I'm happy to announce that after several months of picking and pecking, I've finally finished the new Websites By Kristen website and posted it live. Its always difficult to find time to do your own stuff when you have client projects that come first. 

There are a couple of new features to the website including a client login area where I can manage my client's accounts and they can keep up with what is going on with their website design and development project as well.

I'm sure I'll be making some tweaks and changes to the site in the upcoming weeks, however I'm pleased enough with it as is to let the rest of the world see. I think the new design is a little more "me". I wanted the design to say "professional and clean with a little edgyness on the side". I tried to combine artistic with corporate and clean as best I could to show  a little uniqueness without the site looking too crazy.

I'd like to thank all of my clients who were too busy to call me this week, which gave me the spare time in the evenings I needed to get this thing done!

As a website designer, it has been my experience that my clients are rarely prepared for the creation of their website. Nearly all of my clients ask me how fast I can have the website done, and I usually give them a flaky answer because the truth is, I really have no idea.

Typically, I get a phone call, an upfront payment and a demand that the website HAS to be done in no more than 4 weeks. I agree, start the website right away, create the design over the course of a couple of days, send it over for approval, and 3 months later I have yet to receive any content for the website from my client.

Since this is increasingly the case in my experience, I think it would be helpful for me to outline what information you should come to your website designer with so that the process can go as smoothly and quickly as possible:

1. Know how many pages your website will need and what will be on each page.

2. Know what special functions your website will need (i.e. email forms, content management, special scripts, photo galleries, etc.)

3. Prepare all of the text for your website pages in a word document and email it to your designer. We designers and programmers are not secretaries and do not like to spend hours re-typing your text into your website from a sheet of paper.

4. If your website needs e-commerce capabilities, make sure you have a list of your products to sell, photos of your products, prices for the products, descriptions and titles of products, and know what and how you want to charge for shipping, sales tax, etc.

5. Do not wait until the last minute to sign up for any services that you might need for your website, i.e. Paypal, or another credit card processing service. It can take days to process applications and it can cause delays in your website's launch date.

Follow these rules, and you will not only make the process go a lot quicker, but you will also avoid spending more money than you were prepared to spend. I have had many clients who have doubled the cost of their website from the initial proposal just because they forgot they needed this page, or decided they wanted this function. It takes time to go back and make changes and re-work things, so if you come prepared from the start you will avoid extra charges for change requests.

Another tip: ASK QUESTIONS! Website designers and programmers do not expect you to understand everything about building a website. If you did, you wouldn't need us. I am always glad to explain things to people, and I'm sure most designers would be. That way the client can make informed decisions about their website and the money they are spending.

I have come to realize that people underestimate the amount of work they will need to do to help create their website, the amount of decision making involved, and the time it will take for them to sit down and think about what the final product needs to be. So before you take the plunge, come prepared! That way your 5 page website won't take 6 months to complete.

At 12 noon on friday, there's a knock on my door and the sad face of my friend Tricia appears. She spits out the words "my computer broke and it has all of our company's files from the last 5 years on it... I NEED HELP". So I agree and she pulls a box from the back of her car with a dusty little HP inside.

Being the only person most of my friends and family know that can actually fix a computer, I have a reputation to uphold here. So, I plug the thing in, boot it up, and one of those "windows cannot load, missing file blah blah" messages appears. Not good.

Now this being a Win2K PC, I know the restore disks will not have a feature to simply repair the OS... and I only reformat a hard drive as a last resort, for in this case, all those important files that essentially ARE the company will be lost.

Over the next 3-4 hours, it was touch and go. Troubleshoot this, troubleshoot that.... only to discover that this baby is pretty much SOL. It won't boot from a disk other than the recovery disk, it won't even go to DOS so I can use the command prompt to explore the files on the hard drive.

So off we go to the MicroCenter. Most people may not know this, but they make these little aluminum boxes for $20 that let you place any hard drive inside, plug it in to a USB port, and there you go... all the files right there. So out comes the screw driver and the computer surgery begins.

You know how they say it looks worse than it is? Well not in this case... this poor guy had insides as crusty as his outsides, so after removing the hard drive and the ram and the fan, it was can-o-air time for the innards.

After some good housekeeping, upon exploring the busted hard drive on my own PC, I discovered that ALL of the shared files and documents along with several system files were GONE!!! Deleted, Poof, Non-existant...so even if I could have fixed the operating system, the files were still gone, and those were the lifeblood of the company.

This is where the fun part began. There is a fantastic FREE little program called NTFS Undelete. It reads all of the sectors of any hard drive, and lets you recover any intact deleted files. Miracle right? Well actually, when you hit that delete button or empty the recycle bin, it really just tells the computer to forget the file, however the information still resides on the disk until it is overwritten by another file. So if you ever delete any essential file accidentally... DONT TOUCH THE COMPUTER!! Any wrong action can cause that file to be overwritten and lost forever, so turn it off, and hand it over to a pro.

It was now backup time... every deleted file in every folder we saved, leaving no corner unturned. Once that was completed, it was reformat city... hold your breath and wait.... and tada! There it is that Windows 2K welcome screen.

By this time it was 6PM on Saturday. We spent the next 4 hours installing programs, setting up email, setting up network users, re-loading all of those shared files, setting up a firewall and antivirus software, AND SETTING UP A BACKUP SYSTEM FOR THE FUTURE!

In the end, the result was fantastic. It could have been a lot worse, especially if Tricia had taken it to someone else, or called a technical support line. A lot of those dime-a-dozen PC repair places don't have you or your company's best interest in mind, so it might have been reformat...files gone...sad, sad day. But in the end we prevailed, and sad HP is now happy HP... with a system backup.

As a web developer, one of the reasons I can keep my prices down is because I use a lot of pre-made scripts that do just what my clients want them to. All I need to charge my clients for is the installation of the script, integration of the script into the existing design, and setup of any admin features. This saves a ton of money when some of these scripts consist of thousands of pages of code. To hand code it all would cost thousands of dollars versus a few hundred of dollar to simply use a pre-built script.

There are a lot of reputable script providers out there, but a lot of not-so-good ones as well. Here are a few tips to look at when deciding whether or not to purchase a script for your website.

1. Always look for free GPL/Open-source scripts first. You can find many different and professionally programmed scripts at http://sourceforge.net/ that are essentially donated to the public by programmers. Plus if it doesn't work for you, you haven't wasted any money.

2. Always look to see if the if there is a demo of BOTH the admin and user interface of the script before you buy. Poking around in the admin before you offer up your dough will allow you to see if the script will do everything you need it to.

3. ALWAYS check to see what the system requirements are before you purchase. I can't tell you how many times clients of mine purchased scripts on their own, and assumed they would work with their hosting server. Its a pain to switch hosting for no good reason, or to waste money on a script because it won't run, so check first!!

4. Beware of websites that sell scripts but don't have any contact information! This is a good indicator that you will send them your money and never hear from them again.

5. Look on the script website to see if there is a support section. If so, this is a good sign that if there are any problems with the script, you will have somewhere to go for answers. Support forums are very important to look for as well. A lot of smaller/cheaper scripts don't have a support forum associated with them, but if it does, definitely a plus!

6. Do a google search to see if there are any people complaining about the script on forums, message boards, or blogs. Feedback and reviews are not always directly available for scripts, so its good to do a little digging.

7. Do your research. Don't buy the first script that you find that does what you want. There have been many times that I have found perfectly good scripts with an abundance of features for $50, and others that do the same thing or less for $300.

8. Try to find scripts and software that also have support for additional modules (mods). This is an indicator that you can add features that may not be standard to the script, plus it means the script is probably being actively developed.

9. Find out if the script website offers updates to the script. Once again, this means the script is being actively developed (the bugs are being worked out, and new features added). This also means that as technology changes over time, your script will keep up, per the updates.

10. Finally, if you are not a developer yourself, consult your web developer before you buy anything! More likely than not, they know more than you do about the functionality of the script and whether or not it will work with your website. This will save you from wasting your money.

I'd like to recommend a couple of nifty tools.

First, Paypal has come out with a new widget called Storefront that allows people to sell items from their myspace page. This is great for musicians, retailers, anyone really. Very easy to set up, fairly customizable, and makes you money... what more can you ask for?

Here's a link: http://storefront.paypallabs.com

Second, I just discovered a great service from logmein.com. They offer a FREE remote desktop service which allows you to log into your home or office computer from anywhere. Very simple to use, and great if you travel and need to access your files. There is also an upgrade that lets you pay to transfer files between the two computers, hear sounds from the remote computer, etc. GREAT service, very secure, and FREE!!

Check it out at: logmein.com