This is a life lesson learned through technology. I’ll try to keep it on topic but I can’t promise that you’re not going to be able to apply the information in this post outside of your technological life.
I should mention, this post was inspired by a great piece (guest posted) piece over at Tim Ferris’s blog about stoicism and entrepreneurship. After reading that post, I broke out the old philosophy textbook and read a little further.
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Working for a few large, collective blogs that are populated by free-thinking, busy, and talented people, I’ve been exposed to a lot of “this is my last blog post as the ____ of ____ and I’m so sad to leave.” These posts always seemed so positive and inspirational, like a bright, new chapter has opened up before this person. I was always smiling as I read those posts. I’m also smiling as I write my own.
I should mention, this post is a bit self-indulgent but I can get over that if you can. The TL; DR (too long; didn’t read) for those who can’t is: I’m cutting back my hours with Social Media Today (SMT) slowly to take the first steps towards going fully into business for myself.
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When you contact someone like me to design your site or code up an email or put together a WordPress blog, you generally have two ways to pay for this service: by the hour or by the project. I can give you an estimate, track the hours, and bill you at the end or I can tell you a price based on what I think will be involved and keep the work to around that amount. I think both of these ways suck and I’d like to tell you why.
First, though, I think it’s important to say one thing: no matter what I’m charging, I want my clients to be completely satisfied. In the end, that’s my only job. In addition to that, I’d like my clients to feel like what they paid for what they got was fair. I don’t compete on price because I don’t think that leads to value. I want to build great things and charge people the right amount.
But how to go about doing that? Here’s how I see it from a few different perspectives…
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The WP-Drudge WordPress template is live! Click here to review the features and purchase!
I’m working with a couple of people (thanks Scott and Malcolm) who were requesting the template in the first place and they gave me a wishlist of features including:
- Advertising manager: I’ll probably just use one of the existing plugins out there and build support for it into the theme.
- Stats counter: This is something that Drudge has on his site and, if I can find something that works, I’ll add it.
- Link-by-link color settings: This won’t be too terribly hard so it will be included.
- Selective redirecting: This is the ability to still add posts to the site as well as links. This will just be determined by whether there is a link or not.
- Recurring links: I’m going to be adding this using the default links handling in WordPress to make things nice and easy.
- Theme aesthetics control: At launch, I’m going to include 4 themes: a stripped down, true “Drudge” version and three others. I’m also going to include controls for the background color, link color, and text size.
- Comments: Allow comments on the site for posted links on other sites
- Granular font and size control: Change the fonts and sizes for headlines, links, and descriptions.
I thought long and hard about how to manage links on the site and realized that the best way to do this was through the WordPress widget functionality. So I wrote a widget, my first one ever!
Basically, the links will be added to a particular category and then you add those blocks of categorized links into the column you want to display them in. The categories could be based on the content of the link or they could be more technical, like “top of 1st column” or similar.
The widget gives you a dropdown of all the categories that are on the site, the ability to hide the header, and the ability to control how many links are displayed in the block.
You can also use the other WordPress widgets in conjunction with this post listing widget. I’m guessing that the advertising plugin will create an ad widget of some kind but, if not, I’ll make sure to create one of those too.
I’m still thinking about pricing for this template but it will be reasonable, of course.
I’d love to hear your feedback on this template if it’s something you could see yourself using. What features would you need? How would you like it to look?
Thanks!
Incoming links to your website from text, images, or otherwise are a mystery to a lot people who do business on the web. In fact, I’ve talked to many people who aren’t really clear on what a link actually is. The incoming links concept is one of those things that is hard to get your head around, hard to stay current with, and hard to make a decision about. It’s also, however, one of the key concepts of having an maintaining a healthy website. Let me help you gain clarity on incoming links.
The idea of incoming links falls under this large, ethereal, very misunderstood heading of SEO, or search engine optimization. It’s one piece of the very important “how and where do I show up in search engines?” question. It can be low-hanging fruit for those just now paying attention to them and a welcome challenge to those who feel like they are running out of options to improve the number of people coming to their site.
So where to start? A quick explanation of what a link is.
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I am obsessed with ideas. Ideas by themselves are both incredibly important and totally-overrated. As such, they are completely misunderstood. Simple ideas can transform world but the mean value for an idea approaches zero. I’m in a position where I get to hear a lot of ideas from passionate people wanting to do something incredible. Since ideas have the power to change your life, for better or for worse, it’s my duty to help people stay grounded and test their ideas before jumping head-first into something. Here’s how to do it.
As I see it, there are three questions you should ask yourself before taking any steps forward with a web project:
- Is there a need for what I want to do that isn’t being fulfilled somewhere else?
- If there is a need, is what I’m trying to build going to fit that need in a way that people will use it?
- If there is a need and what I’m trying to do will properly fit that need, is it built in a way that makes it easy for me to keep fulfilling that need?
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