10 Absolutely 100% Necessary Tools for Becoming a Web Developer. Period.

April 4th, 2009
10 Absolutely 100% Necessary Tools for Becoming a Web Developer. Period.

So I’ve been stumbling again. As much as I hate what I’m becoming (A total bitch), I can’t help but go off on another rant. Today, I found three different articles containing not much more than a laundry list of “necessary” tools for budding web developers. The last one particularly ticked me off, because it mentions Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and other proprietary, expensive software. And yet the author had the gall to include GIMP as an honorable mention. Really?

Guess what? I started designing websites hand-coding HTML in Notepad and testing by uploading it to a website hosted on Tripod.

I seem to have learned the crap just fine. I don’t make the prettiest things ever, but my code works the way I want it to, and I didn’t need the frickin’ Zend editor to hold my hand while I wrote it.

So here are ten tools you actually need to become a web developer. Forgive me in advance if I come off as bitter.

1. A brain

This is the most important possession, before any software, any book, any forums. You need to have a functional brain and you need to know how to use it.This goes hand-in-hand with

2. Patience

Patience is a virtue. And if it’s not yours, you just picked the wrong career field. I’ve spent hours trying to make a CSS-based layout work the way I mean it to just to find I forgot to set a margin to 0. I’ve spent hours staring at a line in PHP, targeted by the error message, just to find the line before didn’t have a semicolon at the end. You need patience, and you need to survive kicking your own ass a few times. If not, you won’t be a web developer; you’ll be a failure.

3. Some form of motivation

This is another necessity that goes across many professions. If you’re not motivated to learn, continue to learn, and practice, then you’re going to fail. Period.

4. The ability to read

Web development (along with most other professions) require the ability to read, comprehend, and retain information. It also requires you to be able to apply this newly found knowledge to a project through which you may learn.

5. Creativity

This isn’t just artistic ability (i.e. making things look pretty). You can follow the golden ratio and base everything off a blue-black-white color scheme and make any website pleasing on the eyes. But for solving problems, figuring out how to go about doing something, and even simply finding a starting point, you need to be creative. There was no roadmap to creating a CMS when I started out. I just started with a log in system and ended up with WikiHowNot.

6. Knowledge of Google

You need to know how to use Google to efficiently find answers to questions, because trust me: you will have many. If you don’t know what a particular error message means in PHP, you must be able to find it without spending hours, or else you’ll forget what you were even supposed to be doing in the first place.

7. Support

Whether it be a forum where you can ask questions or another individual “in the know,” you need somebody who can help out and give you a shoulder to cry on when things go wrong. Again, trust me: it will hit the fan. It also helps to motivate you if you have somebody constantly nagging you about the status of your project.

8. Something to teach you

Find a forum, a website, a book, a video, a class, a tutor, or anything else which can teach you web development from beginning to end. W3Schools is a good place to start for HTML. Then you can find a good PHP-education site and pick it up there. Just pick a place and stick with it. If you do happen to go with PHP, by the way, pay special attention to security, or else.

9. Inspiration

This is sort of like creativity. You need something which will inspire you to keep learning and continuously work on projects. I don’t care what it is – money, a muse, the ability to impress your honey. Either way, find something to inspire you and keep you hard at work.

10. A text editor

In other words, a computer with a functional operating system. For Windows, Notepad. For Linux running Gnome, gedit. Pick one. Pick one you like. Ignore fancy bells and whistles (except syntax highlighting… that’s a nice one). You just need something which allows you to save an HTML file, and go from there.

Tags: ,
Posted in Web Development \ 2 Comments »

How Not to Succeed on StumbleUpon

March 23rd, 2009
How Not to Succeed on StumbleUpon

Reading any decent blog on social media/marketing/general Internet things, chances are you’ve run into information about many fads raging online such as Twitter, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. For all the good advice one can hear about optimizing one’s blog for such traffic (write list posts to go viral, content is king, don’t forget to include a next action, whathaveyou), I hear even more bad advice about it, especially pertaining to stumbling.

This is a list of pet peeves which really bother me, both on-blog and on-stumble-profile. A how-not-to guide to successfully generating great traffic through this powerful yet deadly tool.

  1. Include an annoying welcome message for stumblers. While not inherently annoying (I have seen some pretty useful welcome messages), the Wordpress plug-in What Would Seth Godin Do? and similar can be used for both good and evil. The one I tend to see on blogs desperate for traffic is “Welcome to [blog]! Don’t forget to give this post the thumbs up if you like it!” Well, that’s great and all, but there are two problems with this: First, I’m not stupid and I’m not new to this. I know to give you the thumbs up if I like it. Stop patronizing me. Second, what if I don’t like it? You’re basically begging me to send you traffic, and yet most of the people who commit this faux pas don’t bother to provide unique, useful, and helpful content which deserves the traffic it’s getting.
  2. Stumble your own content — a lot. Again, this is not inherently bad. Unfortunately, many people who do this tend to be spammers who don’t actually use the service for anything other than driving traffic to their own sites. Please use discretion when stumbling your own content. If it’s not genuinely useful, don’t do it. As a rule of thumb, you should stumble at least 5x more of other peoples’ content than your own.
  3. Ask me to do things for you without offering to do anything for me. [Person] has added you as a friend! (Add him back) Hey, buddy, this is my shamelessly self-promoting content on my blog. Please like and review, but don’t expect any reciprocation. Sorry, no. If I actually like your content, I’ll probably give it the thumbs up. If it’s useful and review-worthy, I’ll even take some time to write a nice review. Unfortunately, your content meets neither criteria and you’re just a spammer. No.

There are many more crimes committed every day in the world of stumble upon, but these are the three most worth mentioning.

So how about you, fellow stumblers? What really gets your teeth grinding?

Tags: , ,
Posted in Bitching and Butching \ Please add a comment »

Web Standards in the Web 2.0 World

March 23rd, 2009
Web Standards in the Web 2.0 World

If you’re a web designer, web developer, web master, or any other twist on the basic idea, chances are you’ve heard the spiel about web standards and upholding them through validating X/HTML, defendable JavaScript, and perfect, cross-browser CSS.

In fact, getting a website to display properly on all (graphical) browsers across all platforms is often the bane of every web designer’s existence, the most time-consuming, painful task which everybody requires but nobody takes into consideration when reading a quote.

Today I’ll be talking about one thing in particular, though: standards.

What?

We’ve all heard the word “standards,” which is often followed by “compliant” or some variation of the word. What does it mean, though?

For your day-to-day browser development team, it means obeying in a sense; it means building a browser capable of properly displaying every CSS element and every X/HTML tag which has made it into the Worldwide Web Consortium’s grand list.

For your average web developer, it means closing tags properly, using only legal syntax, and building sites which will render properly on every single graphical browser known to man (text-only browsers can typically be ignored, although it’s always nice to structure your document in such a way that users of these can still read the product).

Why?

In the early days of the Internet, when only supernerds knew HTML and browser choice was a thing of the future, standards were developed to provide the end user with a consistent experience across websites and to give some structure to browser developers. During the browser wars, the Acid and Acid2 test were developed to give some kind of quantifiable evidence of a browser’s success or failure. Its “usefulness,” if you will.

Unfortunately, now, in the Web 2.0 world, static HTML and CSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. In a day and age of AJAX and PHP/ASP, people must develop dynamic sites which can handle user input and change state based on what a user wants to do. You’re no longer judged based on that little “Validates” badge in the corner; now it’s about what flashy skills you can utilize to make the most kick-ass site that does what the user wants.

Take some popular websites. Let’s use MySpace for an example. Input the homepage for MySpace into the W3C’s validator, and what do you get? As of this writing, 61 Errors and 21 warnings. Facebook turns up 47 Errors and 6 warnings. Yet these are two of the most popular websites to date, with a rapidly growing userbase. Just for fun, Twitter turns up 10 errors.

What do all these have in common, though?

They take whatever a user wants and turns it into a product – a blog or profile – and does it well. They’re social sites, built to promote oneself, not to promote information specific to a niche. And as such, standards are out the window.

What does this mean for you?

Well, if you’re a web designer and you’re working on the same old static content, nothing. Follow those standards.

But if you’re looking to be the next web 2.0 hit, don’t bother. So long as your site renders similarly on Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer, your users will be pleased, and very few people will pay attention to that lack of a validated tag on your sidebar.

Tags: ,
Posted in Web Development \ 2 Comments »

How to Get People to Listen

March 19th, 2009
How to Get People to Listen

I’m about to lie to you.

You’ve got a superior product (or so you believe) or service, you’ve got a small customer base, and you’ve got employees hired to mass produce your product or provide your service for more than you would be able to. Your prices are established, you’ve got some basic business cards and introductory letters, and now you’re wondering what else to do. You own a small business. Accepting that is the first step.

You see, many people are in denial that they are owners of a small business.

No, not really. I told you I was going to lie. The whole point of all that was to show it’s not that hard to get people to listen, especially online. You come up with a decent title, start with a promise or something intriguing, and then make your point. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to do in person. People are a lot harder to reach in their daily lives than online.

Below is an explanation of how to stop people in their lives through guerilla marketing tactics (think guerilla theatre in this sense).

What the $&%* is that?

This is the in-person equivalent of a catchy title. You have to have something that stands out and catches an eye. It doesn’t necessarily have to be flashy colors, nudity, or gore, although if you can efficiently tie all those in you have a much better chance of standing out (while offending) among your competitors. Just figure out something to catch attention long enough to sell your point. A good idea for the down economy right now would be a CD labeled “Free Money” or something to that effect. Hand out a hundred of those at the bus station and I guarantee you’ll get something out of it, depending on if your content actually does what it promises.

Why do I care?

Say you’ve got our attention. Now what? You’re selling yourself, of course. But what do solar panels have to do with me? I don’t even own a corgi, and I’m certainly not from Wisconsin (see the post below for an explanation of this rambling). You’ve hit the next major hurdle: you’re advertising. Remember, you can’t advertise. You have to sell me on your product without me knowing it. I have to become a believer without witnessing the act, or else I’m not going to become a believer. An interesting way would be to have that CD packed with catchy songs about your business.

Convert!

The final step in getting people to listen to you is to provide an easy way for them to convert. Maybe you hand out a mail-order form with your CD or you have your phone number on that billboard. So long as there’s some way for you to be reached, you should be fine.

So how do you put it all together? Think of it like a blog post. Include some flow, some structure, with your marketing, and identify the major events which happen in a blog post. There’s the hook, the major content, the reassurance, the conclusion, the call to action.

If you’ve got more ideas on how to get people to listen or want to know where I got that “solar panels to corgi owners from Wisconsin” bit, share with us in the comments.

Tags: ,
Posted in Advertising, Marketing \ 1 Comment »

Why You Should Stop Advertising

March 18th, 2009
Why You Should Stop Advertising

Advertising is a common practice which attempts to drive traffic to websites, sell products, and generally create a need or want where there is none. For the most part, a niche product which does what it claims to do can be the driving force behind a company, with a good advertising campaign sending sales soaring through the roof.

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours

Unfortunately, the age of advertising is dead. With AdSense becoming nothing more than a virtual tip jar for bloggers (I’ll click your ad if you click mine, etc.), many of us are paying for click traffic without getting the conversion rate typically found through genuine interest.

This isn’t about that, though. This is about why advertising is dead, and what you can do to save yourself from the sinking ship.

What happened?

You see, at least according to most marketers, during the golden age of television, all you had to do was create a drive to your product through advertising. This was usually done on television through commercials between shows or on infomercials at 3 AM. It worked well for a while. Unfortunately, this age is dead, as many people are desensitized to advertising, and most simply ignore commercials. There are a few with good entertainment value which still stick in the heads of consumers (Think Progressive’s Flo), but for the most part, it’s no longer a viable way to reach the mainsteam customer.

What else has died?

In addition to television commercials sinking, another thing has taken a dive: reaching the mainstream. This is no longer a good way to try to market yourself. It’s a lot nicer to imagine yourself in the typical American household. Unfortunately, people aren’t interested in things which apply to everybody anymore and by losing a bullseye, you miss everybody completely.

So what do I do?

Everybody’s talking about this new hip thing called “niche marketing.” Basically, you find a small demographic and pray that it pays well enough to keep your company afloat. This approach, however, has serious flaws. First, it takes a lot of energy to find a high-paying niche which hasn’t become overcrowded, and by the time you’ve finally found a good place, you’re in an incredibly narrow market like “bioinformatics” (whatever that is) or you’re selling solar panels made only of copper to corgi owners from Wisconsin. Before long, your market has become saturated and you’re in red ink, or worse, you gain money and everybody else has to come invade with their own products.

What can I do?

Well, the only way to get around these problems is to throw out what doesn’t work and embrace what does. If you’re running a blog, you cast a wide net to go viral and at the same time provide niche content which will attract repeat visitors. A common way of doing this is linkbaiting through list posts to reach the front page of digg (so passe).

If you’re running a company, the best way to attract traffic from the masses while still maintaining your niche value is to breed some sort of new idea or trend to catch on.

In other words, go viral, but keep your regulars happy at the same time. It sounds difficult (and it is — I’m still trying to perfect it myself), but it can be done. If you can generate word of mouth, that’s the best way to attract new customers. After all, if Miss Becky Butterhead likes it, I should too.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Advertising, Marketing \ Please add a comment »

On Pricing Your Services

February 27th, 2009
On Pricing Your Services

This is a post sparked by an article over at Blogsessive about cheap custom design services. It’s an interesting read with some food for thought for those of us who can’t design our own websites, but mostly this is in reply to one minuscule part of the post: pricing.

He says there is no such thing as a bargain when dealing with professional design services. I disagree.

If you take a look at MNPHoppal’s pricing scheme, for example, we do a base of $250 for a website, with copywriting, logo design, link building, and SEO costing more. A typical static-content, 10-page website with some information about the company and a sales pitch would run about $500.

I can afford to live off of this type of income because (a) I get more clients due to my bargain prices (there are more people attracted by cheap than there are put off by it) and (b) our living expenses are $450 and food. Thus, three clients a month will more than pay our living expenses, and it only takes a couple days to put together a static website like that (not including the back-and-forth of “Do you like it?”).

This is not to say an all-in-one, all-inclusive charge is a good way to do business. On the contrary, MNP Hoppal uses a sliding scale which adjusts based on the amount of work involved or how many of my skills it takes. For example, if I have a difficult client which requires a lot of customization of a pre-packaged CMS like Drupal, custom logo design in a particular format, and much back-and-forth of “do you like this?” “No,” then I’ll obviously charge them much more than the $250 base price.

Another argument against low prices is that you’re selling yourself short.

However, I tend to err on the side of lower prices, as I feel like I’m ripping off people when I overcharge for my services, as most of the work involved I learned how to do two weeks into learning PHP. Mind you the debugging skills have taken years to polish and the eye for design can only be honed through hours upon hours of scrutinizing other peoples’ websites.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Web Development \ 1 Comment »

Learning PHP: From Scratch vs. Frameworks

February 13th, 2009
Learning PHP: From Scratch vs. Frameworks

Right now, many people are looking to create dynamic websites based heavily on databases, user input, and content management. One of a few ways to go about this task is to use PHP. PHP, both functional and object-oriented, is a great language for this due to easy integration with MySQL databases, simple syntax, and the abundance of help available.

For those learning PHP, however, there is a choice to be made: Should one go about learning it from scratch, or should one learn to use a framework instead?

There are many pros and cons to each method of learning. Let’s look at them.

From Scratch

First, the pros:

  • Good way to truly get a grasp on what is happening “under the hood”
  • Gives complete control over operations to programmer
  • Learn to truly program by solving simple problems yourself before getting into complex situations

Now, the cons:

  • Takes a lot of time
  • Repeat a lot of already-written code
  • Can be frustrating when simple things don’t work

Learning PHP from scratch is good because it really teaches a coder the bare bones, skeletal intricacies of a language (this doesn’t just apply to PHP). You will run into problems – minor and major – and solving small issues on your own is a great way to prepare yourself for the major glitches and logic flaws that will come up later in your career.

Learning PHP from scratch is ideally suited to a person who plans to continue a career in software development, but can be a huge investment for a small payout to a person who only plans to write one or two websites.

Frameworks

The pros:

  • Much faster and simpler than learning from scratch
  • Most basic coding is readily available

And the cons:

  • Limited amount of support available
  • Can run into major issues later without proper preparation
  • Doesn’t teach the basics of the language
  • Can be overly complex for simple tasks

Learning a framework is a great step in a person’s career, but for the beginner who plans to get into PHP seriously, it’s probably not the best solution. You see, using a framework is best suited for somebody who already knows the details about a language and simply needs a faster turnaround for websites. However, CakePHP and Zend are not necessarily suited to the novice developer, as they tend to be a bit too complex for simple problems.

Either way you go about learning PHP, as long as there is plenty of support available and you have a lot of patience, all problems can be overcome. I encourage learning from scratch, but frameworks can also be difficult to pick up if you don’t begin using them early on. I have personally run into this problem.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Web Development \ Please add a comment »

How Clean is Your Site?

January 24th, 2009
How Clean is Your Site?

Hello and welcome to How Clean is Your Site?, the show where we figure out just how much mess you’ve got laying around and cluttering up the interface. The problem goes like this: You’ve been looking at your conversion rates, your bounce rate, your number of views, or what have you, and realize you’ve got a problem: People aren’t coming, or if they are, they’re not sticking around. You’ve got a low PageRank, low visibility, high bounce rate, and this just needs to change.

Here’s how it works: You look at this list, skim for things that apply to you, check them off, and when you’re through you should either have a better-optimized website, or else you should probably go through again and be a little more honest with yourself. So what’s your problem?

I don’t have any visitors.

Well that’s quite a doozy to fix on our first try, but with a little hard work we can scrape off the excess, leaving a clean, highly visible website.

Is your website visible?

Basically, can people actually find you if they’re looking? Are you listed in search engines? Do you have links leading to your pages from other, larger websites? Can people find you if they’re not looking? Do you have advertisements on other, relevant websites?

Submit your site to all sorts of directories, feeds, what have you. Ensure you have good content first and don’t spam. Join a few online communities such as forums and be sure to include a link back to your website in your profile, signature, or whatever else is applicable.

Now, what’s another problem?

My bounce rate is high.

Well this is a pretty complicated fix that takes much research and insight. You see, when your bounce rate is high, it can mean a few things: first, it could mean you have boring content. Second, it could mean people simply can’t find your other pages, even if they’re looking. Third, it could mean they’re not sticking with your site long enough to read your content on the basis of how it appears.

Design is a major issue to be overcome. If you don’t have the skills, hire somebody else to fix your layout. Make sure it’s accesible, and not just pretty, as having to put forth effort to visit a website is definitely not on everybody’s to-do list.

If you have bad content, this is difficult to fix. If you’re not the most talented writer, you can still try your best. Be sure to proof-read to eliminate errors and maybe have others read over it before it’s published. Consider keeping every article for 24 hours like we do and make your changes when it’s “cold” in your mind and you can look at it more objectively.

If your site has a poor layout or if other pages are not easy to find, this is another potential contributor to a high bounce rate. For WordPress blogs, this is an easy fix: simply install a related posts plug-in. For other blogs, I’m not sure of a fix, and for general website constructed from scratch, the fix involves including a lot of extra links alongside your content. The best way for such sites is to switch to a content management system such as WordPress to include links for you.

Be sure to always include a link to your homepage from every page as it helps for search engine optimization and getting people to your homepage (and thus to the rest of your content).

Our final problem on today’s post:

I’m not getting any clicks on my advertisements.

Well, this is also a complicated problem. Not getting a good click-through rate on advertisements can lead to poor income which is less than the cost of hosting and a domain name (in other words, not worth your time and energy).

The solutions to this problem are mentioned all over Google’s adsense tutorials, Yahoo’s tutorial, etc. But it basically boils down to this: Have a good placement. First, be sure advertisements are “above the fold,” or visible without having to scroll down your pages. Make sure they look like they’re part of your content, but also that they stand out enough to avoid being simply ignored.

Another problem with this is many people using web browsers like FireFox also use AdBlock Plus. That means your ads aren’t visible to them. However, while it does kill some potential clicks, it shouldn’t be that detrimental.

That sums up this episode of How Clean is Your Site? Next time, we’ll tackle another tough issue: conversion rates. Thanks for viewing and be sure to stay tuned for Marketing With Butch.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Blogging, Web Development, Writing \ 2 Comments »

Performing a Marketing Audit

January 22nd, 2009
Performing a Marketing Audit

To perform a marketing audit is basically to take stock of the current environment in which your company is surviving. It includes everything from current advertisements being run to general customer opinion about not only your company but also your niche and so on.

Marketing audits are an important part of every marketing plan because, as a component, they provide a good look into how difficult growing your business will be as well as a good way to estimate your marketing department’s ideal budget for the next year, etc.

Read more about

Tags: , ,
Posted in Marketing \ Please add a comment »

Analyze Your SWOT for Better Optimization

January 22nd, 2009
Analyze Your SWOT for Better Optimization

A common task for every marketing department is to analyze where a company is, where it needs to be, and how it can get there. From surveys and forums to learn customer opinion to hiring outside sources to make recommendations, the task takes a lot of work and often outside help. An effective way to analyze your company’s position, though, is through a SWOT method of research.

SWOT is an acronym which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It is an important part of every marketing plan to include these four criteria in the write-up.

Read more about

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Marketing \ Please add a comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »