Clearskys.net Blog

Happy Holidays

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Well, it is almost time to say good bye to another year and say a big Hello to 2007.

We here at clearskys.net wish you all a happy holidays and the very best for the new year.

We will be making a couple of new releases early in the year, but I won’t go into them now as it would spoil the surprise….

technorati tags:happy, holidays, new, year

Does this mean I’m famous?

I’ve just had my first legal threat regarding a blog post (this one).

We have been in contact with our legal representative, we suggest
That you immediately remove our logo and the statement as you are in breach
Of using our copy rights of logo….

If this is not done immediately we will have not alternative but to pursue
Court proceedings.

technorati tags:legal, threat, copyright, logo

How to turn business away

How to turn business away:

1. Ignore your potential customers.

We recently (8th October 2006) needed to get (for us anyway) a lot of printing done. 1000 business cards and 2000 A5 flyers. As we have our own designers and had the proofs already in PSD format I wanted a company that I could email the proof to, have it printed and then go and pick my order up.

Not complicated…. or so I thought.

As my method of delivery would be email, I got together a list of local(ish) print shops, visited their websites and popped off an email asking if they could work in the way I wanted, and what the price would be for the initial print job.

And then I waited, and waited, and waited some more…..

In November (9th) I received an email from one of the printers, well not really from them… It would appear that the printing company couldn’t answer my query. The concept of emailing a file and giving me a price for a certain amount of printing must have been so difficult that they had to email someone at their parent company (who then emailed someone else, who then emailed me).

So I finally had my answer, ermmm no. They couldn’t give me a price without me telling them how many I wanted printing. Being a naive person, I had foolishly assumed that a printing company would have some sort of price list with example quantities, types of print, etc…..

I replied requesting a price list and giving an example of the quantity I wanted, and waited.

And waited, and waited, and waited some more.

I emailed them today (20th December 2006) to see if I would get a price or not.

Glad I didn’t need those cards urgently.

We actually got the printing done about a week after the initial email by a company that bothered to reply, but as we would need a lot (many many thousands) at a later date I kept persevering.
Update - I got a nice email back this morning (21st Dec) saying:

We do not give quotes over the internet we prefer to discuss this in more detail. It is very difficult to deal with requirements and pricing over an email.

After banging my head against a wall and thinking this over for a bit, I put together the following reply. I’m not going to bother sending it as I feel some companies should just be allowed to grow old gracefully and die out.

Hey, that’s why you need a price list. Maybe even put it on your website then no one would have to bother you.
Imagine the cost saving in time, phone calls and traveling around meeting people who have no idea what your basic charges are.

I build websites for a lot of businesses, large and small. A website can be anything at all from a single page to a full blown application.
I have a price list on my site with examples and FROM xyz on them so potential clients can see whether I am in their price range or not.

When approached to design a site I ask 3 questions:
1. why do you want a website?
2. what do you want to achieve with your site?
3. how is it going to pay for itself?

Your potential answers?
1. I don’t know
2. I want something that show we’ve opened in our new town. For who? People must know you’re already there. Why would they want to confirm it on a website.
3. It’s not.

You have a website and an email address. WHY? Apparently you don’t give quotes over the internet or email. So why have a website and email address?
I have to call, make an appointment for a SALES person to come and see me. who might not know the answer to the questions I’m asking? then what? they go back and call me later? they ring the print operator/designer? they give me a guess quote, which is of absolutely no use whatsoever. How do I know if the SALES person wrote everything down correctly?

Email is the perfect medium for a print business.
I can send designs to you
They can be checked and PDF proofs sent back for me to check.
We can discuss different finishes, colours, paper weight, etc…
and more importantly for both of us - it is all in writing, black and white.
If I think you’ve done something wrong, then it is there - in writing to prove it (or otherwise).

If I had to meet a sales person from every print shop to get a simple quote (let’s say it takes 1 hour of my time), that would take up 5 hours of my day, assuming I had you all queued up. Who is going to pay for MY time to give YOU business?

In 20 minutes I can fire off 6 emails with requests for information. In another 30 minutes I can look at 6 or seven printers websites and view prices (or example prices). With a number I can even upload a print-ready design and get a PDF proof and binding quote back before the end of the day. With a couple I can then press a button, enter my payment details and the order is with me by the end of the week.

Now the questions that spring to mind are:
Why would I give you my business?
How are you different or better than other printers (that would make me run through hoops to have the privilege of YOU print my flyers and cards)?
What are you doing to make MY life easier?

Welcome to the 21st Century. You have to be in it to survive.

technorati tags:printing, warning, business, ignore, customers, avoid

Availability Calendar Widget v0.1a

We have added an Availability calendar wordpress widget to our portfolio of wordpress plugins. This widget can be used to display your availability calendar in the sidebar of your pages. It can be easily styled to fit in with the design of your website/blog.

The initial version is now available for download by clicking on the Widget only link to the right hand side of this post. The Availability calendar widget is dependent on having v0.4a (or above) of the Booking manager plugin installed, as the widget only displays a calendar and does not have the functionality to add or edit bookings.

Installation
Full instructions for installing and using the widget can be found here.

A sample page with the widget displayed (and information on styling the widget) can be found here.

Support
Please ask any support questions as comments on this post. This helps us to keep track of everything, and also provide help for other people who may have the same problem.

Booking Manager and Availability Calendar plugin v0.4a

Version 0.4a of the Booking Manager and Availability Calendar is now available for download by clicking on the Download link on the right hand side of this post.

Installation and Upgrade instructions can be found on this page.

This version includes a number of improvements and bug fixes including (but not limited to) those listed below:

• Character encoding bug fix for foreign languages - on some servers the correct encoding for foreign language month names wasn’t being used. This should now be fixed.
• Speed improvement for month generation - not really noticeable, but the algorithm to mark booked dates has been radically improved. This should improve the speed, and also adds flexibility to the calendar system - more soon.
• Arrival and Departure times - You can now enter the arrival and departure times of guests in the booking details.
• Deposit and Full amount recording - Added fields to allow the storage of Deposit amounts and Full amounts (with multiple currencies).

Support
Please ask any support questions for this version as a comment below.

Booking and Availability plugin - Minor release 0.3.2a

This release fixes a small bug in the valid date Javascript validation in IE.

To download the fix, click on the download link on the right hand side of this post.

Upgrading
If you are upgrading from an older version, you only need to replace the booking.js file which is in the clearskys/includes/js directory with the version in this download.

Installing from new
Unzip and upload the entire clearskys directory into your wp-content/plugins directory.

Booking and Availability plugin - Minor release 0.3.1a

I have released version 0.3.1a of this plugin. It is available for download by clicking on the Download link on the right of this post. The filename is the same as the previous versions, but the version number in the plugins list will be 0.3.1a.

Please make sure that you are using this version. All other 0.3a versions have a number of bugs related to displaying calendars with a Monday start day.

Thanks once again to Jaime for helping spot these.

Ooops wrong version uploaded

In my haste (I’ll blame haste rather than my ever increasing to do list and that I think I’ve just broken my coffee maker ) I uploaded an intermediate version of the 0.3a booking and availability calendar to the server.

Apologies to everyone who has already downloaded this version. The correct download is now available (use the same download button as before).

You will know if you have the correct version as it will say 0.3a in the version column on your plugins page (and not 0.1a).

Thanks to Jaime for spotting this.

Booking Manager and Availability Calendar plugin v0.3a

Newer Version: A updated version of this plugin is available here

I am proud to announce version 0.3a of our booking management and availability calendar plugin.

Whilst it doesn’t include all of the functionality that I wanted it to have, I thought it would be more useful to make it available to those who are currently trying to integrate it into their sites (as it includes some functionality specifically requested).

Installation / Upgrade

Download and uncompress the zip file. FTP the clearskys directory to the wp-content/plugins directory of your Wordpress installation. You should overwrite all the files already in the clearskys directory as this version has a few structure changes.

Installation and usage instructions can be found here.

Changelog

• Moved clearskys.net to a separate main Wordpress admin menu, this will help keep the existing Wordpress menus less cluttered, especially when we release more plugins.
• Added ability to change the language of the Days and Months in the admin and public sections of the site (you can set each area independently. e.g. Spanish on the public site, German in the admin section).
• Added ability to set the starting day of the week. Current choices are Monday or Sunday. Default is Sunday.

Support

Please use the comment system of this post to ask support questions.

technorati tags:wordpress, plugin, availability, calendar, bookings, rental, management

Site access problems

We have been having problems with our DNS servers (everydns.net) suffering a DDOS attack, so this blog and the clearskys.net site have been unavailable for a while.

Hopefully this will be resolved soon (and if you are reading this message then that means it probably has), in the meantime I have made a few changes to our DNS settings for our domains - so should this happen again, then we will be more prepared.

Unfortunately, in this case, as it takes up to 48hrs for the changes to propogate, it will be a case of waiting this one out and being more prepared for the next one.

technorati tags:dns, everydns, ddos, site, access, problems