John Locke's blog

If you are, drop us a line.

I know, that's an ambiguous title -- are we looking for Drupal help, or are we offering it? The answer is yes!

You launched your Drupal site yesterday, and it's not on the front page of Google. What do you do now? One of our clients asked us about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) recently, so I thought I'd share some advice from our experience.

First of all, getting organic search results takes time. It doesn't happen overnight, and you're lucky if you're findable on popular terms within the first couple months. Why? Because...

Just the other day I got a request for proposal for hosting, complete with a statement that they knew of some hosting that would cost $15/month. The implication being that they were looking for a hosting proposal that would not exceed that amount.

Right off the bat, there's a problem here. Just the cost of paying the salary of an employee to assemble a proposal would likely exceed half a year of the total revenue at this rate! Expecting somebody to spend the time to bid on such a service at that rate is... well, ludicrous. We would lose money to even bid on the job.

Today, in the Washington State legislature, the House and the Senate are reconciling their two different bills to balance the State budget. Both involve significant tax changes, and there are different ramifications for software depending on which goes through.

I think the discussion has come up at least twice on every mailing list I'm on: Why don't we move this discussion to a web-based forum? When it came up for the umpteenth time on the Seattle Tech Startup list earlier this week, I jumped in with this comment:

Mel asks:

Why would I use Drupal instead of Microsoft Expression Web to create a website?

I actually had to look to find out what Expression Web is--I hadn't heard of it before. It looks like a successor to FrontPage, something similar to DreamWeaver for creating static web sites.

So to rephrase, why should I build a site on a content management system, instead of using a tool that lets me build a site directly?

We regularly import content from old web sites and systems. One recent client had thousands of documents that we needed to copy from the old site, so we wrote a scraping system to import the ones that fit a certain template into Drupal, and just copy the existing documents into sites/default/files.

Using the Filefield_sources module, you can associate an existing file with a filefield, using IMCE or other files uploaded through the file system. However, we hit a problem: if you try to browse to an existing file, Filefield returns an error when you try to refer to it:

URLs are a critical part of all web sites, not just Drupal. However, in Drupal, the URL of a page determines a lot about how the page is built.

Damon Cortesi ( @dacort ) over at Untitled Startup recently wrote up a summary of recurring payment services provided for startups. It's a decent analysis of current payment services that offer a hosted recurring billing solution, if you don't have a merchant account or want to handle your own e-commerce. If you're writing a software-as-a-service platform from the ground up, and would like to outsource the payment side of things, these are good options.

I have a confession to make. I'm absolutely terrible at making estimates. No matter how long I think something is going to take, it always takes longer. Even if I double, triple, or even quadruple my original guess.

And it's hurting my business. Why? Because I do everything I can to deliver what I promised. And I end up losing money, instead of making money. Instead of renegotiating with the client, I work nights, weekends, and pay my employees out of my own pocket to deliver. I go months without a paycheck, rarely get a day off. Does that sound like any way to run a business?