a user, and you think you can somehow manage a killer web application programming team? That’s an incredibly poor business move and you’ll get laughed out of the bank. And you want the programmer to work for nothing but equity? That’s spec work.

That brings me to another thing: Have you ever had one of those managers who knows absolutely nothing about what you do? It happens in IT all the time, but much less so in other professions. BUT if you’ve ever heard a nurse bitch that someone “stepped in” as the head of the nursing staff from a business-only background, you might get the idea. In most large corps — and this is a place where Microsoft does NOT get bad rankings — the heads of the corporation have NO IDEA how to produce their main products…much less have a clue what their IT department does sitting at their computers all day.

It’s never a good idea to manage something you don’t understand. Ever.

On that note, are you interested in a basic web programming class?

Here’s the deal.

I need a shopping cart for a client. I have basic functionality the shopping cart MUST have. Not necessarily because the client demanded them but because I’m forming a hairbrained notion that these are some type of milestone or rite of passage for shopping carts.

1) coupons & discounts — there’s nothing like putting a coupon with your ad or on an invoice. Even better, giving out coupon codes in your newsletters. Make sure they’re paying attention! Many carts don’t seem to have this. The granddaddy of shopping carts in the open-source world requires being broken TWICE to have coupons (”easy discounts” and “easy coupons” must be added to oscommerce aka OSC to get coupons). Bonus points for coupon support out-of-the-box.

QuickCart & Viart Free have coupons out-of-the-box according to shopping-cart-reviews.com.

2) a template system with under 50 files. OSC fails this test, requiring nearly EVERY file to be changed to consistently alter the HTML appearance features of the website. ZenCart has 95 template files not counting those for the admin panel. Viart Free has 115 template files.

Winner: QuickCart (loaded version) comes in at under 38 — note “page.tpl” is the “main page” of the site. Other template pages MAY NOT NEED TO BE ALTERED! I haven’t figured that out conclusively. But they’re not using something standardized like Smarty so you need some PHP savvy to plow through them.

3) separation — real separation — of logic and design. ZenCart is OK on this one. OSC fails miserably. Viart Free comes out on top — using Smarty templating! WOOT! However note the loss on #2, coming in at 95 template files. Shame on them! Smarty is much MUCH smarter than that!

Viart Free, as I mentioned, uses Smarty, and has a standard “header” “footer”. In spite of 115 files, using Smarty would probably make it a pleasure. I’m upset that there’s no standard “right-sidebar” type formats, but that can easily be added to header/footer files so I’m happy enough.

QuickCart also seems to have real separation of logic vs design, so it’s the 2nd runner up for not using a standard templating system like Smarty.

4) real-world examples that show off the system’s flexibility for customization & style.

This is a tough cookie because people are generally lazy. I looked 3 times at http://www.mals-e.com/home.php because it had some of the better shopping cart examples I’d seen. Custom buttons, horizontal instead of vertical cart display, entirely different layouts. Turns out this is a free hosted service, you don’t install the software, you do have to muck around in your website’s HTML, but it’s really a service that handles the customer’s orders off your site. It allows a lot of flexibility, and he’s hoping you make so many sales that you want the advanced site features, which are not make-or-break deals. I don’t see coupon/discount code entry, so Mal’s service fails #1, but it wins on 2 & 3. How much more separate from the logic can you be?

Viart has an odd quantity feature that involves a drop-down, but that’s probably fixable. It requires clicking a JavaScript pop-up to confirm putting something into your shopping basket, which is awkward. These are awkward, but livable issues, but all the sites I looked at had these issues so no one bothered fixing them.

QuickCart — they don’t have that many sites in English, and they have SO MANY in other languages, I needed to narrow the playing field. So of the English sites, I saw minor promising variants in the cart design itself — something near impossible to do in OSC — as well as at least one site where the overall design was beautifully done very differently from the others. The cart behaved the way I would want a cart to behave. At least one site had web sites up for sale, with a number of options for ordering, which is something I may be doing myself.

5) No restrictions.

Viart Free fails here. Limited to 50 products. It requires a Zend optimizer installation. But it does install on GoDaddy. However, this is not terribly expensive to upgrade at $119, if you go over 10 categories/50 products.

In any case, the winner system from looking at the websites is Mal’s service — but if I eliminate the one host I bumped into during my search for something better, QuickCart did better than Viart.

The winning system today: QuickCart. Several hundred shops are listed, though some are spammers or the domains are now invalid. One problem is that I’ve not seen very strongly customized category views, and that’s an area I’ll need to customize. If you expect to have a very small cart, don’t forget to check out Viart Free. Notable mention for money: SquirrelCart — at about $70 it looks like a good bang for the buck — but I can’t say how it does amongst all the criteria mentioned here, since I couldn’t evaluate it.

Note that many carts were eliminated from the contest for a variety of reasons. #1 price. #2 bad reviews out of the starting box (such as VirtueMart/Joomla! which has been repeatedly reported as having the shittiest support forum, being overly complex, etc. If I want that shit, I’ll go back to OSC).

Ok, so next I’ll be working with QuickCart and I’ll let people know how it goes.