I’d like to clarify a bit on my post about getting your website done right. I came off as way, way too cynical and not very helpful.

My intention was not to skewer the people who are well-meaning or beginners. I -did- want to point out, there are unscrupulous individuals out there who will take advantage of people not in the know, willing to charge you thousands of dollars for work that’s not up to par: these are people whose intentions are skewed.

When I first started, my websites sucked. For real. I’ve drawn a quick visual aid to help me illustrate my point:

For those of you who are visually impaired, imagine walking through a hallway filled with roses which leads into a manure factory and someone’s propped the door open. Lots of potential, horrible execution. Now… you can make of that what you will. It’s taken me 13 years and I think I show some marginal improvement.

My point is this: as a small business owner, you’re going to make the best business decisions that you can, when you make them. There’s no reason to think you could have known better when you’re looking back. My first website… it was awesome (for me) – at the time. If I’d stopped there, though… The lesson is, If you get hosed, you get hosed. There’s people who can help – that’s the reason I teach the Digital Gunslingers. It’s why I offer ridiculously low-cost hosting. It’s why… well, you’ll get to see something new from me in a few weeks.

And, it’s why two of the people who comment on this post requesting some help will get a free, thirty-minute phone consultation from me in how to jazz up your website behind the scenes, no matter what the source code looks like. We’ll cover analytics, SEO, and usability. They’ll also get a free copy of Head First HTML and CSS.

If you syndicate your Tweets to LinkedIn – without using the #in filter, you’re going to look silly, or worse:

It’s rare that I find something even I wouldn’t want to post on LinkedIn, but this one made me cringe. None of us are immune to rookie errors like this; you can only hope your followers take it in stride because it’s a Tweet – but damn. On LinkedIn, this is like commenting during your interview that the receptionist looks like she had work done.

Here’s the deal: If you indiscriminately post the same content to every network, you get a #FAIL. If you post two sexual terms in a LinkedIn update, you get a #FAIL. I’m all for irreverence, but if your connections aren’t, you might be in for #FAIL number three (which is usually fatal to their business).

(Header image: Picard’s Facepalm thanks to PicardFacepalm.com)

The Fort Collins Digital Gunslingers raised enough donations through our social media courses over the last 3 months that the Larimer County Food Bank can now provide 484 more meals for local families.

Thanks to anyone and everyone who attended a class and donated a dollar! It went a long way! (And… if you’re wondering how it all got started, here’s my blog post from the first Digital Gunslinger meetup.)

(Header photo: Food Drive 2010 by erskinelibrary)

I built the slides completely in Keynote – giving PowerPoint the snub.  I’ve been having a lot of issues with all Microsoft products and not being able to handle things that are copied and pasted – Keynote doesn’t seem to have that issue.  It seemed to work out a lot better, but there are some quirks that I don’t know how to remedy yet – like how to turn off bullet points.

The presentation itself was a lot of fun – a lot of great people there, willing to learn and ask lots of questions.  I’m hoping to teach the Twitter class again, but not sure when I’ll do repeat classes.  I was thinking the presentation itself would take up only about 15 minutes and the rest would be for discussion.  I was way wrong – the whole presentation took 45 minutes.  Had some great feedback, too:

“Nick has a unique gift for knowing WAY more than you do, yet teaching you generously without making you feel like a complete idiot. And you leave with some knowledge and some confidence in a very short time.”

“Valuable information for beginners and beyond, at a great price! I learned a lot and left feeling rather inspired, and confident enough to attack some issues I needed to conquer to make Twitter more useful. Thanks!”

I’ll definitely have some adjusting to do get ready for $1 101 on Facebook next week.

All in all, I would call it a victory.  Here’s the slides: