Lost in Translation

The following is an article I wrote for another publication a while back. I’d like to re-post it here to help those who follow this blog. I’ve edited it a bit to be specific to this audience.

I’ve been a professional web designer for 10 years now. In that time I’ve seen a lot of people do good things and bad things with their websites. And by bad things, I mean: waste time and money.

However, the web is still a valid place to do business and/or promote your business. It can be a nice source of income for you too. The challenge is that most people don’t know where to start. It doesn’t help that there is a lot of misinformation out there, including a lot of very old information.

No matter what you are selling, there are certain principles that apply.

So here are 12 tips and myth busters to help you on your journey as a business owner using the Internet.

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I’m overdue for another post. Things get hairy when you run a business from home, have infant twins, and the air conditioning goes out. In many parts of the country, that’s not a big deal in May, but in Texas it can be HOT! We have babies and ferrets, so it meant several days of little work, no fun, and no sleep.

Meanwhile, here is a post I originally wrote for DrakNet that was posted April 30, 2010.

I thought I’d share it here for those that may not follow the DrakNet blog and also because this site is basically an extended FAQ covering issues I deal with all the time from clients. Google image search and copyright are recurring themes in my line of work.

I get a lot of images from clients to put on websites. Because I like to educate and protect my clients, I am prone to asking, “Where did you get this from?”

More often than not, the response is: “Google’s free image search”.

Let me clear up a common misconception: the image search on Google is not a repository of free images for everyone. What Google is doing is searching images on other people’s websites and showing those images to you. These are images that are protected by copyright law.

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In the past 10 years, I’ve made websites for a wide variety of organizations. I’ve made them for businesses, nonprofits, and individuals. One thing most have in common is a misunderstanding what is acceptable in terms of logo, and other image use, on their site.

For example, many sites have logos that belong to other organizations on their sites. The logos may be from manufacturers whose products they sell, or from professional organizations of which they are a member. The logos may be from social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

More often than not, these logos are used without explicit permission from those the logos represent. The website owner borrowing the logos isn’t doing so maliciously. In fact, most of them are convinced they are just giving the other websites some “free advertising”.

Let me once again be the bearer of bad news: that just ain’t so. What that is, is theft. (more…)

All web designers run across this at some point: a client has created something to sell and they want to make sure it won’t get stolen when they put it online.

Visual art, audio, video, poems, how-to’s, blogs, and other such materials are what we call IP or intellectual property. There is a lot of exaggeration and paranoia surrounding these items and the potential for theft/piracy.

Yes, there are means to prevent theft but none of it is 100% foolproof.

Here are a few facts about managing IP online

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Well, I’ve finally done it. After refusing to make that move for years, I’ve finally created flat rate packages for web design.

I had avoided this for for so long because I felt that frequently, fixed rate packages weren’t fair to both the client and the designer. The client could be paying for more time than is being worked, or the designer could end up doing more work than they are getting paid for.

I’ve also avoided pricing plans for years because, generally speaking, they often tend to be convoluted and confusing.

However, over the past decade, I’ve watched people flinch whether I quote $25 or $75 an hour. When people hear the hourly rate, they think “gosh that’s a lot”, not realizing how much they get with that.

And of course, these days people like packages that show them exactly what they get. People like being able to point at something and just say “give me that one”. (more…)