We just registered PickAPacker.com today and will eventually be using it to market custom-made packaging software that we’ve commissioned this week.
The software should be ready in about 6 weeks.
We’ll keep you updated.
Looking for a flexible Joomla programmer shouldn’t be such a headache. We have two excellent guys who’ve helped us in the past who’ve done some incredible customizations for our sites.
At up to $70 an hour it’s unproductive asking them to do simple Joomla tasks so we want a few coders who are happy to do the simper work at a fraction of that hourly rate.
We used the usual channels to source some staff yesterday and were disappointed to find that we’ve rejected over 20 applicants so far.
Some might accuse us of being too aggressive in our interviewing but, considering each position we advertise gets over 50 applicants then its worth us trying to eliminate most of them efficiently.
An interview practice we’ve set up is to provide applicants with 9 simple tasks in Joomla that we know how long they should take. We ask applicants to provide a brief description as to how they’d achieve the task and how long they expect it would take. We ask them to indicate the number of hours the job should take - knowing full well that most jobs take between 5 and 15 minutes.
We don’t tell the applicant that we know perfectly well each task should take because we’ve done them ourselves. Instead we let them assume that we don’t know anything about Joomla at all.
We have wasted hours today suffering from the same cliched messenger conversation which always begins like this:
Interviewee: Hello
Us: Hi
Interviewee: How are you?
Us: Good, who is this?
Interviewee: We are applying for your job
Us: What Job?
Interviewee: The Joomla Job
Us: OK, so have you received our email?
Interviewee: Yes
Us: So please reply to it. Do you have any questions?
Interviewee: No
Us: Ok, please do that then
Interviewee: OK
Us: Bye
Interviewee: Bye
Of the 20 we’ve rejected, 10 of them have needed to be told to follow the instructions in the email we sent to them. They all replied back to us either without providing descriptions or without providing time estimates.
Sadly the kind of time estimates other providers gave us were insulting at best, a complete scam at worst. Work we’ve done ourself in 10 minutes was quoted as a task that would take 2-3 days (8 hours of work for 3 days each!!).
Thankfully we are experienced enough to know how long simple jobs take but I pity the new entrepreneur who pays these people to create a website for them and is billed for 100+ plus hours when their ’supposedly’ cheap programmers knock out the work in a few hours.
For those of you experienced with Joomla here’s some of the estimates we’ve been given.
Task #1 Upload an existing Joomla template and delete any references within it that say "Created by Jooma Template Provider"
Longest Estimate: 4 hours
Task #3 Backup the entire Joomla website and database
Longest Estimate: 5 hours
Task #9 Add a ‘contact us’ form to an article
Longest Estimate: 8-10 hours
You might have your own approach for finding good quality workers. If you do please do post below.
For any of you who are not experienced in recruiting freelancers please do realize that the cheap providers often inflate the hours required to do a job by sometimes many THOUSANDS of percent.
Try to have a good idea of what the work really entails before commissioning it otherwise you risk being severely exploited. And, if you’re not being exploited you’re probably employing an idiot!
It took a while, but we got our first Plug and Save fraudster yesterday. The fraud wasn’t very difficult to spot but we’re detailing what happened here because it might be of value to other webmasters.
We certainly aren’t going to invest any time following this up or investigating it but here’s what we believe happened.
1) The frauster uses a firefox extension (we won’t disclose which one) that can be used to manipulate the values of a web shopping cart before it gets sent to PayPal. He set the payment info to just $0.02 (1 cent for the product, one for postage).
2) Fraudster paid us 2 cent via PayPal.
3) Our OSCommerce site reported the transaction as verified and ready to pack in our orders log.
Fortunately a $0.02 order isn’t hard to spot however we might not have been so quick to stop the transaction if he’d knocked off $100 for postage or if he’d ordered an expensive unit for the price of one cheaper.
We verify all orders ourselves and we need a postal address to ship products to so this isn’t a very effective fraud against our type of business. For webmasters selling digital goods or services it’s worth being aware that this scam is still being used.
One of the factors we are aware of with Plug and Save is that we need to work hard to establish credibility.
We are in the process of completely rebuilding the website in Joomla and have already installed a reviews and testimonials section that will feature prominently on the homepage.
We decided to email our most recent 800 customers today to ask them to submit a testimonial to us.
In an ideal world perhaps customers should submit testimonials independently. For Plug and Save however, we are asking for; photographs, recordings and even videos from our customers, so we decided to offer each of them a cash incentive to compensate their efforts.
From now onward all of our sites will have a strong emphasis on testimonials, proofs and customer reviews.
Today funds arrived into our escrow account for the sale of our United World Telecom For Me website.
We have sold the domain, the website and the existing customer list.
UWT4me.com was responsible for our full-time income a few years ago, however we’ve let the site go undeveloped and unpromoted for the last few years as other projects stole our attention.
The buyer and ourselves made a fair deal to both parties and we now have a lump sum that we can use to develop our other sites. We have not left the telecom industry entirely, however our focus will be on Art From Steel and Plug and Save for the next few months.
Whilst …AreBlogged looks identical to our …IsBlogged at first glance the two sites are very different.
…IsBlogged is designed to allow members of the public to build their own free Wordpress Blog whereas …AreBlogged is for use exclusively by us.
…AreBlogged has been installed with some powerful plugins and templates from DataFeedr which allows us to create Wordpress Affiliate Stores very quickly. We’ve so far experimented with two stores and although they require content to be added and marketing to be done the one we are most happy with is …
We have many customized templates already and we’ll be adding and improving stores periodically.
Our intention is to host about 50 stores on the site, each making money from affiliate links embedded in the products.
Should you be interested in doing something similar then we recommend DataFeedr which works with both Wordpress and WordpressMU.
Whilst we respect the concept of a written agreement it seems that a legally written contract is designed very much to discourage other parties to read them.
We are currently creating a distribution agreement for Plug and Save. Whilst we know exactly what we want to include, the template, created for us by lawyers is unecessarily pompous, confusing and suprisingly ambiguous.
Much of our overseas business entails working with non-native English speakers. It seems somewhat disrespectful to provide confusing and lengthy legalese to such companies, knowing that they’ll likely not understand the complex wording. This gives us an unfair advantage and we’ve resolved to translate much of the default terms to something a little clearer. To us, these documents are intimidating and don’t instill much confidence of a fair trading agreement.
Whichever lawyer chose to phrase this paragraph deserves to be shot …
"The individual contracts for the sale of Products formed by Distributor’s submission of orders to Company pursuant to the terms and conditions hereof shall automatically incorporate, to the extent applicable, the terms and conditions hereof, shall be subject only to those terms and conditions (together with all terms in orders which are contemplated by this Agreement) and shall not be subject to any conflicting or additional terms included in any documents exchanged in connection therewith."
We have replaced it with …
"This contract takes authority over any other agreements made, unless specifically agreed upon in writing by both Company and Distributor."
… if only contracts were designed to show how one company wishes to demonstrate that it’s created a fair and respectful contract then we’d have no need for the pompous and verbose contracts that seem so common.
This site took us no more than 10 minutes to create.
IsInvestigated.com offers a comprehensive reverse telephone lookup service which works for both land-lines and cellphones.
We have little plans to develop the site although, as with all our sites; we’ll be starting a link-building campaign over the next week. The domain itself was one that we owned already and the scripts cost us nothing.
We don’t have big ambitions for this site, however if it can at least earn its registration fee each year we’ll be happy.
Thanks go to Charles for bringing this opportunity to our attention.
Click Here to View IsInvestigated - Our Reverse Telephone Lookup Site
Unfortunately with the time it takes to actually administer our sites, we have not had much opportunity to market ourselves as much as we’d like.
Today we’ve begun a very large link-building project that will cover 20 of our existing sites - even the smallest ones.
This campaign is planned to last for at least 6 months and should increase the visibility of all of our sites over time. We’ve begun by adding a small number of links to a few of our completed sites and will add links pages to pending and upgraded sites over the next 2 weeks.
If you wish to exchange links with us for ANY of our sites please get in touch.
Today we completed a sale of 420 .info domains that we registered at the end of 2007. We sold them at Digital Point within 24 hours of advertising them.
Whilst we made a loss on the sale, we’d written off the domians after we learnt that we would not be able to effectively profit from them in the way we anticipated.
We’d undertaken a 1-month course in portal-building with PGInsider at the end of 2007. Portal-Building is the creation of junk sites that contain hundreds of pages of rubbish but the creators add adverts at the top of the pages that they can capitalize on or redirect visitors to other sites.
We were planning on using these domains to build a huge network of websites that generated passive income or increased traffic to our whitehat sites. Sadly PGInsider omitted to mention that the methods they were training us with are pretty much unworkable and unprofitable nowadays. The company dramatically closed its doors, removed all records of the support staff ever existing and alienated all it’s members. It was a remarkable example of how a long-establsihed website could lose all customer loyalty in only a 24 hour period.
We are actively looking to clean up our domain portfolio now, we have about 30 domains that we actually use and a lot of domain names we plan to hold on to. The rest we are looking to sell for a modest amount just to clear away the clutter.
It’s getting very difficult to find good domain names these days and we’ve strugged recently. CommunicationInspiration.com - one of our sites in development - is a horrifically long name but, seeing as there’s no synonyms for ‘communication’ we were left with very few options.