You’re not alone. In fact, most WordPress users I know stay away from updating because their afraid of what might or might not happen. I’ve seen it a lot lately. It’s not too surprising, everything from an entire site breaking, to only the backend turning white screened, to various errors and odd behavior after updating WordPress can happen. The thing is, updating protects you from security holes (heard of anyone site being hacked lately?) and often times is required for new features. Our websites are like computers now, they need updates.

Why Does It Break?!

It’s no one thing, it’s everything. WordPress is a platform that works with lots of other platforms and services, so when one of those elements change, everything involved has to be able to handle those changes. Makes sense right?

A lot of the times, updating works just fine, but there are times the core WordPress application fails, or a plugin, or some sub-element. The failure or error commonly shows up as blank white pages, or 2 or 3 lines of code at the top of a white page, and if you don’t know what happened, there’s no going backward to revert and fix your site.

What to Do

Backup. Always backup your site, database and files (those are two different things), in case you need to get someone involved to do a full site restore after a meltdown. I recommend BackupBuddy for backup.

Disable plugins first. If you head into the plugins section of WordPress, select any or all plugins and disable them before updating, it’s often the cleanest way to upgrade, be forewarned, you may need to reconfigure or setup some plugins after this happens.

Understand, be prepared. Upgrading can take literally 30 seconds, or sometimes it can take hours repairing design and technical breaks after you upgrade your site, plugins, and potentially themes. Awareness is important, if only to be on guard in case something happens and to plan accordingly. Hint: Upgrade during low traffic times.

Solve This Forever Option

If you want a set it and forget it solution, let someone else manage backup and fixing your site when updates break it so you can worry about your message and mission, not the back-end.

IT Arsenal offers a low cost one time and monthly option to keep your site backed up and updated. You check that out anytime here if you didn’t know that. Includes simple maintenance requests and friendly advice.

Here to help!

Case Studies are when I take some time to highlight recent work, the challenges and technologies involved, and what I learned in the process.

Sticky eBooks is a client website from Kelly Kingman. Kelly is excellent at extracting ideas and helping people build profitable e-books from what they already know.

How We Met

Kelly was a referred to me from the wonderful Cath Duncan, she first contacted IT Arsenal from the contact contact form.

The Client

Kelly has several sites, but her most prominent so far is Sticky eBooks which is a WordPress based site with clean minimalist lines and a solid following.

Kelly is a member of our backup and maintenance program that includes a monthly e-mail with suggestions on where her site could improve, or possible web tools to enhance engagement or appeal.

Kelly has been great to work with and one thing that has really “worked” is going back and forth with her on tools or suggestions for site improvement. Simple things that the outside eye often catches when you’re the the one one the “inside” working on your site you might miss.

Font sizes, “calls to actions,” or naming structures are often things we can completely overlook when we’re inspecting our own work. I know I do.

The Work

I didn’t create Kelly’s sites initially but I’ve been in the backends and now maintain their updates, cleanliness, and backups. I’ve been mostly using a tool called ManageWP for easy access to her blogs and the many others I manage and suggesting tools like Hello Bar for increased call to action on her site.

I’ve most recently worked on updating a plugin called Premise that she uses. Plugins when updated sometimes break a website’s look or functionality, so it’s smart to backup before and be prepared if it doesn’t go smoothly.

Other work includes regular backups, tweaks, installs, and consulting.

What I’ve Learned

I’ve learned personal real suggestions are appreciated. Taking a real look, even for 5 minutes at someone’s website and offering recommendations based on what skills and techniques I’ve come to know as effective and that relate specifically to a clients website is highly valued. It’s a personal touch that lets the client know you actually care, and it’s led Kelly to share some really nice things about the work we do together.

What is it? The simple description

It’s “the cloud”, it’s a hard drive out on the interweb, it’s “hosting space” … it’s all of these things. Amazon’s S3 is a very high speed mass of online space that you can set up and put to use for your own endeavors. (more on that below)

Why is it great. Price, reliability, cost structure

It’s crazy cheap, and it’s pay for what you use. Have a slow month, or use it sparingly and the costs stay to almost nothing. Even if you are a frequent user, it’s currently .14 cents a Terrabyte to hold, and .12 cents a GB AFTER the first free GB for bandwidth. If these numbers and words mean nothing to you, that’s okay. There’s no contract and they have a first year FREE to test it out, did you know that? Amazon guarantees %99 uptime, and if you do spend 5 minutes looking at their payment structure, you’ll realize for a lot of business it’s very beneficial versus a service you pay monthly for regardless of if you use it or not.

My actual monthly cost (I run a service backing up WordPress websites for my wonderful clients)

Amazon’s current pricing for S3 (remember, they have a free tier for your first year!)

Storage Pricing (click to enlarge)

How could someone like me use it?

(especially for my business)

It doesn’t really click until you think about it for a few minutes. If you’re in online business, you have a website, there are images, sometimes video, or audio that you put into products or on your site. Perhaps you use some service to backup your computer, or business computers. All of these things really are just transferring data around. You don’t need to have some modern “web app” with 10,000 members to use Amazons services, you could simply be hosting video’s for a membership website, or making a backup. If you need multiple people to be able to download that video at the same time or stream at the same time, S3 is a great pick. Not all cases merit it’s use, but sometimes it’ll save you time and money that’s worth it.

Here’s some actual use cases from IT Arsenal, and ideas for testing it’s worth for yourself.

You might ask, why do this instead of just use my website host (if you know about these things), reasons like obscure file links, access control, organization, ease of use and automation come into play because S3 plays well with lots of other services. (see more below)

Video Hosting

Launching a product with streaming or packaged video to download that you don’t want it floating around on Youtube or Vimeo? Amazon is fast, really fast, and well suited for this. You could upload and stream, or use for downloads. See here for a bit more on this.

Computer Backup

Use a program like Arq, which can automate entire computer backups to S3 as fast as your high speed internet provider can carry it there. Based on it’s pricing, S3 would only cost .14 to keep a 500GB file on it’s servers per month, free to upload, and if the emergency situation arose where you needed to download all those files, it would cost $60. Seems high, but you could backup your computer every day, all 500GB (uploading is free) and it would cost nothing, only when you transfer it out of S3 would it cost you. Which would you rather do, pay every month regardless, or only when an emergency arises?

Also, the first 1 GB transferred out is free every month, so if you only keep smaller critical files (Quickbook files?) it would essentially be a free, incredibly reliable, and accessible backup system.

Using an application like Transmit (Mac) you can even set up the S3 cloud to look like a plugged in hard drive, and simply drag and drop important files.

Transmit S3 Mount as Hard Drive (click to enlarge)

File Hosting (PDF’s, bundled downloads, etc.)

Online business products are often a series of trainings or information in the form of PDF’s, audio, video, and similiar. Package these together as a .zip, or even individuals files and link to them straight from S3 easily. If you already know how to do this with FTP and file hosting, the time saver here is  you get a direct copy and paste link from Amazon’s S3 management console with access controls and increased reliability. (see below)

Website Hosting

I don’t really recommend it, as it doesn’t support WordPress, but very simple “static” webpages can be hosted via S3, you can see more about that here. If you went this route for a sales page, which brought in revenue, you would only pay for the traffic you get, otherwise it’s free. Not a bad model when you only have to pay when you’re getting potential income earning traffic.

Website Backup

This one is very useful. More and more tools are coming with “S3″ compatibility. Meaning you can set up a plugin on your WordPress (or other modern CMS) site, put in your S3 credentials and a backup of your website will be sent to S3, off your possibly vulnerable website server. Very smart.

 See tools like Backup Buddy or wpTimeMachine for this. 

Wrap Up

Honestly, it’s most suited “simple” use is backup, and file sharing, most especially when it happens through some sort of automatic connection you don’t have to manage. Examples of this can be seen in this list of useful S3 tools, things like Flickr backup, WordPress blog file hosting, computer backup. Several times these uses easily carry over to online business needs.

I use Amazons S3 in my business for my WordPress Maintenance and Backup service. I currently manage and ensure over 20 clients WordPress sites make remote backups to my Amazon S3 cloud account where I can download them from a central location for recovery, repair, or additional work and multiple backup copies.

Best of all, their first year FREE tier gives you a great excuse to test it, and a little push to get your business in play so you can launch your next idea a little bit cheaper, and a little bit easier. Sign up here ->  http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ if you think this sounds useful.

Always glad to help, want to know more? Sound off in the comments and I’ll get some video’s or further explanation up.

Case Studies are when I take some time to highlight recent work, the challenges involved, and what I learned in the process.

The Cheer and Chow is a friend’s website, and managing a friend relationship along with a business one can be a challenge, here’s what I learned.

thecheerandchow.com

The site in development is WordPress based, using a theme called AULD, and mimics a “tumblog”…it’s no where near complete, in fact is very much in the beginning phases, me and Shauna have only had a few conversations, mostly over e-mail. I like the clean look of the theme, and the themes source company, Woo Themes usually do a good job on the back-end of making edits to the homepage layout, or critical elements accessible. The site’s content is all about her passion for cooking and baking, and from the looks of it (and my own experience!) she knows what she’s doing.

Shauna, the owner isn’t 100% sold on the theme yet, and if you happen to check it out, you’ll see some basic structure, and a nice fat logo, compliments of her graphic designer sister, Tara Oles, but little else.

How the Work Started

I saw Shauna had a Google based “Blogger” site she was starting to post to more regularly and she voiced some interest in possibly running ads or something on her site someday. I’ve seen this trend up recently as people find out that it’s not that hard to get popular on sites like Etsy.com or with a free blog platform and some basic Facebook sharing capabilities. You can find her blogspot site here (http://cheerandchow.blogspot.com/) before/if she decides to “go legit” with the site http://thecheerandchow.com.

Eventually the content on her Blogger site will be ported over to the new site as part of our work.

This is certainly not the first time I’ve worked with someone looking to graduate from a small free and limited type of platform to a site that can take on the world and transform into something more substantial in terms of traffic, functionality or business…not to mention an actual domain name. (www.something.com)

I let her know I could get her on a real website platform (WordPress) and help her along the way.

The development process was fairly normal in my case, I had her fill out a request here, and I offered to manage hosting, set up the domain and get WordPress installed. I know a lot website development types shy away from doing all those steps, but because of how easy it is to outsource and automate this, and how difficult it is to explain what hosting, domain names, and then instructing an “end user” to go set them up…it just makes sense to offer to take care of all of it, and make sure never to be a jerk if they want to take their files and domain elsewhere. Alternately I take an educational approach with a training program if the user wants to take these steps on themselves with some support. Both have worked really well.

How to Charge a Friend?

You don’t really, that’s how I play it. Although it’s easy to see a friend or family member as an easy income source, it’s hard to draw professional lines and stay friendly, there are boundaries in business, it’s very much about relationship dynamics and messing with that is a dangerous line to play with. I argue business is actually more about relationship than it is about any actual service or product.

I typically ask for a minimum dollar amount, to cover basic costs and because of the psychological reason of when people pay even $5 for something, it mentally invests them to stay committed. Funny how that works.

It’s Still Valuable

Although Shauna is a friend, and I wont be making revenue from our work, the business transaction can still be valuable. Shauna, just like all clients have other friends and family, and business contacts that can use my services.

I’m in the for-front of Shauna’s mind for tech needs, and that will help when throughout her daily life someone comes across needing my services, and I will also purposely ask her for referrals and a little shout out. It’s a concept I like to think of  in terms saturation or reach when it comes to business. Like the world is a sponge, and your business is liquid.

Ask for referrals, a shout-out, or baked goods.

Be Smart

I’m excited to see where thecheerandchow.com goes, and have a working relationship with Shauna, but your business isn’t something to give out on a whim, it’s hard enough to stay profitable sometimes with paying clients. The “red velvet rope” (from Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid) rule always applies whether friend or prospect. I’m going to make sure I work with clients who love working with me, who energize me, and who I can produce awesome results for.

All this stuff gets repetitive and time consuming. Cut out some of the time and make things easier  with these three tips.

Screen Options

See that button called “Screen Options” that shows up on most pages of the administration section of your website? I’ve long ignored it as I move through page after page of plugins, or scroll down and read scrunched up titles in my Posts section.

Start paying attention to this button, it has options you don’t even know about, along with the capability to hide everything but the essentials.

Admin Theme Plugins

You are probably familiar with themes for WordPress. The whole world of designers can create slick updatable themes in any flavor, what you might not be familiar with are themes for your admin section. Why would you want a theme for your admin section you’d wonder? Not necessarily for styling, but for ease of use, speed, and added functionality.

Try Fluency, by Dean Robinson. It installs like any other plugin, but completely changes the look and feel of the back-end.  Features below.

Click to Enlarge

Features include:

• Hover menus
• Switch between full menu view and icon-only view
• Hot keys for menu/submenu access
• Support for both Grey and Classic/Blue default color schemes
• Additional ‘Coffee’ and ‘Light’ color schemes included – plus new custom color option
• Turn on/off Fluency login styles
• Display your own custom logo on WP Login page, and in the admin menu
• ‘Just Write’ – hides all the distractions on the post screens
• Option to add full admin menu to WP Admin Bar

Upload Multiple Pictures at Once

I often gather up the images and resources I’m going to use for a post before I make time to write, usually with Evernote (your brain, online). Perhaps because I’ve been using WordPress since it wasn’t possible, but I’ve just recently noticed you can now select multiple images at once (by holding down command on Mac or control on Windows). It seems insignificant, that is until you upload 5 images, one at a time, do you realize how much effort you could be saving.

There you have it, three quick tips that you’ve either never known, or have just forgotten about. Use them to save some time when updating your website.

Have questions about your own site? Send me an e-mail, or find a social media button on this website and click it.

Once you have a site in place, all the tips and tricks for driving traffic, tools for selling, using social media, writing headlines and so on will start to make sense. A world of business and action literally opens up once you jump over the first few hurdles, which fortunately don’t take a technical degree to wrap your brain around.

Experienced or beginner, you have to make these decisions, you might as well be informed.

Base Purchases

These two things are the basic foundations of a website, a company or service handles these for you, and grants you access to change them.

• Domain – The “name” of a website, generally around $10 a year for the name only. www.EXAMPLE.com
• Hosting – Where your website files live. Depending on your platform, you may or may not have access to these raw files. You might use a website to build your website, or various tools to change the files on your hosting, or even a combination of both. Alternatively, you have a “web guy” handle all this.

*There are several different companies for both domains and hosting to choose from. Worried about needing a dedicated server?

I use GoDaddy for my hosting and my domains. HostGator is good too.

Platform

Blogger.com, Tumblr, Posterous, Zanga, TypePad, Homestead, Yahoo Site Builder, WordPress, Raw HTML

These are examples of platforms. Some give you full control, some give you very limited control. The more the platform “walks” you through the process, the more limited control you likely have. Unless you are positive that the platform offers exactly what you want, do yourself a favor and get really clear about it beforehand. Moving content from platform to platform isn’t easy. For a business, you’ll likely want WordPress, which combines capability for an end user who knows nothing, and a web developer to set up the perfect site.

WordPress

WordPress the application, (not to be confused with wordpress.com which is a watered down version of WordPress the application) is a platform that sits on  your web hosting. In my opinion, it’s the only platform worth putting your effort into. It’s free, you have absolute control over the files, the ease of use is unparallelled, the flexibility you have in pre-made themes, customization, and web developers just isn’t found anywhere else.

Close runner up, Joomla.

This site runs on WordPress.

Type of Site

This is a personal decision. Your platform may try to dictate a certain type of site, but you ultimately pick why type of site you’re going to have. Each will lead you down a different path.

• Static – Compare to a brochure.
• Dynamic – A blog or website with fresh news that promotes engagement or subscription. Very flexible.
• E-Commerce – Sell products, and that’s pretty much it.
• Web App – Provide a service, gain users. Twitter and Facebook are web apps.

This site is dynamic, has news, services, products…probably too much.

Hire or Do it Yourself

Starting a website means executing on the 3 steps above. Each part has it’s own area’s to investigate. I’ve seen posts try to sum it all up, usually in efforts to sell you something, but to be honest it’s overwhelming.

This Inc. article did a good job, (How to Start a Website) but I was sad to find the comments littered with people selling low quality junk service.

Each step has it’s companies to choose from and decisions to make. You can jump over most of these steps and refer to expert opinion by hiring a web developer to set these things up with you, or you can get educated, have ultimate control and be the designer yourself. Each has it’s own cost in money and time.

Stick around, over the next two months I’ll cover tactics for making your website better with the best tools possible. Have questions about your own site? Send me an e-mail.

In celebration of re-launching IT Arsenal earlier this week, I want to give you something.

If you or your users are online entrepreneurs, I think you’re going to find it really valuable.

I want to give you the responses I’ve collected in the last 3 months on what online entrepreneurs struggle with when it comes to technology, what they rate as most needed in building their online empire and how they want it.

IT Arsenal is all about tech help on a specific subject every two months, (currently website setup) but that’s just one element of making a business work. There are a lot more.

The strategists, consultants, solo developers and the online entrepreneurs themselves can benefit from knowing where their peers or future pain points are.

The report below covers over 100 participants and probes how people just starting or currently owning an online business rated 6 essential tech areas and if they preferred training, or service in those areas. It features real feedback on what real business owners want.

Is This Report About You?

Get the report and sign up to “the most useful newsletter ever” below to help your clients, or yourself when it comes to technology breakdowns. Leave a comment, get help with websites here. I love to help.

DOWNLOAD REPORT | Say hello on Twitter @robgranholm

The result? I ended up connecting with awesome idea starters and learned the essential high level tech needs of people who do business online, more importantly how to serve them and you better.

See how and find out more about the survey results below.

Facts

• People are awesome, their ideas are limitless but their tech knowledge unfortunately isn’t.
• Entrepreneurs need real actionable “just make it work” help with the essentials of technology used in online business.
• Less technical hurdles and more make it work.
• “Normal” language is a must.

Sound familiar? With that said, IT Arsenal is moving forward in tearing down the walls that hold back online entrepreneurs, re-thinking support.

How?

Training, Setup, Troubleshooting on a different super specific tech subject every two months. If it applies to you, great, if it doesn’t, sign up for updates or come back later.

Currently Featured: Website Setup

What?

Workshops, Member Protected Content, One to One Training, Digital Downloads, Blog Articles and Services for Hire that vary with the current subject.

The Promise: Provide nothing but value, stay simple, and make it work.

Useful?

Sound good?

Signup here for updates, or check back soon; subjects like speeding up WordPress, optimizing RSS subscribers, backing up your blog, selling a product, newsletters, e-mail campaigns and more are in que.

Survey Results

Want to know the detailed results of the survey? Stay tuned, I’ll release them for free this Thursday, March 31.

I Need Your Help in 60 Second Format

Now’s the time to voice what you’re struggling with and see direct results in the form of services, advice and answers. Please take 60 seconds for the 4 question survey below to help shape what problems IT Arsenal will solve in the world of online business technology. Need help figuring how to set up multi-level membership sites within WordPress?, how to get useful statistics out of Twitter?, or how the heck to simply start a website and what to do next? Let me know, and get help more concerned with you than anything else.

IT Arsenal will re-launch with your specific needs in mind, January 2011.

THANK YOU, SURVEY BELOW

[wufoo-form id="z7x4a3" type="simple"]

First time here? Welcome! Learn more about me here, or at Twitter, or Facebook. IT Arsenal is all about being available and supporting online entrepreneurs in their daily use of technology with troubleshooting, website work, newsletters, digital products, and backup. Get in touch for free consulting and to answer a few questions.

As business shifts around here at IT Arsenal discovering how I can serve you (web entrepreneurs) best, one thing is for certain, I’ll always be about giving and service. Giving is what IT Arsenal runs on! Today I want to give away TWO laptops that have done me great service over the last few years.

They are by no means new, but are still very much useful. They still have a lot of kick and I’m sure a couple people out there could really use these. That’s my hope at least!

The machines are strictly “as is” Apple Powerbooks, but they’re guaranteed to turn on, surf the web and come preloaded with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Anyone can enter the giveaway. Start your first online business, get in good graces and gift it to a family member or watch DVD’s on it. It’s up to you. See pictures, how to snag one and some usage ideas for these older machines below!

Computer Specs

Both computers are in good to great physical condition. The batteries still hold about an hour charge.

15 Inch Powerbook

• 1.5GHz G4 Processor
• 1.5GB RAM
• 150GB HD
• Bluetooth/Wireless
• CD/DVD Burner
• Clean Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Install
• Closing latch does not work

12 Inch Powerbook

• 1.33GHz G4 Processor
• 1.25GB RAM
• 60GB HD
• Bluetooth/Wireless
• CD/DVD Burner
• Clean Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Install
• One pixel wide line down screen
• Compact 4.6 pounds weight

BONUS: Includes car and airplane charger.

See Apple’s specs here. Denote model by Ghz speed.

Giveaway Details

Simply enter to win.

• Giveaway ends  November 10th, 11:59pm, 2010
• Free shipping unless you’re outside the USA (sorry my international friends, you’ll need to help with the shipping)
• No warranty what so ever but I’ll be glad to answer any questions

COMPLETE FORM TO ENTER

Need Ideas on How to Use Them?

• Use one as an “e-mail only” laptop
• Social media stream screen
• Web only business building
• Run linux for a lightweight do it all machine
• Tether to a printer for wireless printing
• Use as an inspirational slideshow machine
• See Lifehacker for more ideas!

What would you do with a new old powerbook?