2009’s top blog posts

Taking my cue from Dr Virginia the Second…

This year’s top posts on this blog were:

1. What goes into a good web design contract – I am sincerely happy to see how many people this post has helped.
2. Friendly anti-IE6 warning messages – in which I implore you to save your geek snobbery and give your site viewers constructive solutions.
3. Gig review: Simple Minds @ Edinburgh Castle – aye it was pishin’ doon and the sound was sh*te so it was.
4. Web Site Launch Checklist – Updated – and I probably should update again!
5. Fixing the PNG bug in IE7 – in which I have to tweak registry settings to see a 2kb png graphic.
6. Dear Webfusion, in which I take a fight against an unresponsive IT supplier public.
7. Littlewoods, or how to create a bad e-commerce experience – in which I object to a company having two literally identical e-commerce sites with different pricing structures. I’ve since removed this post after learning that they have rebranded the “sister” company.
8. Using a different CSS stylesheet in WordPress – does what it says on the tin.
9. Why you don’t let your kid make your web site – in which I object to elected representatives paying family members out of Parliamentary expenses to create amateurish template websites.
10. Updated: How to bypass a background check, in which I recount my horror story of being sent into the NHS blind by a greedy recruitment agency.

I hope these posts have been helpful to you and look forward to many more in the year to come.

Daft mistakes businesses make on Twitter

I joined Twitter as the leaves were starting to fall.  I seem to have gotten the hang of it much quicker than I thought I would.  And while I have not been on it half as long as some, I am seeing a lot of interesting mistakes being made with business accounts on a daily basis.  Like…

1. Using the Twitter account solely to share inspirational and schmaltzy quotes.  I am of the school that agrees with the Demotivator parody inspirational poster -  “If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.“  There’s a point there – I’m not interested in people who have nothing original to say whatsoever.
2. Using the Twitter account solely to auto-feed a news stream from an American web site.  As someone who moved from the US to the UK, I am painfully aware that there are a lot of people whose worship of America is so overwhelming that they believe “being” American gives them some sort of cachet.  (Hell, I’ve been hired for work simply because I am American, as if I was expected to belch Tinkerbell fairy dust all over badly constructed projects.)  It’s not true.  The US health care debate, latest US celebrity gossip, and US taxation updates are quite fascinating and relevant to Americans.  But auto-feeding your UK followers American information from a UK business account is just bizarre.
3. Not responding to messages sent to you because you can’t see them.  If you’re not following a Twitter user, you won’t see their messages to you.  You may be in blissful ignorance of potential customers and contacts getting frustrated at your lack of response.  Do a search for your own account every day.
4. Not responding to messages sent to you even though you can see them.  This was amply demonstrated by a certain web host (let’s call them Webfusion) who, in the middle of a massive systems failure and dozens of furious tweets, simply ignored the growing rage of their customers and carried on using their Twitter account to advertise their new products as if nothing was wrong.  Compare that to 37Signals, who alerted their followers the minute that their systems went down and kept communicating until things were back to normal.
5. Using your business Twitter account to kiss up to tabloid z-lebrities.  Unless you are 15 years old, do that with your personal account.  No one will take you seriously if your business priority seems to be sending endless “x”s to the Reveal! set.
6. Using an automated “get followers” application that gains useless (and very annoyed) follows.  This is how I got followed by a company in Beverly Hills trying to sell me baby sunscreen.  In Scotland.  In December.  You can’t shoot more wide of your target market than that.
7. Being too serious.  Twitter is not about selling.  It’s about making connections and communicating.  Find the happy middle ground between sharing your personality and promoting your professionality.  People no more want to read a litany of your daily routine than they want to read canned sales announcements.

If you have not been making the most of your Twitter account, remember that in the words of Rocky Balboa, “Ise can change, so maybe youse can change too!”  We are all learning as we go on Twitter – which itself is always changing – so you are in good company.  In general, think of posting to Twitter as if you were standing at a rostrum speaking to a group.  Be professional, be informed, be funny, be spontaneous, be responsive, and be true to your brand.  And enjoy it.

UK Browser Usage for 2009

Click for full size.

The best news here is that IE6 has declined from 13.02% in January to 6.45% in December.
IE8 holds just under 30% of all users. Safari and Chrome are almost even at just over 5%.

Date	IE 7.0	FF 3.0	IE 8.0	IE 6.0	FF3.5	Safari 4.0	Chrome 3.0	Safari 3.2	Other
2009-01	50.82	22.69	1.08	13.02	0	0.01	0	2.4	9.98
2009-02	50.4	23.82	1.48	12.37	0	0.07	0	2.91	8.94
2009-03	49.59	24.46	2.22	11.86	0	0.68	0	2.44	8.75
2009-04	47.4	25.12	4.36	10.57	0	0.8	0	2.69	9.06
2009-05	42.82	25.13	8.46	10.3	0	1.12	0	2.82	9.34
2009-06	38	25.24	12.87	10.56	0.02	1.78	0.04	2.14	9.36
2009-07	32.02	21.03	19.94	9.28	4.47	2.86	0.11	1.23	9.07
2009-08	27.72	16.18	24.18	8.01	10.1	3.47	0.23	0.88	9.23
2009-09	26.35	11.47	25.53	8.03	14.66	3.97	1.72	0.64	7.63
2009-10	25.19	10.16	27.11	7.27	15.92	4.47	4.61	0.46	4.82
2009-11	24.35	8.81	28.73	6.63	16.68	4.76	4.95	0.36	4.74
2009-12	22.17	7.42	29.79	6.45	18.05	4.83	5.43	0.28	5.58

Data comes from http://gs.statcounter.com.

20 “business housekeeping” activities for the end of the year

The end of the year is an odd time for the self-employed. Work grinds to a halt as your clients and suppliers use up their holidays, and you follow suit by invoking the saying “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”  While some welcome the enforced break, others dread the prospect of a fortnight of nothing.

Fortunately there are lots of creative and constructive activities you can do to pass the time.  I call it “business housekeeping”.  None of these things are a normal part of the daily grind, none of them take a lot of your time, and none of them are about monetising, profiting, or cashing in on anything.  What they will do is sweep out the cobwebs, clean through the mess, and help your business to hit the ground running in the new year.  Here are a few suggestions:

1. Clean your laptop.
2. Sort through your blog and delete posts that are no longer relevant.
3. Review your pricing structure. Recalculate it.
4. Sort through your bookmarks. You’ll be surprised how many useful resources are lost in there.
5. Join Goodreads and create a “to-read” list of books that can help your professional development in the new year. (Here’s me).
6. Scan in your paper expense receipts and upload them to FreeAgent. (What?! You aren’t using FreeAgent to manage your business finances? Make that your New Year’s resolution.
7. Clean through your mailing list. The sad fact is, not all the companies on it will have survived the year.
8. Archive, back up, defrag, purge, and compress.  No I’m not talking about your post-holiday gut.
9. Schedule meetings with your most valued clients to discuss what you can do for them in the new year.  Learn what challenges they expect to face.
10. Seth Godin says: “Do not approve any project that isn’t run on Basecamp“.  He’s right.
11. Change the record.  Literally.  That’s what Spotify is for.
12. Research new local competitors. Investigate their portfolios, SEO, and networks.  There is nothing underhanded or unethical about benchmarking your market.
13. Get decent professional portraits done for your promotion and media activities.
14. Dump a bad client.
15. Study new changes in the law that can affect your business.
16. Catch up on the local business gossip.
17. Have a session with your executive coach.  Ask her to kick your butt, in a good way.
18. Register as an expert in your field at a media directory.
19. Leave recommendations for good clients on LinkedIn.
20. Pick a new business bank, and make your current one fight to keep you.

What sort of business housekeeping do you do at the end of the year?

Correcting HTML validation errors caused by the timthumb script

I am developing a WordPress project which uses a combination of custom fields and the timthumb script to extract images from posts and display them in certain places as required. When pages are loaded, the code is generated automatically, but it was also generating three validation errors per insert. With six dynamic images on the site’s home page alone, that meant 18 validation errors just attributable to timthumb.

In a regular code situation you would simply replace the ampersands & with &amp; . But how do you correct the script when the code is autogenerated?

The Solution
Go to functions.php and find this line:
echo '<img src="'.$scriptpath.'/scripts/timthumb.php?src='.$image.'&w='.$width.'&h='.$height.'&zc=1" alt=""
Simply replace your &s with &amp;:
echo '<img src="'.$scriptpath.'/scripts/timthumb.php?src='.$image.'&amp;w='.$width.'&amp;h='.$height.'&amp;zc=1" alt=""