Moving to our own domain

We’re convinced – WordPress is the way to go. So we’re now in the process of converting our main web site over to WordPress. So that means no more (or at least not many) new entries on this site. If you want to see what we’re up to, then the place to be is Harris Campbell Pty Ltd.

What do you want?

Are you running or managing a business? (if not, see my next question)

If you’re already running or managing a business (or at least your part of one), what one thing would make your work life easier? I’m not asking which of the things I currently sell might benefit you most.

I really mean, if there was ONE thing you could change, fix, eliminate, introduce, acquire, produce, save time on, figure out, learn, or otherwise make your life easier, what would it be?

It doesn’t matter how big or small it is, or whether you think it’s relevant. If it’d make your work life easier, let me know. (OK if there are two or more, you can include them, I’m just trying to make it easy for you, and help you focus).

Are you, or someone you know, thinking of starting a business?

Similar to my question above, but I recognise that your needs are a bit different to people who are already up and running. I’d like to focus on what information you’d like to have – what do you want to learn more about before starting your business?

Or, if you reckon you have or can get most things you need to get going, what’s stopping you from starting your business right now, today?

Let me know by leaving your comment (click on the comments link below).

Mind the gap

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post. I have been in the final throes of sorting out the property settlement of my separation from my ex. These things apparently always take longer than you plan for and there’s always something that comes up at the last minute and you’re back at square one again. But I believe that this time things look like they might actually pan out and my time will soon be my own again. Fingers crossed!

I have the power to take down the internet

How to bring down the internet

1. Be in an urgent hurry
2. Get your documents, invoices, catalogues etc ready and open to the right page for the important task at hand
3. Curse and throw things while you try to find or remember your username and password
4. Find your bookmark, favorite or URL and go to the web site to get your task done
5. Go to the site in question – and it will be down, either for maintenance or some unforeseen technical glitch – GUARANTEED
6. Do this for every site you’re a member of

Note that this works best for banks, the tax department and other government sites – the ones who can really penalise you for NOT paying up or filling in forms on time.

I have a magic knack for somehow subconsciously causing computer and machinery failure whenever I need them most. If I chose to, I’m sure I could use my power for evil and bring down the entire internet – but then where would I get my porn how could I procrastinate if I couldn’t blog? (Joking! )

But the real lesson here is, just because it’s the internet and theoretically web sites are available 24/7, don’t rely on this availability to get critical things done. Give yourself plenty of time in case you need to (heaven forbid!) pick up the phone or visit on office in person to sort things out.

Things go wrong – plan for it.

OpenOffice update

I’ve been using OpenOffice for a little while now, and for the most part I’m pretty happy with it and it does all the day to day things I want it to, and tends to open faster than Microsoft Office products. However, I do have a pet pieve, and any comments or help would be greatly appreciated.

I use an IBM laptop. It has a trackpad, but also a “nipple” situated in the middle of the keyboard for moving the cursor around (it’s actually between the “G”, “H” and “B” keys). For some reason that I can’t yet figure out, I can’t use the nipple to scroll around documents in OpenOffice. This is despite my turning ON the automatic scrolling for the middle “mouse” button in the Options of the Tools menu. Instead I have to move the cursor over to the scrollbar. Or use the “PgUp” or “PgDn” keys. I find this a bit inconvenient.

While I’m on the subject, I also find that while I can scroll up-down in the FireFox web browser, I can’t scroll left-right using the keyboard nipple. Again, annoying. If it’s simply a matter of a setting I haven’t found yet, that’d be OK. Strangely inconvenient, but OK.

Main site update imminent!

I’ve had an extremely busy weekend, what with Father’s Day and all. Also an ongoing personal matter. So it looks like:

It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

How embarrassment!

I currently have the wrong phone numbers on my main website. I’ll be fixing that over the weekend. This is due to moving a few months ago and it just slipped through the cracks because I was planning to update the site anyway. My sincerest apologies to the women who have been fielding my phone calls all this time.

Now the question you must be asking yourself is why didn’t I notice before? Wasn’t there a slump in business? Well, there was a small slump, but you get that when you move (or can do). But, I had notified my existing customers, and the vast majority of my other enquiries come in by email.

But since I’ve been blogging, traffic to the main Harris Campbell site has been increasing, meaning that those poor women getting my phone calls had finally had enough and got in touch with me.

Again, I feel so stupid, but it’s a lesson well learnt, and one I can share with you now so you don’t make the same mistake:

When you make any changes to the contact details of your company, or you employ someone new, or more importantly, if they leave, make sure you check ALL your marketing pieces: business cards, brochures, shop signs, WEB SITE/S, car signage, and uniforms. Have I missed anything?

Change to design and free desktop pictures

I’ve chosen what I believe to be a more user friendly design. I like that the links in the sidebar at the right of this page are more clear, the calendar layout lets you see at a glance which days have a posting, and the “Add a comment” link is more friendly than simply listing the number of comments.

My current thoughts are that the background image at the top of the page will change over time, using my photos. Photography is one of my hobbies and I have quite a few shots that I think are good enough for public consumption. Where appropriate, I’ll make the original photos available as desktop (wallpaper) images to download – my gift to you! I’d really appreciate a note from you or comment if you do download these images – it’s nice to have your work appreciated!

The current header is a detail of a photo of flowers (don’t know what they’re called) which were hanging all over a neighbours fence. I then applied a woodcut effect. I hope you like it. It’s available as 1024×768. If you’d like other sizes, let me know by leaving a comment to this posting and I’ll get back to you.

To download the image, click on the thumbnail and the larger image will open in a new window. Simply right click on the image and choose “Save Image As…”. Enjoy!

Plastic surgeon sues web developer

Website scars top surgeon
19 August 2006

I’ve been sitting on this article for a couple of days trying to figure out what to make of it. If you only read the Sydney Morning Herald article, you’d think that the web developer in question was one of those cowboy operators who does dodgy work and rips off the unwary.

I did a quick Google of the web developer’s name and she seems to be a member of reputable organisations, has won various business awards, gives talks on matters of eMarketing, and her web company apparently specialises in $2,000-$10,000 web sites (ie the average small business web site).

I wasn’t able to find anything more about the court case in question. I don’t know the facts, just what the article lays out in its six paragraphs. The article says that the web developer made some typos, had awkward copy and used “inappropriate” nude photos.

But I just don’t get it.

The process of building a web site for a client usually includes a number of steps where the customer has a chance to have a say on the graphics used, and at any rate, this sort of thing would be discussed long before any design work was done. I’d imagine that there’d be a case for tasteful and appropriate nude photos on a plastic surgeon’s web site. I have no idea what kind of photos where involved in this case. But if they decided that it wasn’t for them, the customer would say so during the development process.

Also, even with the best processes in place, sometimes typos do get through to a live site. Where it is brought to the attention of the web developer, it is usually an extremely simple matter to fix the problem, and is almost always done free of charge.

So what really happened in this case?

Was the customer involved in the development of the site? Did they sign off on the site, then change their mind later? Did the customer get presented with the final site with no chance for review beforehand? There are a number of possibilities here.

But I’m left wondering why this couldn’t have been sorted out without going to court.

And I’m also wondering why this is news. Is it because of the handy scars/scares pun based on a couple of unfortunate typos that found their way into the copy of the site? Is it because it reinforces the stereotype of the dodgy backyard web developer?

I could be wrong on all counts – the web developer in this case could indeed be dodgy; and their process and/or contract may have left the customer with no way out, paid up in full for something they didn’t want.

But something about this story just doesn’t seem right to me.

What fonts should you use?

Wouldn’t it be great to know what fonts are already installed on other people’s computers? That way, you could write your documents knowing, with a fair degree of certainty, that the page is going to look the way you want, without any extra hassle for you or the people reading your document.

Sure, you could just save your documents as PDFs with embedded fonts, but then you end up with files a lot larger than they have any right to be. And the average person has plenty of real things to worry about without trying to figure out what “embedded fonts” are, right?

I subscribe to Philip Shaw’s Code Style font survey. Apart from a solid list of links for font sources and web stuff like style sheet information, it has a really great, continually updated list of the most common fonts installed on people’s computers. He lists results by what percentage of users filling in a survey have the various fonts installed on their computer. He covers all the major operating systems:

Windows
Macintosh
Unix
Combined results

Want to take the font survey yourself? Or want to receive the latest survey results? Then go to the following pages. To sign up for the results, scroll to the bottom of the following pages, fill in the form and choose “Yes” to be notified if the list is updated.

Windows font survey and sign up
Macintosh font survey and sign up
Unix font survey and sign up

And for those of you who like statistics or have some questions about the accuracy of these results, then check out his Font Survey FAQ.

So, all design, branding and aesthetic issues aside, if you want to know if there’s a fair chance that the people will be able to see your font and hence actually read your document, check out the above links before choosing your fonts.

Talk to me with Meebo!

I’ve recently added the ability for you guys to chat with me through this website. I’m using a new service called Meebo. Anyway, there’s now a little box with the title “Talk to me” on the right hand side of every page of this site, below the Categories box (you might need to scroll down a little bit to see it). Click on the thumbnail image on the left here for instructions.

If I’m online and available for you to chat with, you’ll see a little green speech bubble and it’ll say “harriscampbell is online”. And as you’d expect, if I’m not around, then there’s a red little speech bubble and it says “harriscampbell is offline”, like in the picture in this paragraph.

So feel free to strike up a conversation – no-one else visiting this site can see what we’re typing – it’s strictly just you and me!

Spam lets me know I’m getting noticed

I’ve really started to get a fair whack of spam comments on this blog (all caught and managed by Akismet, thank goodness). At the moment it’s still novel and makes me feel noticed. Obviously I’ve blogged enough to get in some search engines etc. Fortunately it’s nowhere near the 100+ spam emails per day I receive.

Of course I’d rather not become a spam magnet, but it’d be interesting to know how spam volume correlates to overall visibility online.

According to Akismet, 94% of all comments to blogs are spam (as of 2 August 2006). I just did a calculation and currently I can confirm that indeed, 93.75% of comments I’ve received on this blog to date have been spam! Uncanny!

Income protection insurance for small business

We all know that bills are a pain in the butt, but it’s nice to know that you can pay them even if you’re injured or become sick. One thing I’ve realised since having reduced work capacity over the last year and a half (back injury), is that income protection insurance would have been a good thing. Fortunately my passive income covers my bills and expenses, but it’s very tight. I would definitely have benefitted from taking out income protection insurance when I was earning a solid income.

Most banks and insurance companies will have some form of income protection insurance. A good independant website with plenty of basic information about the types of insurance in general is InsuranceWatch. There are all sorts of things to watch out for like:

• the waiting period before you can receive your benefit,
• how long payments will be made for,
• your occupation (eg white collar professional/managerial vs blue collar trades),
• whether payments will be indexed to increase with the cost of living over the period of the payments, and
• whether you opt to be covered just for your occupation (eg the job you have qualifications for), or any occupation (including unskilled labour).

On InsuranceWatch, you can also compare policies.

If you’re self employed, I’d strongly suggest you look at policies that specifically cover your situation. When you’re self employed, you have fixed business costs, as well as all your personal living costs. You want to make sure that your cover (which may include a combination of insurance policies) includes the ongoing costs of your business. The banks and general insurance companies will tend to offer you discounts if you have more than one policy with them.

But the really good news about income protection insurance that sets it apart from other forms of insurance is that it’s tax deductible! This makes it that much more affordable.

eBay increasing prices for Stores and Feature Plus

eBay announced today that they will be increasing their fees for Featured Plus, Basic Stores subscription and Store Inventory Format listings on eBay.com.au, as well as changing the way Store Inventory Format listings are displayed in search results.

There will be no changes to Core Listings fees:

• Auction items
• Fixed Price (But It Now) Items

Prices will be going up for Feature Plus Items in the following categories:

• Consumer Electronics
• Camera and Accessories
• Cars, Motorcyles and Parts
• Computers

Store Inventory Format Listings will go up in price. This includes the Basic Store Subscription Fee, Insertion Fee, and Final Value Fee.

Why are they doing this? According to their site:

From time to time, it is necessary for eBay to adjust fees in order to help guide selling trends and to manage the overall experience of the eBay marketplace. One of the main reasons for the price changes is that buyers have expressed a number of concerns to us regarding the large quantity of Store Inventory Format listings onsite along with the over-use of Featured Plus listings. Buyers indicated that these two features lead to:

• Searches producing too many results and creating a confusing buying experience
• Searches being less relevant, making it difficult for buyers to find what they are looking for.

Increasing the fees on Store Inventory Format listings will help improve the buyer experience by increasing core listings on the site and minimising Store Inventory Format listings.

For more information:

• eBay Press Release
• Detailed Pricing Update Information, including Questions and Answers and examples

More Open Source Tests – XAMPP Lite

I’ve just successfully installed XAMPP Lite (mostly painless, but I had to fiddle a few security settings and turn off IIS to get it working). That means I can now download and play with WordPress on my local computer. So far so good.