I got a new book over the weekend and have just started reading… It’s Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life
This particular book is split into 52 very short chapters. I’m going to try to read one every day or so and share here what I find. I bought this book because I can’t stand having a ton of unfinished tasks floating around; I thought this might help me get more of a handle on things when I’m busy and not be so concerned about not doing all of them at once.
I’m a newish reseller for a certain hosting company that offers WHM AutoPilot as a free automated services center for hosts. This program is pretty cool – basically it’s a tool that exists on your site and lets people sign up for hosting and other services automatically. They sign up for what they want, pay, their account is set up and they get billed for it periodically all without the reseller’s input.
The control panel for WHMAP is pretty well done, it makes sense and is easy to get synchronized with the data you’ve entered in WHM (the hosting manager that integrates with cPanel). However, I found that integrating it into my site proved harder than first thought. My host is not using the latest version of WHMAP, but I’m not sure if that’s a factor here or not…
You create a header and footer template that matches the rest of your site and WHMAP feeds its data into the central area of the page, however you’ve defined that in a div or a (shudder) table cell. That went fine – it popped in nicely.
However, the problems started when I wasn’t happy with the way lines of text ran together. There are many spacing and formatting issues right out of the box, and applying CSS styles to some of these was just agonizing for me.
I probably spent a good 5-6 hours playing with just the first step of the order process and still wasn’t even close to making it pretty on the page. I knew that WHMAP has a big brother named WHM Complete Solution. I knew it wasn’t free, but I’d heard from other resellers that it was much easier to deal with.
I told my husband of my coding woes and asked him what he thought about me buying WHMCS rather than continuing to struggle with WHMAP. He shook his head and told me ‘go get it.’ Why waste so much time, he said, when I could probably be cruising along with the better product?
I downloaded the 15-day trial of WHMCS and had the thing loaded and running in about an hour. I’m not quite done with the integration, but it certainly was a heck of a lot easier than WHMAP and looks 100% better. I’m really happy with it, and the price tag ($166 I think if you buy a copy outright) is in my opinion extremely reasonable. It makes my hosting site look pretty professional, IMHO, and I hope to have it up and running by this weekend.
Okay, maybe my method does take a little extra work to translate, but this is how I do it.
Post-it notes on the wall make a flexible sitemapping system that multiple people can stop by, contemplate, and make changes to as they wish as long as you leave it up.
I work on PC’s, so I don’t have access to some of the cool sitemapping tools that Mac users can try. Adobe GoLive does have sitemapping built in; I’ve taken a brief look but have not yet used it. Generally I wind up translating my post-it sitemap into InDesign using a template that I’ve developed over time.
But the post-it note way is so easy and is a good way to nail it all down before you have to start moving all those little flowchart symbols and lines all over the place.
When I started my web design business and was looking for a host, I first learned about reseller accounts. The host I’m with now has a great one, but not everyone may be familiar with what this entails…
What is a reseller hosting account? Generally, that means that you purchase web server space with a host, then you’re free to sell that space in whatever increments you choose and at the price you set. And typically you’ll have some kind of hosting control panel where you can set up hosting packages and prices and manage your hosting clients – up to the point of monitoring the bandwidth they’re using each month, and upgrading/downgrading or suspending if necessary.
For example, if I purchase a reseller account with 20 gb of space, I can sell 20 1gb accounts or 40 500 mb accounts and so on to my web design clients. I pay for the original account, but my clients all pay me for their accounts too. It definitely pays for itself very quickly, and the ability to oversee my clients’ hosting accounts all from one control panel is a big time saving benefit.
This is so much easier than just setting up a client with their own hosting account and of course keeps me in the loop when they need to upgrade and renew!
This is always tough – the only things I really read religiously are the WebProWorld and WebProNews emails that I get several times per week and I know how fast things change in this field. Sad to say, I’d never thought of turning my Google homepage into a page full of RSS feeds – but I read about that today and that’s really a great idea.
Now my personalized homepage is full of SEO, web design and small business marketing news. I can see a few stories at a time and pursue them if I want, but in any event I get a nice daily overview of what’s going on in just a few minutes. This is much better than occasionally visiting some of the sites I’ve collected every couple of weeks, which is just about pointless.
Anyone else have other good ideas for staying on top of things?
I moved a piano downstairs this morning all by myself.
Well, not really a piano. It’s a Yamaha keyboard I received as a gift last Christmas.
My parents had a small piano, a real one, when I was a kid. I played around with it from time to time, and made a few concerted efforts to learn from the pile of old instruction books stored in the seat, but that eventually faded in lieu of the guitar. I took a few years of guitar lessons but never got better than adequate – although I still have two guitars… View full article »
|
|
|
|
|
