Archive for the ‘Statements and Rants’ category

Donation buttons and self promotion in your plugins and themes.. yes or no?

December 14th, 2011

As regular readers might have noticed, I am a (more than) full time WordPress plugin and theme developer. I have spent the last few years doing this and have an intimate knowledge of WordPress. Because of this, like so many others, I have a base stock of plugins I tend to use for my clients’ sites which I use for a number of reasons.

The list of reasons tends to include the obvious things like ‘are they any good or not’ and ‘are they free’ (always a winner that one). However, one of my other criteria is to do with the existence of the other plethora of rubbish that some developers seem to chuck into their plugins almost as a matter of course.

This post was to do with donation buttons but I suppose that we can extend it to the following:

Automatic backlinking

When I looked at my sites XML Sitemap the other day I noticed that there was a nice little comment in there attributing the work to the guy that wrote the plugin. I find this incredibly annoying as, if it were an option in the plugin, it would almost certainly be turned off.

Donate buttons

I appreciate that plugins take time to write but little cheeky buttons that suggest they want $5 for a coffee is a particular annoyance of mine. I have one donate button and it’s on my homepage sidebar. This means that anyone wishing to give a donation can do but I never expect anyone to. The important thing is that whenever I go to the settings page on a plugin it’s not sitting there in a little box begging for some cash or, more suggestive, suggesting I look at their Amazon wishlist.

Flashing/fixed admin banners

I find that within some plugins people have gone as far as to write a nag box to show within the admin screens to ask for money or to show me a ‘sponsored’ news feed. Often the developer has copied and pasted some code to add this and managed to add it to that all roles can see it, not just Administrators.

News feeds

This one doesn’t bother me as much but I do appreciate an ‘off’ button. On the WordPress dashboard there are boxes linking to WordPress RSS feeds for plugin news and updates. Some developers like to put their little boxes on there too. If I were to allow people onto the admin backend of a site the last thing I would want to show them would be several boxes picking up content from RSS feeds I have no control over.

Social media buttons

The curse of social media now means that every man and his dog wants a Facebook or Twitter button on their site. I actually found myself considering getting a Twitter account the other day but then slipped out of that coma and came back to my senses. My personal feelings on people wasting their life posting ‘status updates’ aside, seeing these boxes splattered all over the admin systems that I use is as much of an annoyance as anything else. Social media sites are great for companies wishing to promote themselves and for people ‘getting back in touch’ (as often is an excuse given by Facebook fans.. what ever happened to email. Given it’s a new technology I know) and not to mention SEO but do I need a dedicated sidebar on admin pages for some plugins telling me what the developer ate from breakfast and is currently doing on the toilet.

HTML comment backlinks

I notice these all the time.. in fact I was speaking to a good friend about them last night when I mentioned I had written a major app which is being used by a few big name companies and he said that I need my name in there somewhere. I suppose my point is that if I have been paid to write something for someone then it’s their name that goes on it, not mine. It’s a little bit different with ‘free’ WordPress plugins where the author needs their credit but then again that’s that the Author Name and Author URI comment fields are for within each plugin and theme.. to attribute credit in a clear, consistent and unbiased/customer facing manner.

Forced suggested donations

I came across this idea when using a plugin this morning. I am working on a client site and wanted to remove a little blue box which keeps popping up suggesting I buy him a coffee or pay his mortgage or something. There was a convenient little button to dismiss the box which I clicked (who wouldn’t!) and it took me to his site which was splattered with both advertising, follow buttons and an explanation saying that if I were to pay him some money they he would ‘arrange for those boxes to flutter away’.

Security concerns

I have some concerns here.. in effect the developer has written a back door into the site (and he’s not the only one.. lots of plugins do it). He can easily log my site address or any other information sent with the request and note how often it’s being used. It’s stats heaven for the developer but rather concerning for anyone else. In effect in order for advertising to ‘flutter away’ he needs to add my site address to a list he has somewhere which will cause the advertising not to show. Feels a bit wrong to me.. thoughts anyone?

Conclusion

I tried to be impartial in this posting and intended to weigh up the pros and cons of this shameless self promotion (whoops) but clearly failed. It’s a shame that I really have to stop using, or just edit the code inside, some plugins because the person who wrote it feels that, for offering an open source plugin, they get carte blanche to advertise/nag/demand money from you until you jump through a hoop or two.

Plugins written for free should really be rated highly on the WordPress plugin directory. They should be talked about, celebrated and, as such, the developer will see both an improved site ranking/self popularity and most likely end up with more work because of it.

I have several plugins in the plugin repository myself and have offered tens of plugins on this site for free. In each one the only link to me or my name is the plugin author and site. The rest is on this site (sans social media and advertising and only the one small donate button if people really feel the need). I would love for a few more developers to take this approach as there are some really good plugins out there which I simply can not use out of the box because of one (or frequently more) of the afore mentioned reasons.

To see a list of the things I offer on this site then take a look at my downloads page

Ho ho ho and happy holidays everyone. I shall be working up until Christmas Eve undoubtedly but I hope to have written a new theme for this site by the n new year. Let’s see if it happens!

1 comment »

Posted in Personal Blog, Shameless Plugs, Statements and Rants, Wordpress

Tags:

Apple releases Beatles back catalog

November 16th, 2010

Apple, a few days ago, changed their homepage to say something big was coming to iTunes and it would be released today at 3pm GMT. I think that the world was then rubbing their hands together in sheer anticipation of what goodies could be announced and included. I went out with my Son for the day but made sure that I took my mobile with me to check the site at the right time (ish) in the day.

The time came and I expectantly checked the site only to be greeted with a picture of the Beatles in their younger years. Given the wait and the suspense I would have expected something just a little bit more interesting than the opportunity to spend more money on iTunes on something that most beatles fans will have on CD or other media already. Let’s hope the next time they announce something big coming that it’s a 2nd generation iPad or Apps for Apple TV… now those I would sit up all night constantly refreshing my browser to see!

Better luck next time Apple. Love the product and the marketing strategy but in this case what was offered wasn’t worth the wait.

2 comments »

Posted in Apple, Personal Blog, Statements and Rants

What exactly do you get from good customer service?

November 8th, 2010

superseanIt’s been a while I know… moving house, holidays and loads of work have made it a little bit of a slow couple of months for inspiring things to say. Regardless, today’s topic is a simple question and in theory a number of possible answers..

What exactly do you get from good customer service?

I work for a number of friends and clients and find myself in the position where I am constantly dishing out advice whether helpful, requested or otherwise. I work on a forum (at Newmedias), I do a great deal of email support and I answer a lot of questions from clients and customers.

Of course working in IT means that everyone assumes you know everything about everything and call whenever they can’t get their email to work or computer to start (i’m a web developer!). So why oh why do we bother helping people out at all? Well.. there are a number of reasons that I came up with:

  • The money
  • The challenge
  • The self gratification
  • That thank you you get on helping another person out
  • The favour you are then owed (assuming the person you helped didn’t pay for the privilege)
  • The handouts (such as the comedy Photoshop job that someone did for me this evening (right top))
  • The money

A short list, I know, but feel free to post your own! I think that we all do it for a combination of those reasons as opposed to just one. Even if you are paid to help it’s still nice to help people out and go that extra mile. You wouldn’t, and don’t(!), expect to see it everywhere but as a person in need you are always very relieved to find that one helpful person who makes it all better for you. I am not saying that I am always that person but I must admit I do try (when it’s convenient for me to do so).

From a business perspective the customer service is incredibly important although I do wonder if some companies strategically position their helpful (and local??) staff where they are likely to need it. For example my ISP and phone are provided by a company that sounds a lot like Squawk Squawk and I have had nothing but problems with them for three years. You wonder why I am still with them… that’s easy.. they are cheap! However, being cheap does not exclude you from having to give a good service to your customers. My internet at my old house was intermittent at best and in my new house it seems to have stopped at 3mb (i’m paying for 20mb!). Now when I took out the contract (fixed term.. no escape!) I was assured that all would be fine… I got lots of glossy welcome literature (which went swiftly into the bin) and the service was running by the due date. Then it all went down hill… internet service was incredibly slow and flicked on and off seemingly randomly. On calling technical support I was asked to plug my computer into the router with a cable instead of wireless, I was asked to change micro filters and use a different phone socket. All completely pointless and fruitless but the support operatives would not take no for an answer. In the end I got a little bit grumpy with the person on the phone and asked to be transferred to second line support. On connection I was greeted by someone who I could understand and who noted a fault on the line and had it fixed within a few minutes.

The moral of the story was not to dig at Squawk Squawks appalling service (and believe me it has been dire!) but to point out that the useful staff are hidden behind a wall of incompetence whose sole use is to fend off the people who need to turn it off and on again. A good business practice? I don’t know but it seems effective for all except those with any computer knowledge who they manage to infuriate. Luckily, like good support staff, those are in short supply as well.

To conclude, what do you get for good customer service.. the answer if of course a comedy Photoshop drawing to put a smile on your face :)

No comments »

Posted in Personal Blog, Statements and Rants

NewMedias get’s it’s third musketeer!

May 21st, 2010

logoThose of you who know me from the NewMedias Your Members project will remember that for years it has been a two man band. Some were sceptical about the future of Your Members and whether it was just going to fizzle away like so many other WordPress plugins. I am pleased to now tell you that actually no, we aren’t going anywhere and in fact will be trying to get things moving again with help of the latest member of the team, Glenn Pegden. Glenn has a varied background, likes long walks on the beach and candle lit dinners. I understand he also knows a thing or two about sales and therefore he will be kicking myself and Tim Nash into shape to get the plugin(s) updated, pretty and unmissable!

Current plans include a whole new website just for the Your Members plugin to house things like… wait for it… documentation and a proper list of the things it can actually do! We have recently released YM version 1.6 which is the best version yet! We hope to get some feedback and tweets to the new YM Twitter account for things that you, the community, would like to see and then get the next version out to you sometime in the next couple of months.

Any questions about the plugin, the project or Glenns vital statistics then you can get in touch with us at newmedias.co.uk or use my site contact form and we shall get back to you.

No comments »

Posted in News, Personal Blog, Statements and Rants, Wordpress, Your Brand

Snow Leopard and SCPlugin

February 4th, 2010

Snow Leopard BoxI recently upgraded my laptop to Snow Leopard and have, as of yet, not been wowed by it. Whilst in conversation with a friend I defended the OS and demanded that the latest release was not a Service Pack as he suggested and is an entirely new OS. I installed it and expected the world to tremble as I booted up, I wanted to see an instantly noticable improvement for the ‘average’ user such as myself.

No such luck

Since installing the update I have not noticed an increase in speed as was anticipated and to make things annoying I have had to completely reconfigure my local web server and find a new Subversion application to use. It took me about a week to recover fully from the upgrade. The laptop has been sadly crashing (albeit not catastrophically) once a month or so.

On the bright side though, and there is a really big bright side, my laptop now sports the latest version of the OS. OSX is still as pretty and user friendly as it ever was and, after a month or two of use, you really start to notice the differences and little tweaks that have been added. I had problems before the upgrade with deleting ‘locked’ (?) items from my trash (there was a keyboard shortcut I now know) but now there is a handy dialogue box that asks about it on emptying the can. There are a few other stylistic changes I notice although I am aware that the major change is the extension of integration of Cocoa which is nice (apparently).

No comments »

Posted in Mac, Personal Blog, Statements and Rants, Subversion, Troubleshooting

Tags:

Why buy from an ugly website?

February 3rd, 2010

I have been thinking a great deal recently about the work I do and how much of it is purely functional before someone else goes away and ruins it with their bad design choices. I attended ThinkVisibility 2 last September and it was a real eye opener with regard to the talks I was subjected to. One was to do with eye tracking and we were shown an example of a number of users’ browsing patterns for different sites. I never realised how predictable users can be with the way they look at some sites.

However, one of the sites we were shown was Amazon and it shows the users having trouble getting around. I have to ask myself exactly how on earth Amazon makes money at all when people are obviously struggling to find what they want, or worse, find what they want but can’t work out how to pay for the thing!

I have started looking at websites in a new light now and often refuse to buy anything from a site that I deem to be unworthy of my custom. It sounds a little bit odd for me to say that but I honestly do think twice about getting out my wallet if it takes me longer than I want to spend finding the items in the first place.

I would almost be inclined to start a black list of sites that, in my opinion, were badly designed but before long it would be unmaintainable :)

What, however, I will do is comment on a few sites that I do get along with and tell you why…

#1 Google
I was introduced to Google in 2001 when I was at college and my lecturers suggested they use it because of the distinct lack of advertising. This, of course, has now changed and Google has a colossal advertising network. Let me ask you this though… does it get in the way of your browsing? I say no it doesn’t and the clean cut and fast interface they provide is exactly what I want to see.

#2 eBay & Paypal
I have been using eBay and Paypal for years as I am sure most of Europe and the US have been as well. I find the interface on eBay inkeeping with the ‘fun’ theme of the dutch auction and the clean lines of Paypal when you come to actually hand over your money a refreshing contrast. Would you really want to hand over your card details on a site that looks like a child has written it? eBay offers a good and intuitive search functionality but also excellent browsing and viewing product pages.

#3 Apple
I may be criticised for saying this but I think that apple also have the right idea with regard to their site design. Design, of course, is something that Apple have grown up with and have continued to excel at through the ages. I find the homepage to be a no nonsense view of what they want you to see (which at the moment is the new iPad (a big iPod in my opinion.. not a great deal of product design elaboration there!)). The shop is non contentional but you always manage to find your product and get it into your shopping cart with no problems.

#4 Facebook
To start, I hate facebook… It is one of those sites that just ropes people in to basically live until the shelf life runs out and they move onto something else. They are managing to keep ahead of (or in conjunction with) Twitter quite well at the moment but then the sites have somewhat different core strengths. However, my hatred aside, you really have to give it to them that the design of the site, the navigation and the speed are all pretty good indeed. The use of Ajax and Javascript are a credit to the site and the user experience is a good one indeed.

#5 Bing
I don’t use the search engine at all to be honest as I am firmly a Google man (stubborn really if anything else) however, one has to appreciate the front page of Bing. Instead of going the Google route and showing nothing or the Yahoo route and showing everything they have shown interesting bits of information about random things. The picture in the background changes frequently (much like Googles header image) and the hotspots on the image give interesting information about the scene and it’s contents. I like this method of not being forced to swallow news (or worse, wait for it to load!) that I don’t want to see but providing me with an interesting picture with the opportunity to easily get more information. Well done Microsoft on your first half decent search engine page!

The list could go on and on but I have things to do. Please do feel free to add your own likes and dislikes to my list. The point was to highlight the fact that design and placement of a website is often not as important to some people as it should be. These examples are sites whom I think have done it properly. Copying them is not the best thing to do at all but use them as an inspiration to guide you in making the right decisions for your own homepages.

7 comments »

Posted in Events, News, Personal Blog, SEO, Shameless Plugs, Statements and Rants, Usability

Tags:

An extension of my being?

February 2nd, 2010

My Wife just left the house and was about to drive away when I realised that she had left her mobile phone on the dining room table. I picked it up and ran out of the front door waving it like an idiot as she merrily drove away unaware of her imminent predicament.

After the incident it has really dawned on me how much we, as people, a nation, a planet, rely on technology in our daily lives just to get by. Simple tasks such as driving to work or visiting friends is now impossible without the use of a Satellite Navigation system. Our cars themselves are being packed with more kit to make them easier (and less interactive) to drive. I drive a car with an automatic gearbox and often make use of cruise control. So I can effectively span the entire country driving using only one hand and no feet (assuming the petrol doesn’t run out in which case more limbs might be required).

At home our reliance on technology is no different… I was just talking to a friend of mine who is currently sitting in a lecture 20 miles away; I used Skype last night to speak (and see) my sister in law in France; I am writing this now using a laptop computer whilst listening to my iPod whilst the washing machine makes sure I have something to wear tomorrow whilst the automatic central heating keeps me warm. And to top it off… all along I am wondering exactly how my Wife is going to function in the world without her mobile phone!!

My observation for the day is that we as a species are becoming so reliant on technology that I worry before long we shall just forget how to do all these things that people 50 years ago just knew how to do! I do wonder what’s coming next… a new product idea for Apple maybe, a subcutaneous mobile phone. A use somewhere there for their multi-touch technology I think. Or if Microsoft does it I can see the next ‘I’m a PC and Windows Cerebral was my idea’ advert.

So I suppose the morale of this is to go and buy a tent, leave your phone at home and only check your emails the twice a day instead of the once every five minutes that seems to be the norm for most iPhone and Blackberry users. I shall be here checking the curtain every two minutes to make sure my Wife get’s home safely (if she even manages to find her way).

4 comments »

Posted in Personal Blog, Statements and Rants

Tags:

Should one follow the path (of least resistance)?

November 29th, 2009

It’s a funny term isn’t it, ‘the path of least resistance’, but it just about sums up the way that a lot of businesses run day to day. It symbolises the age old dilemma that faces many people… do it right or do it quickly?

There are, of course, sides to every story and in the majority of cases it comes down to money. Money makes the world go around apparently. Take for example a project which is due in a week but to do it in that time you would need to cut a few corners. However, if given another few days the job could be done properly and actually work. When you put this question to your manager, what is his likely response? Quickly, exactly!

So is there a benefit to cutting corners? The answer, of course, is yes there is! Consider an IT contract. If you put in a system that works, didn’t take long to do but will inevitably fail then who are they going to call on that day when all hell breaks loose? Should they call you to fix it? Why? Well the reality is that yes they will call you because the likelihood is that because you wrote the system then you are more likely to fix it more effectively (and therefore more cheaply).

The opposing side to the argument is company reputation. If you are honest with your client and give them the dilemma to solve themselves then not only do they feel that they are a valued customer but also you not longer have to make that decision to extend or cut corners.

So why is the dilemma effecting so many people in so many businesses across the world? It’s because not every client likes to be involved on that level. There are a proportion of clients who just want to pay the money and get the job done effectively throwing the ball back into your court. The talent needed here, of course, can be put down to experience. It takes years to be able to tell whether a client wants to be involved or not.

My personal way of dealing with it is to ask them! Why not bite the bullet and communicate with them? One thing I have found whilst working on the forums at Newmedias is that people want to be kept up to date with anything and everything. They want hourly updates and ideally to be informed when anything changes preferably with a couple of forewarning messages as well. Ultimately this isn’t always possible and is very hard to manage at times which is why a lot of businesses either do it for a while and then stop or just don’t bother.

So let’s say we are supporting a product either via email or a forum? What’s best practice? Should we bombard the user base with automated system emails? Yes I believe so but only if they are done properly. This brings us back to the theme of the post. Do it right or do it quickly… my preference, do it right!

No comments »

Posted in Personal Blog, Statements and Rants

Tags: