Can I please have my business back?

You see, I’ve been more than patient.  I grinned and bore it when you informed me that you would be moving my VPS account to a new server, even though I neither asked for nor wanted the switch.  I bucked up and sent all of the clients on my VPS a nice email giving them a full week to plan the switch of their IP addresses.  Then rolled with the punches when I ended up doing all of the switching myself because most of my clients didn’t know how.  I went out on Friday night fully confident that when I got back, the server switch would be underway in your safe hands.

As it is, I was being barked at by clients before 8:30 AM on Saturday because my whole fucking VPS was down.  I had to make my first support call of the day as soon as I’d gotten out of bed, while my toddler gave me that plaintive look that hints that she knows the whole weekend is gone already.   I then altered the plans I’d had for Saturday to manually inspect each account on the VPS one by one, and to bring each one back online.  And I was still giving you the benefit of the doubt, when in the middle of this, Apache went down for no reason at all.  I restarted it.  Then MySQL went down.  And nothing would restart it.

Naturally this was the time when I needed to make a critical query into a client’s SQL database.  And I couldn’t even access it.

And then Plesk went down.  And it ain’t coming back up.  I can log in, but I’m told that my control panel needs to be restarted.  I click the button to restart it.  I get the error message.  I try again.  Nothing happens.

And that was Saturday afternoon.  I phoned tech support three more times.  Each time, I get a patronising bore advising me to log out and he’ll fix it, and all will be up and running in half an hour.  Running my arse.  The third call is answered by some pissant who tells me that my issue was already addressed on the system status page – which it wasn’t.  Sorry to interrupt his busy Saturday night.

Sunday comes.  Nothing is working.  Everything is still down.  My clients who use webmail advise me they can’t get into their accounts at all; webmail is redirecting to the default site on the server.  I sit on hold for 40 minutes.  I’m told “we’re aware of the issue.”  I place all of my issues in writing, with screen grabs, and fire it off at 10:30 AM.  I get no response until almost 4 PM on Monday, when they inform me it’s fixed.  I log in and check.  Not fixed.  Nothing’s been touched.

Clients are having hissy fits.  One of my clients has had no web presence at all since Friday, when I switched her IP to the new domain like you asked me to.  One of my clients needs critical repairs to his SQL database.  I lost £10 in phone credit just sitting on hold waiting for tech support this weekend.  That wasn’t talking to tech support.  That was waiting for tech support.

And from you, we’re getting absolutely nothing.  Sorry – you’re “apologising for the inconvenience” and “thanking us for our patience” because you decided to fix something that wasn’t broken without asking if I wanted it.

Not good enough.  Absolutely not good enough.  The time for that was Saturday afternoon, when I first reported the problem.  It’s almost 5 on Monday, and a whole business day has passed.  That day has been a complete financial and administrative loss for my clients and for me. And there is still no indication as to when this will be fixed.

You “thank me for my patience?”  You’ll be thanking me out of your wallet, please, for the time I’ve spent waiting for you to give me my business back.

Cheers,
Idea15 Web Design

Edit 1 December: it’s now 23 hours since I wrote this post and guess what.  No change.  They’ve provided my clients with a workaround for the lack of access to their webmail accounts, which is a major headache lifted; but as for me, no.  Still a broken VPS, still no access to my domain accounts, still no indication as to when this will be fixed.  I last phoned tech support at 10 to midnight last night and was assured that not only would my situation be escalated, but someone at Webfusion would phone me with an update before noon.  Guess what.  It never happened.  I am still no further forward than I was on Saturday afternoon.  In the meantime they are providing copious status updates on affected Windows VPS accounts, which would be really useful if I was one of them and not Linux.

WordPress is now the open-source CMS of choice.  But like any web platform, it isn’t perfect.  The responsibility for keeping the installation secure falls solely to you, not to a faraway company.

As a designer, I am occasionally asked to peek “under the bonnet” of other WordPress sites, and I tend to go pale when I see a site that has no security safeguards in place.  It’s a bit like keeping your front door locked, but leaving the key under the mat.  Without some security precautions, breaking in is that easy.

There are plenty of lists and posts out there with excellent information on how to protect your WordPress site, but not everyone has the time or the technical inclination to see it through.  With that in mind, here is a list of a few critical steps you should take to protect your WordPress site.  These will take a minimum of five minutes, and no more than 15.  When I set up a new WordPress install, I do not do one click worth of work until I have run through these security safeguards. Make it your own habit to do the same.

1. Create a new administrator user with a new login name.  Delete the default “admin” user.
2. Use random gibberish passwords of at least 12 characters.  Here’s a helpful random gibberish password generator.
3. Install and activate the Login Lockdown plugin.
4. Install, activate, and run the Secure WordPress plugin.
5. Install, activate, and run the WP Security Scan plugin.  Run its File Permissions check, and change your folder permissions accordingly.
6. Install, activate, and run the Maintenance Mode plugin to create a landing page and “cloak” the work in progress.

This audit will provide your WordPress site with a healthy standard of essential security and protection.  The three security scanner plugins do have some overlap, but I doubt you will mind.  If you want to explore more advanced options for protecting your WordPress sites, here are some definitive lists:

• 12 Essential Security Tips and Hacks for WordPress (Six Revisions)
• 13 Vital Tips and Hacks to Protect Your WordPress Admin Area (WPBeginner)
• 9 tips to make WordPress hack-proof (guvnr)

It goes without saying that you should keep your WordPress installs updated to its most recent version at all times.  This summer’s attack wave preyed on sites which still had older installations running.  Newer versions of WordPress allow upgrades with one click; and if your server is like mine and does not like the automatic system, manual upgrades take less than five minutes.

Some might say that you should not engage in security procedures like this unless the client specifically instructs you to do them – and more to the point, pays you to do them.  That’s a dangerous game to play.  When you decided to use an open-source platform for your client’s site, you consented to the fact that the platform would require occasional vigilance and maintenance from yourself.  Open source is not a cash cow which gives you a means to squeeze money out of your clients every time an upgrade becomes available.  If you feel you should be paid before doing upgrade work, think about what it will cost you in the long run to have your clients’ web sites defaced during a hacking wave because they were not adequately protected.  Being proactive about your existing clients’ ongoing needs – even if there is no pot of wealth in it for you – is what separates the real web designers from the shysters.  Choose where you want to be.

Big news here today:

T-Mobile staff sold customer data
Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers, a spokesman for the firm has confirmed. The suspected illegal trade emerged after the firm alerted the information watchdog, Christopher Graham. He said brokers bought the data and sold it on to other phone firms, who then cold-called the customers, as their contracts were due to expire.

I was targeted by two of these calls, and almost wrote a blog post about it as a scam warning, but couldn’t be bothered.

My phone account is an unusual thing: I have had the same number and pay-as-you-go SIM for seven years, and before that it was my mother in law’s SIM, so it is probably approaching 10 years old.  It’s on Virgin Mobile, which piggybacks on the T-Mobile network.  Like me, Virgin Mobile users will be accustomed to seeing their service occasionally identifying itself as T-Mobile, but my account is so old that on paper it technically is T-Mobile.

So when the phone rang with Welsh call centre staff diving right into it – “I understand your T-Mobile contract is about to run out.  Have you received a new phone in the last year?  Well then I’ll put your order through” – I was able to shout certain variations on “whoa nelly!” right away.  I’m not on a contract, I rather like my zippy little Samsung, and I pay my phone money to Virgin Mobile.  But someone in Wales was looking at a computer screen which said I was a T-Mobile customer due to receive a new phone.

As a business owner you get these high-pressure offers all the time, but this one was odd.  It was specific, it was confident, and it was too dodgy.  Their call list, rather than being plucked from the phone book, had some real records.  And when I retorted to the callers that this was quite obviously a scam, they backed off right away.  Normally these callers deny it all and keep up the sweet talk no matter what you say, but these kids were spooked about something.  Now we know why: they were working off an illegally pirated sales list.

Incidentally, having had the misfortune to spend a few weeks temping in a mobile phone company’s call centre, watching dozens of “permanent temps” with no legal rights being pushed, prodded, emotionally abused, humiliated, and manipulated for an hourly wage barely worth getting out of bed for, I can understand their motivations for seeking a side income and revenge – no matter how misguided – completely.

A client contacted me today seeking guidance about an odd email he had received.  Here’s what it said:

I was hoping you might now have had the chance to think about my email, sent to you some time ago. Would you be interested in placing a simple text advertisement on your site? Our clients are some of the best known brands in a range of industries and would value the demographic your site targets. We pay a fixed annual fee to webmasters for placing adverts for our clients. You can find more information at (URL)

This is not the first time I have seen this offer.  It is run from a well-known company which, contrary to their claims of “valuable demographics”, targets sites in a fashion that’s so random as to be laughable.  For example, a small neighbourhood web site I administer here in Scotland was targeted by this company using an IP from an East Asian country.  Many folks in that community can’t afford to put the heat on in the winter, so the thought that they were a “valuable demographic” to the Asian market was odd to say the least.  In the case of the client who contacted me today, the company web site deals with such a specific, narrow, and geographically focussed target market that their counterparts can be numbered on one hand.  The mere fact that they were targeted suggests someone working off a quota list.

The ads this company places are never ads for the sorts of products and services one would want to be associated with.  99% of the time they are the sort of ads which, when they are sent to you over email, are funneled directly into your spam folder.  Don’t think too hard, but medication, casinos, and “recreational activities” should come to mind.  Text ads like this will drag your site’s legitimacy as well as its search engine ranking down like a dead weight. You can read about what typically happens if you do go ahead with this sort of arrangement: Bad ads can come back to bite you.  It makes for depressing reading.

Yes, the company has a perfectly rational explanation for everything (don’t they always?), and a few stock lines they use to retort any pesky questions about their transparency and integrity.  Most of those retorts fall into the “it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is” category, with a dose of blame-the-victim thrown in for good measure.

If you have received one of these approaches

It goes without saying, but if you as a small business owner are approached by someone wanting to place ads on your web site, think about it.  Why is someone you have never heard of, writing from a random virtual company, trying to skive off your site?  If they are such a market leader, then why do they need the help of a little business like yours?  Will sharing your web site with another company help your brand or dilute it?  Will ads you have no control over serve your customers, or drive them away?  Is this what you went into business for?  And really, is it worth risking your brand integrity for a fee so low it wouldn’t pay your TV license?

If you are interested in placing ads on your web site, do it on your time and on your own terms.  Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, and LinkedIn Direct Ads are all legitimate, professional, and highly flexible services you can use to integrate relevant ad content.

As always, if you are in doubt about the legitimacy of an approach you have received, contact a professional web designer for guidance.

Web design, it’s safe to say, is a field which has some very unique challenges.

Just yesterday a colleague and I were commiserating -  to the point where we were saying the same words in unison – about potential clients who ask you to come in and do a sales pitch, and then you send them a written proposal, and then you never hear from them again.  There’s nothing.  No response, no follow up, no returning calls or emails.  My fellow businesswoman and I were in complete agreement over why it’s so frustrating: they asked us to come to them.  The pitch was not the result of a cold call initiated on our side.  We made ourselves available to their needs and questions, we travelled to their offices and put our best feet forward, and we spent a working day drafting a letter-perfect proposal.  And from that, we don’t even get the courtesy of a one-word communication from them.  Even if you’ve followed every bit of best practice in sales and follow up, they completely ignore you like a clique of teenage girls.  One simple word – “no”- is all we’re asking for.  But that’s one more word than you will ever hear from the potential client again.

And it’s now happened to me five times this year.  My colleague had similar sentiments about her own business.  Of course, you know that you are not going to win every project you pitch for.  But you don’t expect to be snubbed entirely.  Obviously, if a potential client behaves in that way, not gaining their custom is no big loss.  But that does not make up for the hours of meeting time, effort, and document drafting that you’ve put in without so much as a thank you.  I wish there was a crystal ball – or a widget, or a plugin, or an app – that could tell you which potential clients will turn out to be tumbleweeds rolling across your desktop and which ones are going to be the start of a beautiful friendship.  But there’s not.

It’s not all bad news, of course.  Sometimes you get that fantastic client who you can work with for years.  They just “get” the web and its potential and provide you with a steady stream of project work that never quite feels like working.

And yet.  Sometimes a client responds to your proposal and you dive into the project together.  And then this happens: analysis paralysis.  A simple question which requires two minutes of the client’s thought goes unanswered for two weeks.  The next question stretches to a month.  And then an entire season has passed since you last heard from the client – even though (and this is the really crazy bit) they have paid you money to perform a service for them.  As with your sales pitch, you make yourself available to them, you remain flexible, you stay in contact, you provide multiple means for them to contact you…and they don’t.

So what’s a designer to do? You have committed to working for them, but they are not working with you.  You can’t actually mothball the project because they have not told you to mothball it.  You want to remain professional and see the work through to its completion, even though the completion date in the contract is so far in the past that you are fully within your rights to send them an Abandonment of Project letter.  You run through your past behavior obsessively, thinking “was it something I did?”, even though you are not the one at fault.  You know that there are perhaps less than two working days left in the project, and the thought that you could have the work done and dusted by the weekend annoys you for the principle of the thing.  Your accounting figures – in your books and in your head – said you’d have made twice as much from this project as you actually have, and that causes problems as well.

How do you handle your mothballed web projects?  Are there any tricks you use to sweep away the tumbleweeds?

In the spirit of trying something new, I’ve had an article published on the excellent Find Networking Events site.

Click here to learn what to do if your web site designer has gone out of business.

I’m a web designer.  (You probably noticed that.)  So when looking for services and assistance for my business, I choose providers who have a top notch, efficient, and well constructed web presence.  After all, you wouldn’t choose an architect who lived in a ramshackle house, you wouldn’t choose a chef who hated food, and as a web designer, you wouldn’t choose to place your business in the hands of people who still view the web as a threat to their current business model.

Unfortunately I’m now dealing with two of them.  The first is my business bank, Lloyds TSB.  Their online banking system is a text-only interface, circa 1995, which has one, count ‘em, one image – a heavily optimised jpeg which says “continue to online banking.”  The whole site goes offline for “maintenance” between midnight and 4 AM, which is when we freelancers tend to be hitting our stride.  And the online banking interface’s contact mechanisms literally do not work.  I have now used it to contact the bank about various matters three times.  Anything sent through the interface disappears into a black hole.  You don’t get a confirmation, you don’t get a tracking number, you don’t get an email, you don’t get a callback, you don’t get a letter by post, and you certainly don’t get a personal communication from your assigned “Relationship Manager”, whatever that is.  It’s as if you never contacted them at all.  Today I phoned them to complain about the third instance of a  lack of communication from them and when we eventually got around to discussing the specific issue, the information they gave me over the phone was different from the information provided on their web site.

It’s safe to say I’ll be leaving Lloyds as soon as possible.  The web to them is still some newfangled gadget that they don’t expect people to actually use.  Like many banks, they market themselves as building a personal relationship with you, but I can’t even get them to answer my support requests.  Are they going to understand what I need to grow my web business?  Absolutely not.

The second clueless service is the Public Contracts Scotland web site.  This is the site which lists all public sector tenders in Scotland, with everything from buildings to vehicles to roads to schools to laundry to the Commonwealth Games covered.  Now, every business advisor in Scotland tells you to register on this site.  (It must be in their prepared script.)  So imagine how you feel as a web professional when you see where your profession is categorised: “Other Information Communication Technology.”  Yep, we’re lumped into “Other”, below Call Systems, Consumables, and Reprographic Equipment.   Not surprisingly, the most recent tender listed there was obviously written by a committee of people who have secretaries use their computers for them.  It was so full of pie-in-the-sky jargon which belied a complete ignorance of basic web use that I ended up laughing out loud at it.  Because I’m signed up for email alerts in my “category”, I have to put up with getting alerts for new contracts for the provision of audiovisual equipment.   It’s pretty clear that I’ll never get any business out of my registration there.

It’s staggering to think that in the year 2009, the web itself is still chucked into an “other” catch-all within a subcategory.  Do I want to spend my time putting myself out to people who don’t feel that my profession is worth a name, or do I want to focus on people who view the web as an integrated process – I.E., not the public sector?  It’s a no-brainer.

I’m a member of the surprisingly useful WordPress group on LinkedIn, which counts just under 3,000 WordPress obsessives professionals in its roster.  This week several dozen of us were targeted by a very dodgy (and likely fake) member recruiting people for a “job” that resorted to every cliche in the book.  The candidate would basically use all that hard-earned WordPress wizardry to create up to 500 identical template web sites on certain topics which scrape information from Wikipedia and would refer site visitors to professionals in that business sector who have paid for the advertising space on the site.  There would be no salary or compensation, and your income would be based on a share of the sales commission revenues “your” sites earned in profit at the end of successful commercial transactions, which, in this particular business sector, could take years.

As for the person behind the “business model”, one of his claims to fame includes stalking and physically assaulting one of his employees as well as her three year old child over money he claimed she “owed” him.  Frighteningly, the job offer asked – illegally – whether you have any kids.  Think about it.  Not even the most psychotic Glasgow gangster would stoop that low.

One of the tenets of the No-Spec campaign is:

At the end of the day, there is a certain irony in spec work. A prospect requesting it is ultimately saying, “My project isn’t important enough to hire a professional who will take the time to understand my situation and goals and invest the time needed to create a suitable solution.”

You could well amend that statement to say that if someone doesn’t want to hire a professional above board, there’s a reason for that.

Anyway, details are available on the LinkedIn WordPress group.

Here’s a little trick I just invented.  When using WordPress as a CMS, we often configure it so that a certain post is showcased as a “featured article” on the home page.  That post may well have an image in it.  But for a project I’m currently working on, the design brief calls for the featured article’s image to be displayed as the background in a photo-frame style on the home page, like this.

So how do we extract the post’s image as a background?  To start, the “picture frame” has shadows, so I kept it as part of the div’s background image itself.  So we start with the white box in place already.

First I styled a div for the featured article to fit within the “picture frame.”  I won’t repeat this here, as the way you choose to style your feature is completely up to you.

Then I wrote the code to extract the title and excerpt tags from the latest post in the “Home Page Feature” category.  You can read about how to do it here:

http://wordpressgarage.com/code-snippets/display-posts-from-specific-categories-on-a-page/

I then created CSS styles for the title and excerpt tags.

Now on to the image.  This article will explain how to write a call that will retreive and display images from a post.  After following the guidance in that post, I then enclosed the call within a div, div class=”backgroundfeat”.  It’s important to then style that class so that the image displays behind your title and excerpt tags, but in front of the picture frame.  In my case I went with
z-index: -10;
position: absolute;
left: 0;
right: 0;
top: 0;
bottom: 0;

And voila – the post’s image is now the feature story’s background.

Remember that the image you upload to your post must be sized exactly to fit within the picture frame.

PS – by “picture frame” I mean a thing that holds pictures, not an actual web site frame (god forbid.)

I have had an unusual fortnight of work which has involved a lot of repetitive cutting, pasting, clicking, and circular mouse movements for the work required on two different projects.  There’s simply no way to get around it.  Predictably, my hands are a bit stiff and sore, and my right hand tends to go ice cold from lack of circulation.  Lucky for me, while digging through my desk trying to find something or other, I found my Cat’s Paw hand exerciser.  I’d completely forgotten about it.

What a difference it makes!  60 seconds worth of stretches with the Cat’s Paw leave my hands feeling absolutely normal and healthy again as if I hadn’t touched my computer at all.  My right hand even starts to warm up immediately.  Who cares if the product is so simple that it’s almost silly?  It actually works.