Yeah, I know, yet another post not related to puppetry. - Actually, one could relate this to my comments on Wed about dealing with inquiries from the general public about puppetry.

I had an interesting experience today dealing with UNIMA Australia updates. A lot of the members have been having trouble logging into the site, although I haven’t been having the problem myself. As I do when things like this crop up, I visit the support forums for some ideas and perhaps updates from the code providers of bugs, patches, etc. The particular code package I use for the membership area of the site is a popular one, and I’ve used it before in the past. You can get the code for free, however, the people who offer it also have a subscription service where you get additional features and more support from staff. Suffice to say, in trying to lower the money being spent on behalf of UNIMA Aus., I’ve simply relied on the free version, which does more than enough to run the site with.

This is a bit of a backgrounder to what happened today. Browsing the forums, I saw a lot of queries about problems logging in using their code. It’s good net etiquette to search first, ask for help second, but not knowing what the problem was (ie. no error messages to track down specifics with), I stopped searching and posted my own thread on the forums. (Good etiquette also recommends first posting your site details: code version, any hacks or conflicts you might know of, error reports, etc. This I did, along with a description of the issue and a link to the site - and an offer to create a test login for well, testing purposes. This is all common practice when asking for support on website-related issues)

The response from the providers, word-for-word: “Upgrade to the new version". This is a fairly reasonable response, since most problems with these things is an out-of-date code. Since I was only one version out of date though (and the new one only came out a month or so ago anyway), I found the brusk and somewhat unspecific reply to be bordering on rude.

I replied politely, stating that I would do an upgrade, but in the meantime asked if the issue could be related to javascript conflicts (which can cause a lot of problems with sites without you realising it) or any other problem. The response (and I copied this from the site): “It means that upgrading might solve issue and we cannot really address issues on older versions. Not enough time or resources to give this type of free support.”

From a business person’s perspective, I entirely understand the need to spend your time and resources on paying customers over non-paying ones. I also understand that code debugging is an extremely time-consuming effort, and that it’s not the code providers’ responsibility to do this job for you - these code packages are always offered with a disclaimer of ‘as is’ and ‘limited support provided’.

From a customer’s point of view, even a non-paying one, I expected better treatment. There is a better, and more polite way, of telling non-paying customers that you can’t help further. Additionally, even a glance at the website is a nice thing to do.

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Quite possibly. But one must remember that there are levels of customer service for freebies. Some go completely unsupported. Some go supported until the day the provider disappears without a word. Some are reworked or specialised for your needs; or new features added because they may have a use for everyone, not just you. And there are some people who provide such a blunt response that no amount of quality of product would entice me to buy full support.

In this situation, I felt completely frustrated. There is only so much user-to-user support that you can rely on before something goes wrong, and if you can’t receive even a small amount of support from the people who offer the service/product, then using the service/product at all is worthless. The attitude, even in subtext, is “we don’t offer support at all to non-payers". Which is fine if, and only if, you make this extremely clear to non-payers; on your forums; or if you simply stop offering your services for free altogether.

The fact of the matter is - like so many companies are discovering via being embarassed on the net, Twitter and elsewhere - that you can’t afford to treat your customers with disregard. By being as polite as possible, and yes, even by going a little above and beyond what the customer expects you to do, you can create an enormous amount of goodwill towards your product and service.

If instead, the providers had responded: “Please upgrade [note the ‘please’] to the newest version. That will most likely solve any problems you have. If you do experience further problems, please come back and add more information. Unfortunately, we do not have the time or resources to individually inspect every website, as our product is so popular. If you would like more in-depth support, I recommend you purchase a subscription which would allow us to spend the time necessary helping you.”

Now one may think that I just slightly reworded what they said - and I did - but I added in some important words which makes a customer feel a little more secure in the level of support provided, as well as keeping everything less brisk and more polite and welcoming. Notice I also included a sentence inviting the person to upgrade to a paying customer, as well as an invite to post more info if necessary. Now granted, I’d still be a little annoyed at the response, but couched in such terms, I would hardly fault them as they are a business and not a free service altogether. However, the way they treated me in the first place made me so annoyed I wrote - but didn’t post - a rather curt reply of my own. If anyone asks me, I will recommend a different product, and if I had been working on my own site and the money to spare, I would not consider upgrading. Indeed, I’m now considering that the first sign the code package breaks, I will seek a different one in order to get a decent level of support.

Now I’ve had many issues myself with ‘non-payers’ - you’ve heard me complain a number of times about repeating myself in replying to inquiries about puppetry -  but whenever I do reply, I reply with as much info as I have. (Even if it’s reposting links to articles or something) I apologise for not being able to help further, and I avoid being curt unless extremely warranted. In those occasions, it has invariably been few and far between emails where people have not included anything but a short sentence ("I want a puppet. Make me one") and tend to be far more polite than necessary.

The problem about offering freebies is of course, that people expect you to support them and ask for far more of your time than they are probably aware of. However, there is a good way, and a bad way, of telling someone ‘no’. In today’s case, even though the affront really is mild, it is a perfect example of destroying any goodwill that might have been gotten by providing a taste of the full product/service.

One of the most frustrating things that I’m trying to set up for SOP is a combined RSS feed (of the new site’s posts, and PIM’s posts). The only vaguely useful method is to use something called Yahoo Pipes. It’s a site where you can take an RSS feed, and using different little modules, process them through various code pieces, and out the other end, have a formatted, new feed. The problem of course, is that you have to understand a lot of specialised code to use it, there isn’t really a guide to tell you how to set things up (well, there is, but because it’s designed for flexibility and diversity, you can’t have a one-guide-fits-all answer), and worst of all, Yahoo is shit.

Or really, their programming is so shit, that the page stops working if you browse to another page (like when using tabs in your browser), or it just doesn’t save. You’ll add one piece of code, and the page will have a heart attack. I’ve learned to refresh often and work in miniscule steps, but even then, getting everything to work is a nightmare.

I’ve succesfully created auto-retweet bots today, only to discover that they don’t work either. (Thank goodness actually, for other people’s ‘how to’ tutorials on these things, because Pipes is, as I say, shit) Well, they work, but they repeat everything twice in each tweet. Of course, it’s not as easy as ‘fix and check’, because everything has to process through Twitter, then the Pipe, then through another RSS feed service, then back to Twitter again. It takes time to update, and so, a lot of time is wasted waiting around to fix things.

In another time-waster, I keep getting contacted by people who want to know about a particular acting agency. I had replied to a Yahoo Answer (hmm, there’s a theme here…) about a year ago, back when I was still doing that whole ‘reply to wannabes when they ask questions’ thing on acting in Australia. Despite not being one myself, I do enjoy helping people learn about the Aussie industry in general - which comes out now through puppetry - but now I find myself being contacted every few weeks or so because of this, somewhat notorious, agency. However, I’m sick of dealing with the questions - those following me through last year’s harrassment debacle will realise why - and I’ve put notices on my contact form, on YA, and on other places where people find my replies.

It seems though, that even bright orange capitalised text isn’t in your face enough to get people to read the obvious wish NOT to contact me about it anymore. It wastes my time, because I actually don’t have any more information than I’ve already provided, as well as being a nuisance and distraction when I want to work; I have to contend with the possibility that it’s really an underhanded method of harassing me further, and further annoys me that people don’t seem to follow the numerous and detailed links already provided (which if they read, would answer all their questions and more). It’s clear people just want reassurance that their - incorrect - instinct to sign with any agency that would take them is not going to get them scammed. That’s great, but could you please read before emailing me about it?

I’ve just spent several hours trying to create a reply/forwarder for my email account so these things get bounced politely - with a nicely-worded, explanatory email, which if I were not toning it down would actually say  off. (I am starting to get nasty about these things. I’m on the actors’ side, but if people actually believe that someone can guarantee paid acting work in the Australian industry, then I’m almost tempted to say you deserve to get got. Even wannabes can’t be that stupid)

But as usual, things don’t work they way you expect them to, and even trying to get the forwarder fixed is a waste of time… Just when you think you make some progress, you head back about 10 steps.

The comparison though, is interesting. I get mightily pissed off when people email me about acting agents. Whereas I don’t mind at all spending a great deal of time posting on puppetry, and replying to people’s queries about that subject. Why then, do I get annoyed about the former issue?

Most likely because it highlights a very important issue: I do get annoyed when people email me about a puppetry subject which I’ve already answered in depth. As much as I try to get Google to index the correct page by leaving ‘this post is also known as…’ messages, or by renaming posts as necessary, the real issue is that people really don’t bother reading the text on the page. Am I the only one in existence who reads everything on a website, as much as possible, before typing off an ambiguously phrased message?

But I find this more annoying because I have taken as many steps as I possibly can to rectify the issue - that is, to update people on this unwillingness to respond - and yet am still receiving inquiries. I no longer answer my phone, but rather screen calls and don’t ring people back if they don’t leave a message; because I no longer wish to deal with harassment over acting agencies. Is it too much to ask that people take a few seconds to read the polite text - that is, let’s face it, not there just to look pretty? And is there any point in being polite when subtle orange text goes over people’s heads?

I have no qualms over answering questions on puppetry, because I invite it. I accept it as a responsibility of creating my website, and of offering those sorts of posts in the first place. If I no longer wish to accept inquiries or feedback, I will simply remove my contact form and close comments. But on acting agents, I no longer wish to respond. And the only thing left for me to do is to delete those inquiries on sight, or to create an auto-response and then delete on sight. Everything else is just a waste of time.

Yesterday I made some odd, yet good progress on SOP. Getting sick of staring at code, I decided to bypass some of the more important stuff to work on some of the detail.

Currently on the SOP site there are ad spots along the sidebar, and because of some recent updates to design (thanks to the moving of the logo to the top left of the page) I needed to rework the graphics for it. I spent a lot of time trying to get the sidebar image redone, as it needed to be a touch longer; note to self, never test that whilst logged into my blog. You see, b2evo comes with a toolbar which appears at the top of the page if you’re logged in, whether you’re viewing the backend or front. It kind of screws up your margins, and plays havoc with testing of images.

Anyway, I then set about making some ad images, which will appear on longer areas - tutorials and books, for example - on single post pages. I figured that the addition of a second ad area is good to keep consistency in the design, but is probably not worth selling since it’s so low down on the page. A perfect place to place ads for sellable things, like patterns.

Then I checked my Lulu stats and discovered what patterns sell the most (Round Head is my biggest seller, with my fish shadow puppet pattern after that) and made ads in order of what sells. Technically I did it slightly the wrong way around, since I want to push sales of the newer moppet pattern. Fortunately I can rearrange at will.

This also gave me the opportunity to refine the ‘your ad here’ images. You can see I’ve slightly ‘buttonised’ them by playing with light and shadow: http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/books.php. I also redid the border on my PIM ad, since the black square didn’t match up with my new rounded corners.

But today, I hit a bit of a wall. I’m still stuck on commenting, with a tiny little bit to fix. In order to get pop-up commenting working, I’ve had to delete the default code for the comment link and replace it with my own; problem is that this prevents the text of the link from working properly. Instead of having a number of options (leave a comment, 1 comment, X comments), I’m stuck with only having one text. Which doesn’t help if someone mistakenly believes there are no comments, when there are really 6.

I’ve tried a number of different methods to try and fix the problem, and no one at b2evo forums seems to have an idea. So I’ve started to look for a different method to show the comments. Initially I wanted CSS-only pop-ups - for those who don’t use javascript, which causes a lot of crappy ads to appear when browsing the net - which avoids a lot of problems for browsers as well. I haven’t managed to get it to work yet, which is why I ended up with a javascript version in the first place.

But it got me thinking along other lines. Leaving the problem for another day - again - I went to work on something desperately needed. A ‘download button’ for the patterns. Trouble is on the current PIM pages, people have to hunt for the download link. I read up on some good practices of download links, as well as product description pages, and came up with the ‘grab this’ image. You can see it in use here: http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/tutorials.php. I thought a boring web 1.0 button was too blah, and noticed that one of the good examples had a bunny holding a download sign. I then thought, “why not use the logo?” A bit of careful editing of the image, the addition of a pdf icon, and voila! The ideal, attention-grabbing, download button. (On a personal note, I like the idea of ‘grab’ rather than ‘download’. It makes things seem more immediate, more urgent, more necessary. The image itself makes me feel as though I can be greedy and get the pattern all to myself)

I’m also hoping the placement of it will work well; right underneath the post’s heading, it gets your attention. And it makes use of a principle in web design which suggests that people who read left to right actually skip the bottom left-corner of the page. On the tutorials page, as linked above, I find my eye naturally wandering from the page title/post title, down to the ‘grab the pattern’ link, and down again to the read more link and sidebar. I also find no one really reads descriptions much, so putting the link at the top means more chance that people will click and buy, rather than fuss around trying to find the link and give up in despair.

And here we return back to the whole pop-up thing. Because I had no idea how best to display the information on the description page. Currently, the description is portioned off into ‘pages’, one of the functions of the blog, where you can separate paragraphs of text into pages, rather than a long post. Initially I thought about prettying up the page links and leaving it at that, but it was a bit boring and doesn’t really fit with the new design. But then I started thinking about ‘tabs’. It’s where you have a bunch of links, and depending on which link you click, different content will appear in the same place. This seemed like a perfect solution, hiding content away so as not to clutter up my nice clean design.

I looked into the b2evo forums for a way to do this, but there was only one post with info on how to hack the code. Not wanting to do that, I searched for a way to do CSS-only tabs. With some careful post-editing and some addition of a couple of lines of styling in CSS, this is what I came up with: http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/tutorials.php/how-to-make-a-muppet-type-puppet-human-foam-puppet-pattern. (You can see my ads for patterns if you scroll down) I actually attempted this on the commenting/post’s content, but found that the page ended up looking quite lopsided, with a comment or two - or lots - on one side, and the sidebar on the other.

Again, the download link is in your face, ensuring that people who land on the single post page don’t have to scroll to find it. You’ve got the short paragraph seen on the category page, then a set of links, and then a list of features. (I’m hoping to add a ‘preview’ image here in the form of book made up of images of the actual pattern, but got stuck trying to get that to work too) Go and click on the ‘examples’ link… Done it? See how the example images appear nicely, removing the features list from view? Clicking on the reviews does pretty much the same thing, revealing… well, dud content which I haven’t edited yet. But you get the idea.

The cool thing about this is since I haven’t added any borders or anything to the ‘tabs’, you don’t even realise they’re there. I’m undecided as yet whether or not to better style the links to each tab, but I’m liking this sort of minimalist style of making the most out of the page space. Another thing I like is that no matter which tab you’re viewing, the download link never disappears from sight; it stays right where it is the whole time; and the ‘features’, ‘examples’ and ‘reviews’ are clearly marked and easy to find. No more hunting for what you want, just click and read!

Considering every bit of what you see on that single post page (ie. everything within the post title/content area down) is actually done within my blog’s text editor, it’s pretty impressive. The one thing I’m enjoying with this redesign is seeing just what I can do with the blog platform, and so far, it’s awfully limitless. Of course, I still haven’t solved my commenting system, but I feel like I’m one step closer to figuring it out.

I’m probably also not done styling this particular method of presenting content; the problem with flexibility is it also reduces your ability to maintain a consistent design. (I’ve also just noticed one problem, which is that you have to scroll back up the page to click a different tab link…) Articles and other content-based pages will end up having one design; pattern pages another; videos yet another… and so forth. This is why the minimalism of the tabs is important, to ensure it doesn’t look too different from other pages, and yet provides a different method of presenting content to ‘normal’ posts.

EDIT: Just before posting this I looked at the page in IE. And yeah, if it looks shit in IE, check in Firefox. I haven’t even gotten anywhere near browser compatibility yet. But hey, at least the tabs work in IE!

As per discussion in my previous post, I decided on adding a by-date archive on SOP. Kelvin pointed out that sitemaps are generally more for search engines (a list is good for spiders to figure out how your content relates to each other, as well as pointing any results to the correct place), and I kind of agree. Personally, I went by what would be the most useful for myself and for readers. Having one big list of all posts, no matter what category or page things are posted on, is handy. Having one by date makes it less redundant, as well as providing me with an easy overview of what was posted when. (Granted, the backend of the blog can be browsed that way too, but there’s a lot more bits and bobs in the backend that sometimes makes it easier to view a simple list like that on the frontend)

You can see most of the work here: http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/archives.php. I’m hoping to add month/year headings to separate the posts out and add a bit more visual aid to it. What I like about the list is that it shows the date, title, and the page the item was posted on. It makes sense to have the page listed, rather than the category, since as I pointed out on Monday, articles can be in multiple categories. Initially I had also hoped to have the post avatar in the list, but it looked all a bit hodge-podge with each avatar being a slightly different size.

Additionally today I resolved a couple more problems: the URL for the contact page, which was incorrect. Seems a silly thing, but actually, the way the blog platform is designed, there’s no real ‘contact’ page, just a link to a form. There is actually an example template for a proper contact page, but it breaks every time you try to make it look like the rest of the site. As the the link to the contact form includes a parameter to call the correct contact person (ie. me), having a short URL wipes out this parameter and causes no form to appear. Luckily for me I finally tracked down the correct piece of code in the message form file and tricked the whole thing into pulling a contact page up on the incredibly short http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/contact.php URL. (As compared to something like: http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/contact.php?disp=msgform&recipient_id=1&redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.schoolofpuppetry.com.au%2Fcontact.php. Naturally, the shorter URL is not only prettier and better for search engines, but it also prevents spam/hacking attempts by those who actively search for default settings in order to spam/hack)

… Now, you may also notice I’m not posting on my regular 5-day-a-week schedule. And that’s because I’m going to reduce it down to 3 days a week (Mon/Wed/Fri). This will allow me to focus more on writing better content, as well as prevent any potential burnouts. Additionally, in this time of transition, it allows me to have a bit more thinking/breathing space as I formulate plans for the PIM site.