Monthly Archives: December 2004

Tinker Time!

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It’s been just over a month, and I’m tired of my layout – so I’ve changed it.

When I started my blog, I grabbed a free layout from Alex King’s WordPress styles page, and did a bit of tinkering. With those templates, you only need to upload the wp-layout.css, and the look is complete – that’s because WordPress derives most of its layout and formatting from Cascading Style Sheets.

However, for that ‘little extra’, I also had to tinker with the index.php file – in my case, I wanted to insert banners and AdSense ads. This required formatting adjustments and making room for the ads (and the ad code), which needed to be with the index.php.

The good news is that those two files pretty well sum up the changes you need to make in WordPress. Changing the style sheet affects all pages; and index.php is used for just about all output in the blog, so changes there are reflected site-wide as well.

For the new layout, I likewise decided to dig into index.php – besides more ads, I wanted to use a few tables. Although CSS is supposed to replace tables, I still like the occasional table or two for layout. In the case of my blog, I wanted a central text area that grew to the browser size, instead of a fixed column.

It took more PHP fiddling than I would have liked, but you’re looking at the initial result. I can move on to the little details, but right now, BigBizBlog is live with incarnation #2…

The Customers From Heck!

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I just read a blog today where the marketer complained about a problem he had – of a service he offered, several people recently signed up, and then signed out in only 10 minutes.

He’s understandably upset – who wants to lose customers?

But the problem is what happens afterwards – he blames them.

Now bad customers are part of business, and it is possible that he got 3 or 4 bad apples in a row (this time of year, there are quite a few frustrated people). But to automatically jump to that ignores an important fact:

Where there’s smoke, there’s a fire.

I sell software for a living, and I’ve had my share of customers complain about products, service, etc. But one thing happens time and again – if I get a complaint about a problem, I’ll usually get two. Then three. And sure enough, there’s a real problem.

One of my programs, Rocket Retriever, had a bug. I couldn’t reproduce it, but a few customers were sure it was there. In the end, it was an obscure timing issue that took less than 10 minutes to fix…

…and I’m VERY grateful to the customers who complained about it.

So take the gripes, calm the people down, and ask yourself – is there really a problem?

In the case of this blogger, he’s solving the problem by offering a free teleseminar on his product – a clear sign that he’s listening to the complaints.

And I’m positive he’ll find the level of quitters drops like a rock!

Free eBook for Small Business

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With a bit more time now, I’m slowly going through my email and eBooks. One I’ve been meaning to get to, and finally cracked open, is Seth Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible.

It’s a good read.

What I liked about it – it’s targeted at ‘real’ small business. People who know they can’t compete against Kellog’s or Nike, but who understand that being small has its advantages (and if you don’t know what they are, all the more reason to read the book).

Nicely formatted, easy to read, and inspirational (‘rah, rah, small companies are great’ kind of inspirational) – if you are running or planning a small business, or wondering what to do next, it’s worth a browse.

Enough talk – the time you spend reading this can be spent instead reading his eBook. You can get it here – just use the ‘save to disk’ button on the first page.

Guard Your Links… With ActiveLinker!

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One problem with a blog – if you’re busy with other things, it can be a pain to buy out time to write. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been busy programming – hence the gaps in my daily musings.

The good news is that one project is now done and ‘live’ – ActiveLinker, my new product for link management.

If you’re a business, and you’ve used (or are considering) tinyurl.com or their equivalents, don’t – get ActiveLinker and keep control of your links on your site, where they belong.

This isn’t just hype – one company that provides the ‘tinyurl’ service had to shut down. Someone was using the links for criminal activity, and the result was the whole service ended – and ALL links went inactive.

For someone that has a link or two for personal information, that’s a shame losing it – but for a business passing out shorter links for contacts, it’s very, very bad. Hence ActiveLinker.

But enough talk about it – just drop by the site and check it out. And of course, feedback is always welcome!

Why Own a Domain?

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I was asked a question today – how many domain names did I have? In answering it, I realize the bigger question was – why own domain names at all?

In my case, I have about 80 – besides personal ones I’m holding onto for family, and the ones for my four word domain name project (4wdn.com), there’s a quite a few for my different products and projects. So then, what makes a worthwhile domain name purchase? I think the reasons fall into several groups:

  • To lock in names. Reasonable domains names are in short supply (especially .com ones). So if you come across a good one, buy it just to make sure it’s there when you need it. For example, several months ago ActiveBits.com came available. I bought it right away, and liked it so much I eventually renamed my company to match.
  • To help with your brand. I cannot stress this enough – before you name something, make sure that the domain name is available. If not, you lose a huge opportunity to tie a product to its domain name. And don’t worry about putting up a site for each item – you can easily point them to another page until you need them (GoDaddy.com lets you do this easily, a technique I used for GoogEdit.com and ScreenSaverLiberator.com, among others).
  • To prevent competition. With my 4WDN idea, I mention that getting all variations (with and without dashes, and plural versus non-plural words) means you can grab all combinations – and lock out competition. For any domain name, if you buy a .com you like, buy at least the .org and .net at the same time. It’s a small price now to prevent someone someday trying to benefit from your brand. Likewise, look into variations – plurals, dashes between the words, etc, and make sure as many as reasonable are locked up.
  • Because they’re going. In 1996 I bought Pankhurst.com. Not long afterwards, the .net and .org versions were gone. I don’t expect they’ll ever be available again (although it’s not really an issue since I moved my business over to ActiveBits). There’s plenty of time for regrets, but if a name interests you, get it now – or risk seeing someone else use it in the future.

And finally, although not a business reason, domains make great gifts – not only do they give family a chance to brag about owning a domain, it finally gives you a fixed email address to reach them!