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One of the problems I have come across when building multi language website are database configurations that cannot support the new languages people are planning to add.

In this post I want to give you a case study of a site that could not support Chinese and how I fixed it.

The English and Chinese Site

I was called in by a client to configure a site that would work in English and Chinese    All was going fine, the tools I use to host multiple languages were in, I was ready to start adding content and multiple menus when we found our problem …

The  Problem

Whenever we added Chinese content into the site, instead of displaying the correct characters, it displayed a line of question marks instead ??????????

The Cause

When I looked under the hood I realised we were using database collation of a type that did not support double space characters such as Chinese or Japanese and would only allow us to use Latin character sets.  Which would be fine for English, French, German etc but no use for a more complex languages.

The Solution

We needed to change the character set of your database from something that will not support double character languages like Chinese to a character set that will, always my preferred and default selection is utf8.

The majority of sites I work with use MYSQL so I’m assuming that is the case with your multi language site.  You can change your You can do this through phpmyadmin very simply by opening the database in question  going to the general settings and changing your database collation (see screen dump).

Please backup your database before you do anything like this – you have been warned.

As a matter of course I set-up all new sites with a collation of UTF8.

Can Your Database Handle Multiple Languages?

The quick test is to cut and paste this simplified Chinese sentence into your site (for those interested I think it says can  your database handle multiple languages)

你的数据库可以处理多种语言

If it shows up okay then you are good to go, if it shows ???????? you have a database issue.

Wrap Up

Often working with multiple languages throws up unexpected issues we don’t expect, if you are used to working with Latin languages this is an issue you would never expect.

If you need help with your multi language build, please contact me to get a no obligation quote.

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A big thank you to everyone who joined the live event on Tuesday, if you were unable to attend, here is the replay.

The Replay

[leadplayer_vid id=”516EE2055C35A”]

Links Mentioned In The Webinar

• wpml.webployglotcom
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Right-to-Left_Language_Support
• translate.google.com
• dev.wpdude.com

Download Slides

Presentation slides

 
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This is a guest post by Ken Myers, see Ken’s Bio at the of this post

WordPress is one of the most common and versatile content management systems on the Internet. It is a way to publish your content very quickly and has the ability to utilize a great range of plugins in order to make the experience for the visitor a good one. However, there are many WordPress sites across the Internet that don’t fully explore the possibilities this CMS has to offer. Many plugins and widgets go unnoticed that could greatly increase the efficiency of your site.

1. FreeBlogApps.com – The RSS reader can keep mobile device and computer system users apprised of new posts that are submitted on your website. FreelogApps.com helps you create those RSS feeds which can be added as a widget to your blog for all to see and install. The RSS reader is downloaded from the provided link and installed on the mobile device. This simple yet effective app is linked to the content on your website and provides a real-time update of the posts you or other authors submit.

2. Pinterest Pinboard – Link your Pinterest imagery to your blog with the Pinterest Pinboard Widget. Any time a new pin is added to your Pinterest account, it is immediately reflected onto your webpage. Technically, the widget allows you to enter any Pinterest account in order to display his or her pins. The settings are simple as you can adjust how many thumbnails of the images the widget is wide and how many to show in a row. If your marketing plans include the use of Pinterest, this could be a viable method to link your blog visitors to your imagery for increased exposure.

3. Top 10 – Display the most popular of content listed on your website. Visitors who found your
site through search engines can be enticed to read other posts that are deemed as the most popular by your general audience. This widget will count the number of times a post is accessed and display the most popular. Settings can be altered to reduce the number of posts that are
displayed and a timeline can be added for additional control.

4. K-news – Providing a newsletter for your subscribers is made easy with the K-news WYSIWYG editor. Colors, images, themes, and more can be added to manually create newsletters or automatic creation from the system using the most recent blog posts. There are a
variety of tools and settings that make K-news quite an amazing subscription widget to add to
your WordPress website.

5. Video Sidebar – This widget allows users to easily add video content from a wide range of websites including YouTube, Vimeo, MySpace, MetaCafe and more. Any video can be added as long as the information is correct such as YouTube’s video ID. Sizes can be modified within the ettings of this widget in order to maximize the sidebar widths of your blog. This widget could be used to further promote your own videos on your website.

As plugins and widgets are developed quite often by the WordPress community, it is always in your best interest to keep a watchful eye on current developments. Although you may settle on a widget that is close to what you truly want, there may be someone out there who develops one that fits your theme and vision perfectly. Never settle when there is a possibility to increase your efficiency.

Author Bio:

Ken Myers is the founder of http://www.longhornleads.com/ & has learned over the years the importance of focusing on what the customer is looking for and literally serving it to them. He doesn’t try to create a need, instead he tries to satisfy the existing demand for information on products and services.

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I’m just about to launch a new consulting service and I thought I would write a little bit about the pros and cons of consulting as an on-line business model for anyone considering consulting as a profession.

I’ve not done a lot of consulting in the past year or so due to the time pressures of building my team up, but now the team is in place and bedded in I have more time to offer these types of services and I’m really excited about getting back in the saddle.

I love getting on skype with people and talking through their problems rather than being at the end of an email, but if you are considering this for your online business here are the pros and the cons.

What Do I Mean By Online Consulting?

On-line consulting rather than in person means getting on the phone / Skype and solving peoples problems with your own experience.

Clients find you on-line via your website, become accustomed to your knowledge perhaps through blog posts or free reports.  They like what you have to say then realise they can go deeper with you via a consulting session where you can address their very specific issues for a fee.

They book a slot and you get together and talk through your clients issues.

There may be recordings or follow up reports.

You bill the client, everyone is happy.

The point is it is all done remotely, no onsite meetings  no need to change out of your Scooby Doo jammies (or is that just me?).

Here’s how I like to conduct a consulting session:

We book a slot that is good for us both, we call up using Skype.  I like skpe because I can make calls anywhere for free and  because it has screen sharing functions that we can use to look at your website and point at areas where there are problems.

I record the session and create a PDF of any action points to pass to the client as a tangible record of our session (this also means you don’t need to take notes and can focus completely on our session).

The Argument For The Pro Consulting Lobby

Here are the plus points of consulting:

Zero Barriers To Entry – you can setup a consulting practice in a few hours, I wrote about this in my post Recipe: The Three Hour Business there are few costs involved (website, domain name).

As long as you have a Paypal account and Skype you can setup as a consultant.  It’s a great way to make your first online sales.

Zero Time To Market – if you are creating products or other tangibles it can take lots of time.  For example if you decide to get into the ebook market, it takes time to write and edit your ebook, consulting takes no time, you can be earning as soon as your website is live.

Easier Service Delivery – all you need to do is listen and answer your clients questions.   Getting knowledge out of your head is much easier than say, coding up a website.

A quick caveat here, you must have the appropriate communication skills to convey complex knowledge you have gained over the years in a palatable and understandable manner.  If you are a techie that bibbles in binary, consulting may not be for you.

No revisions – unlike say graphic design, once you have delivered an hours consulting that is probably it (apart from sending recordings, and associated reports).  A graphic designer may have to do endless rounds of revision and hand hold clients for a long time to earn their cash.  Consulting has none of that.

And The Argument Against

Here are the arguments against consulting:

Consulting Is Not Very Scalable – you cannot scale selling your time by the hour.  Once you reach a ceiling of x hours per day that is essentially your income limit.

It’s impossible to sell eight hours a day of online consulting, you need down time between calls, you need to follow up and perhaps provide recordings and other materials.  There are only so many hours you can sell consulting 1-1.  You need to look at more passive alternatives where you can leverage your time better to scale as a consultant.

People Don’t Know What Help They Need – If I said I was a WordPress consultant, you would say “ooookay, so what!” if I say “I’m a wordpress consultant that can talk you through the problems of creating an e-commerce store” that is much more specific and people get the help you can offer.

You need to spell out what you offer and how it can help rather than offering your time as a generic “Biz Consultant”.

That’s why I like to offer specific consulting packages with a defined deliverable that people can understand and relate to their own problems.

Zero Barrier To Entry – this is a pro and a con, if it takes no time to hang up your shingle as a consultant there is nothing to stop anyone doing this.  You need some way to differentiate yourself from the competition.

People Have never Hired For What You Do – This makes selling consulting very difficult, if you have never hired a consultant and don’t know what they can do for you, shelling over a couple of hundred quid (or bucks to my American chums) for something as intangible as hiring someone’s brain for an hour is hard to swallow.

You need to convince people how your years of experience can save them time and heartache.    This is not an easy thing.

Closing Remarks

I really enjoy consulting and I’m not trying to put anyone off but it needs to be part of a wider product offering of active consulting and passive products or a hybrid of the two.  This will allow you  to scale and stop you pulling your hair out.

If you can do that then consulting and sharing your knowledge and experience with clients is a great business model

Stay tuned for my new consulting service next week…..

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At WPDude we have gone from being a one person freelance setup to being a firm of four people over the last year or so.  We can provide WordPress technical support as an agency rather than one person.

During that time I have had to learn the hard way how to make this pretty difficult transition.  If you are about to embark on this process, here are the top eight things I wish I had known before I started.

1) Everything Slows Down

One of the things I was very proud of as a freelancer was my quick turn around time.  I could get a quote out and turn around to start work in a couple of days.

Once you are dealing with a team, everything slows down, there is more communication, there is more time assigning work, there is more time dealing with other people’s agendas, life styles etc etc the list goes on.

Build some slack into your schedule and expect things to slow down.  Do yourself a favour and reduce your stress level by knowing things will slow down and learn to go with the flow a little.

Set client expectations (sorry any clients reading I know I’ve been a little poor at this) and let them know things are working a little different from when you were a freelancer and there is an x day lead time now you are a firm.

2) Get It Out Of Your Inbox

If it is in your inbox, it might as well be lock away in your head.  You need to get all client and team communication out of the inbox and into a central place that you and the team can access at any time especially when people are not available.

A few days ago we finally went 100% communication via Basecamp our project management tool for all team conversations. I’m looking at the best way to make all client communication 100% via basecamp too, but that is proving a little tricky, but I hope to be there soon.

The point being now we have a centralised place where all communication between the team is visible and no crucial items like files or code are held in an inbox.

3) Systemise Everything

This is a real pain in the arse as we say in the UK (feel free to say ass my American chums).  It’s the least exciting thing I have ever done, but creating a system for how you work, the expected outcomes, output and feedback is huge.

It is incredibly dull, very long winded but it pays off sooo much in the long run.  Each of our projects is systemised, at any point I can dip in and see progress through that system.  Everything is done the same way each time which not only provides a consistent quality across all work but it also allows us to onboard new staff members or contactors very easily.

It’s not a cast in stone thing and it is evolving but is allowing us to take on more work and perform that work much more smoothly.

4) You Are 100% Responsible

This is a mindset I would like all freelancers cum business owners to adopt when they are starting out.

When I say you are 100% responsible this means that any failure from the team is your failure and you cannot blame them.

This may sound a little weird to some people but if all you do is spend your time chewing out your staff this will drive you mental and cause huge levels of stress.

Take 100% responsibility for the issue, think I am to blame for this, how could I have stopped this happening.

 

Nine times out of ten you will see that you didn’t explain something correctly or you did not set expectations properly or you just have not put across how high priority that work was.

This list goes on and on, but taking 100% responsibility and systemiseing work or creating new documentation to stop the issue happening again is a great mindset.

Remember you are learning to be a business owner so  you will make mistakes.

5) Learn To Let Go

I was a terrible micro manager at first (I still am heart, sorry to any members of the team reading this for last Monday and my knee jerk reaction)  I was fretting and sweating, where is my update, what can I tell the client, why have they not completed that task yet, it’s only a 20 minutes job!!!!

Learning to let go and trust your team to get the job done is huge.  This is a skill that will stop the ulcers growing.

This all goes back to your system, build the system, make sure there are enough checkpoints to ensure you can be happy with progress and let go.

6) Delegate Don’t Abdicate

On the other side of letting go is learning to delegate but not abdicate.  You need to pass work over and trust your team to do it, BUT you need check points in place to ensure the work has been done correctly.

I have an end of day update process where all projects my team are working are update with a few paragraphs of progress report.  At a glace I can see where we are.

I’ve delegated the work but I have not abdicated my responsibility to my clients.

7) Some Clients Will Be Upset, Get Over It

If a client is used to dealing with you as a freelancer and has a high level of access to your time, some clients  will expect this relationship to continue.

Some even start to push at your boundaries and demand that you work on their projects not your team.  It’s a weird thing but once you setup boundaries a certain type of person automatically pushes against them.

Be aware of this and be prepared to let certain clients go.  You have adopted an agency model to allow you to grow and you cannot grow if you are stuck catering to needy clients.

8) Work On Your Business Not In It.

Once you have a team in place it’s a good idea to stop working IN your business and start working ON it.

You have an agency with staff now that needs a constant stream of work to pay their wages. Learning to work on your business to develop it rather than fulfilling service or product requests is a hard thing to do for the freelancer.

There is a mindset that you can do it in 5 minutes, why not just log in and do it,  but you are paying someone to do those things for you. Learning to let go and pass the small jobs back it a skill unto itself.  Those five minutes soon add up and you find that teh work of running an agency and working on your business does not get done.

There is a term amongst British workers who have move to management that they are “off the tools”.  Once you start a firm, get off the tools as fast as you can.

My final point here if for a much more detailed future blog post but you need to learn how to deal with you new found time freedom.  This is one of the weirdest things I’ve come across, learning how to stop being twitchy once you have some free time.

Wrap Up

There are very few resources on moving from a freelancer to a firm and I was considering starting a new blog to cater for people planning to make that move.

I’ve felt the pain and I feel I have a lot of information to share, so if you are interested in make the move from solo freelancer to full blown firm, can I ask you to do ONE thing, click through on the link below and leave your email address.  If there is enough interest I’ll start up the blog and start sharing my story.

Click here if you are interested in more Freelancer2firm.com

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It’s been a while since I last created a video post, so I thought I would show you how to setup WordPress to work with Google content experiments for your site.

What Are Google Content Experiements

Google content experiments(GCE)  are a way to split test content on your site and find out what works and what does not work on your site. This is part of the free Google analytic service.

For example you may have a sales page with an image on it.   Does the sale page work better with the image or without it.  If you don’t have objective data, you are only making a guess.  Using GCE you can test which page performs the best by setting up an experiment and sending 50% of your traffic to one page and 50% of traffic to another.  Then using a system inside of your Google  analytics account called goals you you can test which page give you the most conversions.

Check out my video tutorial.

Video

[leadplayer_vid id=”512F3F28CBCD0″]

Links

Here are the links I talk about in the video

Google Analytics

Content Experiments for WP plugin

 

Wrap Up

Do you find these type of video tutorials useful, let me know in the comments and I’ll create more.

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Someone I’ve been working with for many years now  is Jonathan Woodward.  He is a designer and illustrator.

I’ve worked with him as his client, he has been my client and we’ve worked together on a number of joint ventures.  He designed this site and a couple of others for me.

Jonathan has developed a new type of design package I just wanted to tell you about.

Graphical Subscriptions Services

Jonathan has setup a great new design service for people who need lots of ongoing graphical work.  It’s a subscription based service where you call down on your designs as you need them on a monthly retainer

Check Out His Portfolio

If you are looking for ongoing design help, I really suggest you check out his portfolio at Tiger Stripe Studio.

The image I use on this post is one of Jonathan’s excellent illustrations.