The site’s on a bit of a budget so it’s a simple design, with colors and general look-and-feel borrowed from a site the client likes. Simple editing comes via CushyCMS. When customers click to buy, they are sent to Paypal for the actual transaction and then forwarded to E‑Junkie, which provides the automated and integrated PDF download.

Visit the site: Office Manager’s Guide to Hiring the Best Cleaning Service

Once upon a time having a suddenly dead computer in the middle of a bunch of big projects would have been disaster. But over the last few years I’ve been putting more and more of my data “in the cloud,” that is: with software services that store it for me.

Email in the Cloud

I used to be a die-hard Thunderbird fan. This is Firefox’s cousin, a great email client. I would take such great care transferring years of emails every time I switched machines and I spent hours building huge nested list of folders to organize archived messages. About a year ago Thunderbird ate about three months of recent messages, some quite crucial. At that time I started using Google’s Gmail as backup. I set Gmail to pick up mail on my POP server and leave it there without deleting it. I set Thunderbird to leave it there for week. The result was that both messages would be picked up by both services.

After becoming familiar with Gmail I started using it more and more. I love that it doesn’t have folders: you simple put all emails into a single “Archive” and let Google’s search function find them when you need them.You can set up filters, which act as saved searches, and I have these set up for active clients.

Why I’m happy now: I can log into Gmail from any machine anywhere. No recent emails are lost on my old machine.

Project Management in the Cloud

I use the fabulous Remember the Milk (RTM) to keep track of projects and critical to-do items. Like Gmail I can access it from any computer. While messing around setting up backup computers has set me back about ten days, I still know what I need to do and when I need to do it. I can review it and give clients renewed timelines.

An additional advantage to using Remember the Milk and Gmail together is the ability to link to emails. Every email in Gmail gets its own URL and every saved “filter” search gets its own URL. If there’s an email I want to act on in two weeks, I set up a Remember the Mail task. Each task has a optional field for URLs so I put the the email’s Gmail URL in there and archive the email so I don’t have to think about it (part of the Getting Things Done strategy). Two weeks later RTM tells me it’s time to act on that email and I follow the link directly there, do whatever action I need to do and mark it complete in RTM.

Project Notes in the Cloud

I long ago started keeping notes for individual projects in the most excellent Backpack service. You can store notes, emails, pictures and just about anything in Backpack and have it available from any computer. You can easily share notes with others, a feature I frequently use to create client cheatsheets for using the sites I’ve built. Now that I use Gmail and it’s URL feature, I put a link to the client’s Gmail history right on top of each page. Very cool!

Another life saver is that I splurge for the upgraded account that gives me secure server access and I keep my password lists in Backpack. There’s a slight security risk but it’s probably smaller than keeping it on a laptop that could be swiped out of my bag. And right now I can log into all of my services from a new machine.

Keeping the Money Flowing from Clouds

The latest Web 2.0 love of my life is Freshbooks, a service that keeps track of your clients, your hours and puts together great invoices you can mail to them. I’m so much more professional because of them (no more hand written invoices in Word!) and when it’s billing time I can quickly see how many unbilled hours I’ve worked on each project and bang!-bang!-band! send the invoices right out. Because the data is online, I was able to bill a client despite the dead computer, providing my exact hours, a detailed list of what I had done, etc.

Others

Calendar: I always go back and forth between loving Google Calendar and the calendar built into Backpack. Because I can never make up my mind I’ve used ICal feeds to cross-link them so they’re both synced to one another. I can now use whichever is most convenient (or whichever I’m more in the mood to use!) to add and review entries.

Photos: Most of the photos I’ve taken over the past four years are still sitting on my dead laptop waiting for me to find a way to get them off of the hard drive. As tragic as it would be to loose them, 903 of my favorite photos are stored on my Flickr account. And because I emailed most of them to Flickr via Gmail most of those are also stored on Gmail. I will do everything I can to get those lost photos but the worst case scenario is that I will be stuck with “only” those 900.

Your Examples?

I’d love to hear how others are using “the cloud” as real-time backup.

Via 37Signal’s Signals vs. Noise blog I came across a fascinating post written by Brian Fling of Blue last year on pricing a project. I’d like to talk about it and to explain my own philosophy. First a extended quote from Brian:

I find it funny… in a sad sort of way, that we often
start out our partnership with bluffing, no one saying what they are
really thinking… how much they are willing to pay and how much it
should cost… Though every book I’ve read on the topic of pricing says
to never ever ballpark, I have a tendency to do so. If they can’t
disclose the budget I typically try to start throwing a few numbers
from previous projects to help gauge the scope of what we are talking
about, call it a good faith effort to start the discussion… While this
is very awkward part of the discussion it is almost always followed by
candor. It’s as if once someone starts telling the truth, it opens a
door that can’t be closed.

I completely agree that candor is the only way to work with clients.
Maybe it’s the Quaker influence: we reportedly pioneered fixed pricing
back when everyone haggled, with the philosophy that charging true
costs were the only honest way of doing business. My official rates and contact page includes my list of “typical costs” — essentially these are the “ballpark estimates” that Brian talks about.

When I put together estimates I base it on my best-guess informed
estimates. I start by tabulating the client’s requested features and
determining how I’ll achieve them. I then estimate how long it will
take me to implement each feature and use that to determine a
first-guess for project cost. I then compare it to past projects, to
make sure I’m being realistic. I know myself well enough to know I
always want to underestimate costs–I usually like the project and want
to make it affordable to clients!–so I do force myself a reality check
that usually ends up adding a few hours to the estimate.

When I put together my official estimate I try to guess where
potential bottlenecks might happen. Sometimes these are technical
issues and something they’re more social. For example, a client might
be very particular about the design and the back-and-forth can take
longer than expected. If I think anything like this might happen I
mention it in the estimate. Sometimes as we work through the details of
a feature I’ll learn that the client wants some enhancement that we
hadn’t talked about previously and which I didn’t factor into the
estimate.

When I do see a particular part of the work taking longer than
expected I flag it with the client. I try to keep them informed that
this will add to total costs. In many cases, clients have been happy to
go with the extra work: I simply want to make sure that we both are
aware that the estimate is changing before the work happens.

I charge by the hour rather than on a per-project basis since I find
it to be a much more open business model. Brian Fling’s post agrees:

The problem [with per-project billing is that] one way
or another somebody loses, either the client pays too much, meaning
paying more than it’s market value, or the vendor eats into their
profit… One benefits to hourly billing is the client is responsible for
increases of scope, protecting the vendor and the customer. If the
project is completed early the client pays less, protecting the client.
This puts the onus on both parties to communicate regularly and work
more effectively.

I have very little overhead: a home office, laptop and DSL.
This means my rates are very competitive (one client described it as
“less than plumbers and electricians charge, more than the kid who mows
the lawn”). Being very careful with estimates mean that I often
communicate a lot with clients before I “start the clock.” I’ve often
worked with them a few hours before the estimate is in and we’re moving
forward and of course some of this un-billed work doesn’t result in a
job.

Putting together fabulous websites is fun work. It’s very much a
back-and-forth process with clients, and it’s often impossible to know
just what the site will look like and just how it will work until the
site actually launches. Half of my clientele have never had websites
before, making the work even more interesting! It’s my professional
responsibility to make sure I work with clients to foresee costs, dream
big, but most of all to be open and honest about costs as the process
unfolds.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In theory it’s easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and
the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site
they’ll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting
together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write,
write.

I’m looking to join a web design house, which means I’ve been
interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me
the best way to increase SEO for their
clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I’m an idiot
but it’s absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over
100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation
get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many
of the same results–blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content
on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly
start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug–your
company’s life is probably already filled with bloggable material!

I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer
service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I’d get a
particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching
an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and
searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn’t always
pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get
answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk.
Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a
blog post. By the end of a year, I’m sure the volume coming from these
obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday’s Long Tail Strategy
post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search
engine’s one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).

Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine,
think about whether it’s bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would
come in and we’d spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation
reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could
have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.

Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper
that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates
gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour
trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I
slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down
into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area–to find my
workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took
no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.

Humans are social animals. We’re always blogging. It’s just that
most of the time we’re doing it verbally around the water cooler with
three other people. Learn to type it in and you’ve got yourself a
high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways
to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was
tagifying my personal blog over at “QuakerRanter.org.” Every time I
post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the
article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in
such a way that results send the term through the site’s search engine
to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I’ve used
that term.

Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk
about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we
automate them). We don’t necessarily know the categories that our
potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites
increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239
entries but 3,860 pages according to Google.
It’s the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of
this extra volume. This doesn’t increase traffic by that nearly that
much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag
indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.