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Setting up a WordPress Blog Part II

Previously, I had written an article on setting up a WordPress blog. Since then, I have learned a bunch of new tricks and plugins as I’ve gotten to know WordPress a bit better and I wanted to let the readers here know about these changes.

A New Website Host

Recently, I migrated all of my websites from Total Choice Hosting over to a new host at Mediatemple which caused me to rethink my prior WordPress setups. I also purchased a few more websites that I had started to work on. Prior to this post, I had recommended Total Choice Hosting as an easy setup. I still think TCH is still perfect for someone that only hosts one website and is looking to save some money. But if your site is relatively heavy or complicated, then you’ll probably get what you pay for. Please note that I’m not receiving any payment or kickbacks for recommending anything in this article – this is purely based on my own personal preferences and experiences.

There’s quite a few benefits of this migration to Mediatemple:

  1. Speed #1. Gzip compression is supported by their servers. Gzip can increase a website’s load time by 80%.
  2. Speed #2. Their servers are set up for grid computing which means faster processing and better handling of website traffic spikes.
  3. Speed #3. Faster speeds means greater reader retention.
  4. Speed #4. Google has been hinting that they may start looking at speeds as a factor into better rankings with their search services. However, no one outside of Google is 100% sure whether or not they’re currently implementing ranking based upon speed. They usually don’t release specific details for warranted fear of people taking advantage of the system.
  5. Speed #5. I’m fairly certain Mediatemple has newer equipment which probably means more memory and better processors.
  6. Storage. They give you 100 gigabytes worth of storage space which is perfect for hosting my eStore files over at HDRSource.
  7. No reselling. Total Choice Host is a “reseller.” Basically, they look around the country for other hosting companies. They are more or less middlemen. This is just one more layer you have to go through in order to get some questions answered, or if you do encounter issues with your server and need things to get fixed (as I had once.) As a result, they are also often slower to update their technologies (gzip support is one that they are lacking.)
  8. Support. 24/7 telephone tech support in case something goes wrong. They also have one of the best knowledge bases in the industry.
  9. Cost. It’s cheaper for me to host my eight plus websites under one $20 package versus paying $9 separately. You can host up to 100 websites. All of my bills are also consolidated this way.
  10. Consolidated. All of my websites are now under one login and administration panel versus having to manage eight separately.

The negatives to this website hosting transfer:

  1. Slight hiccups when it came to migrating my WordPress databases. This is to be expected and varies on a case-by-case basis depending on which host you are transferring from/to as well as the complexity of your websites. I had some issues regarding image upload paths once everything was transferred. I went manually through my database and had to reset some paths. Now it should all be working again.
  2. Getting used to a new system/administration panel after all of these years. It was a little awkward for a day or two, but I quickly got over that.
  3. I noticed some important emails were getting bounced to spam and have had to keep my eye out to keep that from happening.
  4. Slight intermittent email downtime. That’s the one thing I will say about TCH that was great. In all of the years hosting with them, I probably can count the email outages on 3 fingers. I have faith however that Mediatemple will sort this out as they are a relatively new company.
  5. I miss my website log analysis tracker AWStats. I think you can install it if you wish, but I didn’t have the time to tinker with it. Mediatemple by default currently uses Urchin, which was recently bought out by Google. Google is incorporating Urchin into Google Analytics. Some say Google Analytics is better than Urchin. I personally think it’s great, but the one downfall is that it currently doesn’t track real-time visitor statistics and only appears to update once a day.

I think if you have more than one website and are not looking for a completely dedicated website host, than a host such as MT is the way to go. It’s not perfect, but it’s much faster and the interface is easier to use. If you do decide to go with them, please feel free to drop my name as I could always use a discount (and no, I’m not getting paid to say any of this lol.)

Installing WordPress

If you’re looking to start fresh, then this is fairly straight-forward as they provide a one click install. You just basically create a new name and click a button then wait while the process finishes.

Most of my installations were transfers. I could simply add the domain on MT and copy all of my files over to the new MT folder via FTP. I also had to back up the database from TCH using phpMyAdmin and import it into the MT phpMyAdmin. After that, I needed to update my wp-config.php user name, database name, and password to the new locations. Once WordPress was installed, I manually went through the database file (using Textpad) re-exported from MT to check and fix some URL/file paths. From there, I proceeded to load fresh copies of the plugins I had used.

If you have any troubles or questions regarding a WordPress website transfer, a simple Google search for “WordPress transfer to new domain” or “WordPress database transfer phpmyadmin” will pull up a lot of results and tutorials.

WordPress Themes – Look and Feel

I’m fairly confident you can use WordPress to set up any type of look and feel. It doesn’t even have to look like a blog nor does it even have to contain one. The reason I’m starting to use them is because it’s fast and there’s a lot of free plugins which are available that save a tremendous amount of time and add functionality (such as contact forms, galleries, online stores, search engine optimizations, etc.) If I do want to add a blog later on, then I can do this with relative ease. It’s also easier than having to manually edit code or create something from scratch.

There’s literally thousands of free WordPress themes available on the Internet. All you have to do is to log into your WP admin and go to the themes section. There’s also a lot more available beyond the WordPress site. A search for “WordPress themes” will pull up pages upon pages of documents for you to choose  from.

If none of those themes you find seem to satisfy, there’s even free online “WordPress theme generators” which can take you most of the way there to your final design. I just happened to be checking out a free trial of a paid version yesterday called Artisteer, and I was fairly surprised at how much it would let you do without having to code. I was expecting the worst but came away thinking the opposite. There’s probably even better ones out there, but I really didn’t have the time to look any further.

If that still doesn’t work, you can always just cobble the code together yourself. I often try to find something approximating the overall look and feel that I’m going for – two columns, one column, side navigation bar, etc and then go in and modify the code to obtain what I want. Most of it is generally CSS parameters.

Last but not least, you can always make it another person’s problem. Find a freelancer online and pay them to mock up a site for you.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress by itself is a very powerful blog/CMS (content management system), but it’s bare-bones and not too attractive when it’s a fresh installation. While it has everything you’ll need to get up and running, there are things you will want to add to extend its usefulness and functionality. A note of caution is to use the minimal amount of plugins as necessary. A lot of plugins are coded incorrectly and can result in slower performance, memory leaks, and even break other plugins as well as your layout. If you’re not using them, then delete them.

To install them, it’s pretty easy. All you do is venture to your WordPress Administration screen and go to the plugins section. Click ‘Add New’ and search for the plugins below. Install and activate.

Below, I will post a list of plugins that I’m currently using on a WordPress 2.9 installation. Some of the plugins from my previous article on “Setting up a WordPress Blog” have been discontinued or changed:

Design Related:

  1. Lightbox Plus: A lightbox is a method of displaying your pictures, movies, and images. You’ve probably seen it in action before. When you click a picture, it enlarges into a popup window and the background may fade out. I’ve tried just about every lightbox plugin – both manually and even within WordPress, and so far Lightbox Plus is my favorite. It works right out of the box and doesn’t seem to break things. It also provides you with a bunch of ready-made designs of which you can always tweak too.
  2. Page Links To:  If you have navbars and menus at the top of your site with submenus, this allows you create a dummy page (and hence another submenu item linking elsewhere.) This is pretty hard to explain but I’ll try here: I had one user clicking the submenu’s but not the main buttons and he couldn’t figure out the main button was also a separate page… Basically, this is an ineptitude checker.
  3. Pro Player: There’s many ways to embed videos into a WordPress site. This plugin provides an easy way to embed videos into your posts from sites such as Vimeo or Youtube. If all I wanted to post was Youtube videos, I’d probably go with TubePress instead. However, Tubepress requires a little bit of shortcode.
  4. WP Typography: Believe it or not (it’s hard to admit), most of us use incorrect grammar and punctuation. WP Typography helps correct common mistakes such as em dashes versus en dashes, quote marks, ellipses, math symbols, widows, etc.
  5. WPTouch iPhone Theme: If you have a smartphone or an iPhone, than this plugin automatically shrinks your website down to something perfectly readable for an iPhone. It definitely makes surfing this website much easier on the eyes.

Security Related:

  1. Secure WordPress: This plugin helps to help fix holes. It also removes information which really isn’t anyone’s business such as which version of WordPress you are running.
  2. PHPSecInfo: This isn’t a WordPress plugin. Instead you install it manually into your root site directory and browse to the link. It will tell you which php holes exist. This requires a bit of advanced knowledge to tweak these settings. Most people probably do not need to even bother with this.
  3. CHMOD 755 and 644: This isn’t a WordPress plugin. I just thought I’d mention it here since I’m on the topic of WordPress security. All folders should be set to 755 on permissions (via FTP) and 644 on individual files for security purposes. There’s probably a plugin which performs this function.

Social Bookmarking:

  1. Cute Profiles: On the side of my blog, you’ll see a few buttons that take you to my Facebook page, etc. If anyone is interested in following me, they can always click those items. By adding these options, you may increase your readership. Plus it’s kind of cool. Of course, you don’t have to use this as you could also provide links in your blogroll as well as widgets for many of these Social Networking websites.
  2. Sociable: This provides little buttons below each of my posts. These buttons allow readers to select an article they like and post a link back to it on other websites such as Buzzfeed, Facebook, Technorati, etc. I use Sociable on most of my blog websites, but unfortunately the layout broke on this particular website when it was used with my translation feature. I’m not quite sure why the break happened, but I did spend time trying to figure out the cause as well as digging through code. I ended up using Sexy Bookmarks instead.
  3. FD Feedburner Plugin: This redirects all of your RSS (really simple syndicate) headlines and sends them to Google’s Feedburner. Google’s Feedburner site provides a handy gateway and options to redistribute your RSS articles in a standardized format to those who use RSS feeds. If you have a homepage set to iGoogle, MSN, or Yahoo – most of those articles that appear are nothing other than RSS feeds/headlines that are appearing. Some people prefer to view daily headlines through RSS feeders as opposed to having to manually comb through websites which may (or may not) be of interest to them. More information on Feedburner setup can be found here.
  4. Sexy Bookmarks: a XHTML compliant social bookmarking set which allows users to select articles they like and post to other websites or email. I’m currently using this over Sociable on this website.
  5. WP to Twitter: I had set up a Twitter account specifically for my websites Lunarlog and Lunarstudio. Basically, whenever I post to this website, WP to Twitter takes the post link, shortens it, and automatically sends it to my Twitter account. It’s hidden on the back-end, but it is there. I could install another plugin which pulls information down to this website for display, but quite frankly, my Twitter account isn’t all that interesting. There’s a lot of these Twitter integration plugins available – I haven’t had time to experiment with all of them. Suggestions are welcome.

Spam Related:

  1. Askimet: Ships with WordPress. Enable and signup unless you really like getting spammed.
  2. WP SpamFree: Another antispam plugin which appears to have blocked over 70 comment spams since I enabled it last week. It includes a contact form as well. I just hope it’s not blocking valid users… I can’t seem to check.

Speed Related:

  1. Autoptimize: This optimizes your website by concatenating your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into one nice, tidy bundle. It works in most instances, but occasionally breaks other plugins and even your layout. I’d save this plugin for last as once you install it, you’re going to want to test your site out to see if anything went wrong. For this blog, it kept breaking my translation flags so I turned it off. Instead, I am currently using WP Minify.
  2. Cache Images: Everyone should be using this if possible. It basically tells a reader’s browser to store to temporarily store an image (such as a logo used throughout a site) on their hard drive. This way, their browser doesn’t have to download an image every single time they move to a new page. It makes things seem faster and reduces the load on your server saving both bandwidth and processing. The nice thing is that in-case you do get hammered from a popular site linking back to you, you’ll be better prepared to handle a huge spike in traffic.
  3. OSSDL CDN off-linker: A CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. A CDN redistributes your files around the world and caches them. That way if someone else on the opposite side of the world goes to your website, instead of having to sit there and wait for information to download, their request will hit a server that is closer to them and the pages will load much faster. CDNs generally cost extra, but if you want your website to be fast – then this is something you should use. At the moment, I am using MaxCDN with my websites. They are currently running a promotional deal at $10 signup for a 1 TB of information transfer. OSSDL CDN off-linker simply allows you to connect to your CDN and formats all of your images and scripts to be fetched from CDNs such as MaxCDN. I was using W3TC (W3 Total Cache) but it was breaking some of my plugins (Proplayer killed my RSS feeds and eStore.)
  4. Use Google Libraries: A lot of plugins use code that comes from other sites (for example, many lightboxes use libraries from Google.) But why keep all of those libraries local when you can take advantage of the latest and greatest directly from Google itself? Google runs on a CDN as well. This ensures that these libraries are pulled from there instead of your website, and it will reduce the load times for your viewers.
  5. WP Optimize: This helps clean up your database. Over time, you install plugins, remove them, write articles, save drafts, delete things – all of this adds holes to your database. On a very busy website, you may have a lot of holes which ends up slowing down your website. WP Optimize is basically a “disk defragmenter” for your database – it removes these holes which can slow down your site and puts everything back together again.
  6. WP Minify: This plugin concatenates JavaScript and CSS files much like Autoptimize does and helps speed up your website. Basically it puts all your scripts together in one neat bundle, and strips out unnecessary comments and white space. Where Autoptimize broke my Transposh Translation flags, WP Minify didn’t. So as much as I liked Autoptimize, I’m using this for now.
  7. W3 Total Cache: This is a new-comer to the whole scene and has some of the highest rankings on the WordPress plugin site. It sets out to do a lot of things mentioned above (Autoptimize, WP Minify, Cache Images, and OSSDL CDN off-linker) but it can be somewhat confusing to novices. And although it has close to 5 stars from over 150 users currently, I found that it broke some plugins that I used. In particular, I couldn’t get it to work with my WordPress eStore plugin – the cart widget wouldn’t refresh properly. Secondly, it completely killed my RSS feed (which is pretty bad) when I had ProPlayer installed (a huge bug.) Frederick Townes is the author of W3TC and CTO of Mashable – I’m fairly positive that he is looking into these issues right now after I had mentioned it. Temporarily, I’m using several of the plugins mentioned above to help compensate for W3TC.

Functionality Related:

  1. Contact Form 7: Provides a contact form on your blog/website. Instead of having to provide an email which people could reach me at, now they can send me emails via the built-in form. Not only is it convenient, but it also serves as a spam bot check. You have your choice of choosing questions and answers or CAPTCHA for security. You can also add functions such as allowing attachments, etc. I know this type of form is very useful. Over on my website www.lunarstudio.com, I have a php contact form that I hand-coded many years ago. I also provide an email address. Guess what – most people tend to use the form instead of sending me emails. It’s probably a 9 to 1 ratio. I absolutely love this plugin. You can see it in action here.
  2. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: This automatically creates a handy sitemap on your website. Instead of having users click on categories, tags, and next buttons – all your articles appear on one page that’s easier to follow. I also speculate this helps search engines figure out and spider your site more easily. You can see it being used as a page here.
  3. Evermore: This adds a “read more” link to each abbreviated post. I used to use a more in-depth plugin called Post Teaser, but I think it has been causing some slowdowns recently.
  4. Post Teaser: Same functionality as Evermore mentioned directly above, but adds a little more information such as reading time, word count, etc. I have it temporarily disabled because I think it was slowing down my sites.
  5. Google Ajax Translation: This is a translation plugin for your posts and comments. It’s very handy. Unfortunately, it leaks PageRank (although you can hack the code if you desire.) Secondly, it was breaking with some of my optimization scripts. Instead, I’m using Transposh Translation Filter for now.
  6. Gurken Subscribe to Comments: This is perhaps one of the lamest things WordPress doesn’t provide by default. If someone comments on your article, you might want to provide them with an option to subscribe to the thread. That way if anyone replies to them, they will get notified via email.
  7. Highlight Author Comments: This plugin allows you (an author) to easily stand out from the rest of the people commenting by allowing you to easily adjust your comment colors. Some themes may have this function built-in. Many do not.
  8. OpenID: This allows users with an OpenID account to have it automatically sync up whenever they comment.
  9. Simple Tags: This helps you tag each of your pages and posts more easily than the one provided by WordPress. It gives you far greater options. Tags are basically keywords (or important words) found throughout your site. Often, you will see tags appear on the sidebars of blogs – sometimes they are referred to as “cloud tags.” They get indexed as well, and helps both users and search engines to navigate commonly used phrases and topics. I was using WP Cumulus which is really nice to look at, but I think it just adds to the processing on people with slower connections and computers. Disabled for now.
  10. Transposh Translation Filter: These are the flag icons on my sidebar which helps foreign users translate my website into the preferred language of their choice. It should also help get your site seen internationally. I was using Google Ajax Translation mentioned above but stopped because of incompatibilities.
  11. WP Cumulus: A pretty method of tagging topics. I have it disabled due to processing loads and I am currently using Simple Tags instead.

Summary

This is my setup currently. While you could go with a basic install, I find that the WordPress plugins mentioned above improve, visibility, speed and functionality. Upon installing the plugins I mentioned above, you may want to activate them one by one and test to see if they break any of your other plugins or themes. You’ll want to clear the cache in your browsers – with Firefox, you can simply hold shift+refresh. With IE, you can do that within your tools\options menu.

As always, I’m open to better suggestions from the community. If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them here. I hope you find this article useful.

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3D rendering, design, media, and technology news.
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Advanced Fabrication

I mentioned a while back that I was taking a company to court – Advanced Fabrication now called Coffee Shop Experts also known as Coffee Cart Biz for refusing to pay for work that I had done. I have a clause in all of my contracts that if it is broken, I retain all rights to the images I produce. It’s a clause that I recommend all of my fellow artists and colleagues having. Because of the owner’s outright refusal to honor our agreement, I feel that it is necessary to post the work I had done here. Please keep in mind, this is close to five revisions later and only one angle out five provided:

Coffeeshop Rendering by Lunarstudio

Coffeeshop Rendering by Lunarstudio

For reference, the court document number is:

Docket #: 201010SC000041

Advanced Fabrication Coffee Cart Biz Court Ruling

Advanced Fabrication Coffee Cart Biz Court Ruling

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3D rendering, design, media, and technology news.
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WordPress eStore Versus Shopp Review and Comparison

I’m writing this article in order to help customers, designers, and programmers make a decision regarding WordPress Online Store solutions. Here are my findings. Of course I am more than willing to hear your comments below, but I hope that my experience and opinion helps make you formulate a more informed decision before wasting your money on something you may or may not use.

I have an online store over HDRSource in which I sell HDR images for use with fellow 3D artists. I use a plugin called WP eStore to handle all of my transactions. Basically, you click an “Add to Cart” button, it adds the product to a cart, then takes you to Paypal where you finish the transaction. From there, you are provided with an encrypted download link which expires in X amount of days which you can specify. The system is fairly simple and that was exactly what I was looking for.

My circumstance is unusual in the fact that my downloads are fairly large – ranging in several gigabytes for some of my files. While the downloads haven’t been without their issues (there are going to be people with time-outs on slower connections with files that big), the eStore plugin has been fairly straight-forward in its setup and ease of use. The documentation supporting eStore is also fairly well thought-out.

Recently, I decided to switch hosts for all of my websites in part to provide a better experience with the download process. I signed up for the Mediatemple Grid Service which allows an incredible 100 gigs of storage space – this would be enough to host my content locally versus going through a third party such as Mediafire or hosting services. This would make the download experience more seamless, and plus I wouldn’t have to pay extra charges for using their storage space. When switching hosts, a variety of issues may come up – especially when transferring blogs which are dynamic and database-driven by nature over to a new host. Simply put, things can go wrong, especially when it comes to live online stores. These problems are to be expected.

With eStore, I ran into a minor hiccup in which my store downloads would download, but would lock you out of the website after canceling a transfer. I informed the plugin author of this issue as well as Mediatemple, and also began the bug hunt on my own. It was very difficult to tell what was going wrong. The system worked fine with my previous host, but fell apart on the new one. Was it something I did wrong, a limitation of the host, or something getting pulled incorrectly by the plugin itself? It was an issue that I would spend several days working on.

To complicate matters, HDRSource was mentioned in 3D world magazine. Some free libraries came out on DVD so my website was getting hammered by traffic from all around the world. I really needed to get this issue resolved immediately. The timing couldn’t have been any worse.

After several days of on and off experimentation, hours of midnight telephone tech support with my new host, and a flurry of emails flying back and forth between the eStore plugin developer and I, I decided to give WordPress Shopp a try. Here is my review and comparison between the two online store plugins. Keep in mind that this is for my setup and your needs may vary:

Comparison:

WordPress eStore Advantages:

  1. Cost: $34.95 (this was $20 when I purchased it this past summer.)
  2. Easy to install.
  3. Easy to use.
  4. Perfect for making simple purchases through Paypal or 2Checkout.
  5. Provides a return URL which takes you back to your website after a purchase is made.
  6. Flexible.
  7. Great shopping cart widget to show your purchases.
  8. New features being constantly added.
  9. Relatively new forum, but fairly useful.
  10. A strong focus on security by the author.
  11. Responsive tech support.
  12. Overall simplicity.
  13. Flexibility.
  14. Allows for free variations of your digital assets upon purchase.
  15. Return check-out page for Paypal standard.
  16. Multiple support videos.

WordPress eStore Disadvantages:

  1. I don’t believe eStore currently allows for sales to take place within your site. That involves a lot of work regardless with advanced accounts, additional charges, and SSL.
  2. This is purely cosmetic but the plugin website (in my opinion) isn’t as attractive, but in this case looks are completely deceiving. Everything is customizable.

WordPress eStore Support:

  1. The plugin author has been very accommodating and knowledgeable. To be honest, I’ve never experienced this level of tech support any where. He has literally “bent over backwards” to help me find solutions to my unusual circumstances. He has spent hours, if not days trying to help me out. The support is bar none. Keep in mind, he also has a separate day job.
  2. On several occasions, he has offered unsolicited refunds to which I refused because I could see that he was trying very hard to work on things.

WordPress Shopp Advantages:

  1. Restrict downloads to IP and maximum tries. However, I think eStore should have no problem implementing this.
  2. Easy to install but it installs too much and even broke my template by automatically inserting three unwanted pages.
  3. Shopp MCE button in the WP editor for production insertion/drop-down list shortcode. Again, I think eStore could implement this – right now there’s a little manual code copying but it’s really a no-brainer.
  4. The shipping options seem a little-bit more in-depth. I don’t ship physical products, so I really cannot comment. It was just an observation.
  5. More options for payment systems including the ability to embed credit card processing within your website without having to leave it. Again, there is a catch because this involves a lot of setup work of obtaining different processing accounts, additional charges, and SSL (Secure Socket Layer.)
  6. Prettier author website (but in this case, I found that looks are really deceiving.)

WordPress Shopp Disadvantages:

  1. Lack of simplicity. On the outset, you’d think by looking at their website that this would be “professional” and easy-to-use. Installing it is easy, but getting it to run is a different issue. You find yourself going through pages upon pages to figure out how to customize your site only to find out that you have to have some coding skills (editing php and CSS pages.)
  2. Cost: $55. $20 more than eStore.
  3. Insertion of three random pages upon install that will break your layout.
  4. No initial mention as to whether or not it encrypts digital download links (which I found out through having to purchase this.)
  5. Digital downloads only allow one product download per purchase. If you decided to provide a free alternative version of your product, you can’t. If you decided to provide multiple parts to a download to ease downloading, you can’t. They say they support resuming, but this is a major oversight on their behalf. Nowhere is this mentioned on their website. I had to wait a day only to find out it was unsupported.
  6. Their shopping cart widgets are beyond confusing. They offer 3 or 4 (I forget) different shopping cart widgets. In my tests, I added a product. Nowhere was a removal button. The widget only mentions price and not the product name when you add a product. It also wants to take you to a separate cart page on your website versus eStore which will take you directly to Paypal for checkout. Not only are you forced by default to be taken to a separate cart page, but then after you make a purchase, you get tossed onto another page full of marketing gimmicks for your site – you may find this useful, but I’m of the opinion that unless you want it there, don’t add this by default.
  7. Insertion of extra code and text into each product. All I wanted was a simple “buy now” or “add to cart” button below each one of my items or posts but no – didn’t happen. Instead, it inserted the product name (again although I had already written this), a description (already written), and a price (already written.) I’m certain you can “hack” the code” so that it doesn’t display these elements, but for someone that wants something simple, you shouldn’t have to. These items should be a checkbox disabled by default under the plugin’s settings. On top of this, it ran it’s own CSS styles which was one more thing I would have to tinker with. It also threw out a huge horizontal rule that I couldn’t ignore. For someone looking for something simple, this was overkill and quite frankly a “pain in the butt.”

WordPress Shopp Support:

  1. In digging through their confusing forum and documentation, I noticed that there were a fair amount of posts which went unanswered. There were also several dead links I came across. Almost everything I wanted to do needed to be hacked, and that would be possibly be broken anyways on their next update. For something simple like removing the titles it inserted, I shouldn’t have to spend several hours trying to figure that out. All I want is simple.
  2. I waited a day before receiving a reply. Time was critical for my installation.
  3. I asked for a refund and stated a couple of my reasons which I thought were quite reasonable and that perhaps they would make an exception to their policy (which admittedly I didn’t read in my hurry.) Here was their reply:

Dave,

Greetings Charles,

Please keep in mind that while Shopp does not support the handling of multiple files for download upon purchase, Shopp does handle resuming downloads.  This means if a customer/client cannot finish a download right at that moment or is disconnected, they can come back and start where they left off.

Concerning the performance of Paypal Standard, it is stated that this version of checkout is a “remote” payment service.  To have a seamless payment processing experience PayPal Pro or another provider would be necessary.  Please see our documentation on PayPal Standard.

As far as a refund, due to our sales policy a refund cannot be available.  For more information, please see our sales policy.  https://shopplugin.net/sales-policy/

I encourage you to take the time to browse our community forums for any information that may assist you in your use of Shopp, as well as stay informed as to what’s coming in future Shopp releases.

Best Regards,

Dave

I asked one more time in an email and mentioned that I was going to write a review of their product. This is his second reply:

Dave,

Charles,

With the access of a demo versions of Shopp, sales documentation, feature documentation, as well as sales policy, it is not possible to issue a refund for this scenario.  I’m sorry you don’t feel Shopp is the e-commerce solution you are looking for but we sincerely appreciate your feedback.

Regards,

Dave

Now, while I completely understand that they are trying to prevent piracy, you’d think that they might make an exception to this rule when someone states valid reasons for why they felt the product did not live up to their expectations. On several occasions, the author of eStore offered to give me a refund when I encountered a few issues – and I didn’t even ask for that. In my opinion, that clearly demonstrates that the author of eStore really cares for the product he is delivering. I couldn’t ask for more. It’s really miles above the cold replies I am getting from Shopp.

Conclusion:

The author of eStore ended up fixing my download problem yesterday. Everything was restored and in better working order than before.

If you’re looking for simple, than eStore is the way to go – it’s highly customizable, lighter in weight (from a code perspective), and less intrusive. Unless you absolutely need more payment options and credit card processing within your website (without having to leave it), than go with Shopp or another alternative. Keep in mind that built-in credit card processing is complicated, and quite frankly not worth the time. Paypal has become the defacto standard in credit card processing so it really doesn’t matter that when you make a purchase that you are taken to a Paypal page for final purchase.

Frankly, I am a very satisfied eStore customer and will continue to support the author’s efforts. I felt that he has helped me so much, that the least I could do is write this article discussing the differences between the two WordPress plugins.

p.s. I just noticed that Shopp left behind some code after deactivation as I was about to publish this article lol. I’m also out $55…

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3D rendering, design, media, and technology news.
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Transferring Servers

In between all of my art-related projects, I’ve been working on two other websites that’s still under wraps. I’ve discovered a lot of techniques recently (both WordPress and server-related) that should speed upload times and responsiveness of the pages being served. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to implement these tricks on this website. I’ll write about these techniques later. I can say that the upcoming article will contain a lot of useful tricks to help anyone interested in optimizing their websites. I’ll also need to update a list of the plugins I’ve since abandoned and others that I’ve recently discovered. At some point, you’ll all probably see a 503 Holding Page go up. I’ll be using the Maintenance Mode Plugin for WordPress here as the splash page while the content gets ported on over.

There’s been talk recently (this has actually been going on for years but has reached a new plateau as of recent) that Google is going to start putting an emphasis on website load speeds. In other words, the faster your website, the higher ranking you may receive. Google said in the past that this wasn’t a determination in their ranking algorithm, but that’s not to say it won’t change in the future. Last year alone, Google made over 200 tweaks to their code in order to determine a website’s position on the Internet. They also rolled out a few new items that measured website’s speeds – perhaps to answer Yahoo’s speed nanny Yslow. All this recent news seems like faster speeds at some point will become a deal-breaker for a lot of site. So speed is something that anyone who wants their website to be seen should really start considering. Besides, it’s been proven and studied that faster speeds keeps a reader’s retention longer.

One of my websites, HDRSource, needs to be on a more stable platform considering that it has a built-in storefront and all the downloads need to run more smoothly and reliably. LunarStudio is my main website – and it’s very heavy when it comes to images. It also ranks in the top 10 for over 50 Google search terms and phrases which means heavy traffic. Heavy traffic means slow speeds. There’s also this blog and three others that will also need to be ported.

While I loved my old (and current) Total Choice Hosting, they’re starting to run on some outdated technologies. Their service is technically fine for most people, but the difference in speed is noticeable if that matters to you. I think one of the main factors in their apparent crawl is their lack of support for a compression technique called gzip which is handled by the server technology. I talked with their techsearlier, and they simply will not enable it. Gzip can compress a website up to 80% – that’s serving a website almost twice as fast. The other thing is the lack of distributed hosting – this is processing a page out from multiple computers versus a single server. This also means speed and the ability to handle getting crushed if someone on national news decides to plug your website.

I’m really set on giving the website hosting service Mediatemplate a try. After talking with a few people, I’ve become impressed with their server system which uses distribution (better processing under heavy loads), overall load times, and even technical support. I’ve also been astounded by a few of the websites I’ve seen hosted with them. Mediatemplate lacks some of the pomp and convenience of the Fantastico control panel which shipped with Total Choice, but I’m sure almost all of the functionality is there  under different pages and buttons.

The cost of Mediatemplate’s service is $20/month currently and you can host up to 100 sites on their servers per account. That’s unheard of. I’ll be saving roughly $25/month in that alone by consolidating all of these sites. They will also host up to 100 gigs of website-related files – that’s perfect for the HDRSource store and means that I’ll be saving an additional $10/month for my external file hosting on 4shared and Mediafire. So there will be $35/month in savings, and a much, much speedier host to boot.

How can you go wrong with that? Well, I’m more than happy to be the proverbial guinea pig  here. They have a 30-day money back guarantee in case it turns out to be less than expected

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What Prices to Charge as a Freelancer or Artist

Introduction

Unless you’re intent on living on the streets, working side jobs, or are fortunate to have the support of wealthy parents and benefactors, most of us at one point or another have to ask ourselves – “what prices should I charge?” Pricing out and valuing your work is a great mystery.  If you look around the Internet and even ask others for advice, the amount of money – especially for artists, ranges a very wide gamut. The price point is very difficult to gauge with so many people out there. Of course to some degree, what you can charge is indicative of your skill level, but for the sake of this article I’m just going to discuss what an average businessman, freelancer, artist, and even photographer should be charging at the very minimum.

For the sake of this article, I’m going to use my experience as a freelancer for close to the past 10 years and running my company, LunarStudio. The same experience should apply to most people in a variety of different situations.

The Internet – The Global Price Mediator

At one point before the Internet grew in size and popularity, if you wanted a television, you would drive around town to various electronics store. The price would have probably remained relatively fixed. If you drove to a competitor in the same neighborhood, you might have found several hundreds of dollars in savings. If you drove even further – perhaps to another state – the price may have gone down or up several hundred instead. There really was no baseline comparison from place to place. Prices were more or less regulated to the availability and general income of where you lived.

Enter the shopping world of the Internet. No longer were people confined to the neighborhood electronics store. If you saw a television you liked at a physical location/store, you could come back home and do a search for that same TV online. In the Internet’s infancy, you could discover huge savings on the same exact product, perhaps even including free shipping and no taxes. Suddenly, you were aware that there were great deals to be had online. You saw what one company was charging at one location, and what another was charging in a completely different part of the country. This is comparison shopping on a larger, more instantaneous and convenient level.

The Internet had the effect of exposing exorbitantly high prices in one area, and showing “rock bottom” prices in another. Over time, the highs and the lows across the country evened out to a degree. Your local store started to honor TV deals that you could find out on the Internet. The boundaries originally set by a lack of information and geography started to evaporate. The Internet became the great price mediator.

Now you may be asking yourself, how exactly does this apply to your business? The same analogy applies to many of your services. As prices of goods around the country start to level off, the highs and lows of what you can charge has also been affected. Everything including average income and salary starts to average out.  In some parts of the country, there are still higher costs of living and major differences in salary, but these differences are going to eventually follow suit.

Let’s take for example two digital artists that work remotely off of the Internet. One is out in farm country – somewhere out in Oklahoma. We’ll call him “Artist A.” Artist A has a very low cost of living. He pay $500/month in rent. Most of his bills tends to be relatively inexpensive for him.

Now let’s take “Artist B.” Artist B lives in the heart of New York City. His rent is $2,000/month. The costs of living are generally much higher for him.

Let’s suppose that both of these artists produce a similar quality of work. Guess who has to charge more in order to keep up their living expenses? Artist B.

Unfortunately, Artist A can easily undercut the more expensive Artist B. On the other hand, is Artist A really doing himself any favors by drastically undercutting the more expensive Artist B? In the short-term, yes. It costs a lot less for Artist A to stay alive. But guess what – the prices of the TVs they were looking at earlier still remains the same now. Artist A in effect has to work harder to afford that television because he’s charging much less. Artist B also has to get more jobs in the door (because he’s charging higher prices) in order to compete with Artist A in order to buy that television. Both artists have made more work for themselves simply because more competition has entered the field via the Internet.

So what is the solution to this problem then? You can choose to wait out the “great Internet mediation” – as to how long that will take is anyone’s guess. We all have to wait irregardless. You could also try producing substantially better work and charge more, but there will always be people who don’t recognize better quality and simply go for the lowest prices. You could also perform lower quality work, and at that point it becomes a numbers game as to how many clients you can shove through any given door before they realize they’re getting substandard work. In essence, you’re still making the same amount of work. If you want quality – then you have to pay for it.

What the average person has to do (assuming that your skills are average in nature) is to find the middle ground – a happy medium. A price point which isn’t “too high” and not “too low.” As your skills progress, you should be able to charge more over time as your services come into greater demand.

The point is that you’re not doing anyone any favors by undercutting your fellow artist (or businessman) in the age of the Internet. In fact, you may be doing more harm than good. Ultimately, you need to provide a quality product with a quality service, and hope that makes all the difference. In a perfect world, we would all be charging similar prices, and only those that charge higher are producing better quality.

Comparing Others

So you have looked around the Internet and checked to see what other competitors and colleagues are charging. You have one relatively unknown person in the middle of nowhere trying to charge $25 for a photograph. On the other hand, you see another person with a little bit of better work charging $250. Which price should you charge? Perhaps like most people, you consider yourself an “unknown” too and are just starting out or trying to make ends meet. The first inclination may be to charge on the lower end of the spectrum – $25. But are you selling yourself short? Perhaps if you charge closer to $250, others will see your work as “more professional” or “more valuable.” It’s a tricky question with a seemingly tricky answer.

In order to answer this question, we can look at other various industries for a baseline number.

Take for example a plumber or an electrician. They can easily charge $100-$150/hour. If your electricity goes out or your toilet stops working – you have no real alternative aside from trying to fix it yourself. You’re more or less forced to pay those prices. However, there’s a reason why you pay them these rates. Even at those prices, I don’t see many plumbers and electricians living in mansions. The standard of living factoring in risk and reward (for running your own business) all averages out.

How about professional photographers? They’ll bill out $1,500-$2,500 a day. What is not apparent to the average person/onlooker is that they’ll spend a few days prior negotiating with potential clients, a few days in post process after a shoot, and a few days cleaning up all of their previous negotiations.

As for architects, how much do you suppose their companies bill out on a hourly basis? The average is around $125/hour. The principals? They can push $200/hour.

Now let’s take a look at my architectural illustration work. Running my company (artwork creation, 3D knowledge, self-education, marketing, invoicing, sales, etc.) is more complicated than any other job I’ve personally ever seen and requires multiple skill sets. What do you think I should be charging if I spend an hour’s worth of work on something?

You may say to yourself, “well, art isn’t a necessity.” However in my field, I argue that it is. My illustration work helps sell multimillion dollar buildings based on ideas and blueprints. If someone is planning to put up a $50 million dollar building and it all hinges on a pretty picture, do you think it’s worth spending $10,000 or more? It sure is. My work gets ordinances passed by town boards. It communicates to designers what something will look like even before it goes to manufacturing. And it helps fill spaces quickly. That’s a very useful service to people and companies.

So I’ll ask the question again – what do you think I should be charging? My work is more complicated than average and it is very useful. I know from personal experience that I’ve spent almost 10 years, working and studying 16 hour days, almost 7 days a week with no vacation doing this. Shouldn’t I gain some level of reward on top of all the energy and extra efforts I’ve put into my craft?

I’ll make the same point as I did in the previous section. You’re not doing yourself any favors by charging low. That only works for the short-term. The same applies for charging high unless you’re determined to produce a better quality and provide a better service. You need to find that middle ground.

Cost of Living Breakdown

Now that I’ve more or less made my argument that geographical location is becoming increasingly irrelevant in today’s digital age, let’s assume that you’re an average professional artist living in a city all by your lonesome in an apartment. You’re single with no children. All you do is freelance for work. This “should” be the most common situation. Let’s tally up your expenses:

  1. Rent: $1,500/month or $18,000/year.
  2. Electricity: $250/month or $3,000/year.
  3. Heating (assuming it’s efficient): $250/month or $3,000/year.
  4. High-Speed Internet/Digital Voice/Television (hey, it’s bundled): $200/month or $2,400/year.
  5. Cell Phone with data access (most people have them): $80/month or $960/year.
  6. Car loan or finance: $300/month or $3,600/year.
  7. Groceries (we all have to eat): $200/month or $2,400/year.

TOTAL: $33,360/year.

This means that you have to make at least $33,360/year in order to just pay your bills. I’m not even factoring in credit cards, health insurance, and miscellaneous equipment expenses – that could easily add another $8,500 to that total. So let’s add in those items:

  1. Health Insurance (average Massachusetts plan): $300/month or $3,600 year.
  2. Credit card (you ran into trouble and have to pay it off monthly): $150/month or $1,800/year.
  3. Misc. equipment expenses (ie. a high end computer for graphics, software, repairs, .etc): $2,500/year
  4. Previous total: $33,360/year.

REVISED TOTAL #1: $41,260/year.

So we’re up to a little over$40,000/year. That’s not including 1/3 business taxes, 10%/annually in retirement savings, savings for your potential kid’s college education, and savings for a nice down-payment on a home. I like round numbers and I’m going to jump a few more steps to include these items.

REVISED TOTAL #2: $60,000/year.

That’s right. You need to make $60,000/year just to survive in a city by yourself. How do most people do it? They manage, but they often struggle to just keep their heads above water. It also general requires a dual income either through having roommates or through marriage. Add to this economic uncertainty such as the global depression in 2009, and you’re sitting on the edge. Here are some statistics as to the average income and salary within the United States.

I’m not trying to scare anyone here, but rather I’m pointing out that you should at the very minimum be targeting $60,000 year in 2010 just to earn a living.

How Much to Charge

Let’s say that we agree on $60,000/year as a target figure. How much does that mean we need to make per week at a minimum? Let’s say that you work 50 weeks out of the whole year. That breaks down to $1,200/week or roughly $4,800. Again, I like round numbers so you need to earn $5,000/month.

Let’s say that you’re an artist and you’re lucky to get two jobs per month that take a week per job. Each job would need to cost $2,500 in order to meet your target goal of $60,000/year.

Assuming (and this is a big assumption) that all of your marketing duckies are lined-up in a row and that you can manage to pull four jobs per month, then maybe you can charge $1,250/per job at the very minimum. At that minimum price point, you are really risking your own livelihood and future. Truthfully, you can’t just risk staying at the baseline, but should instead be focusing on getting ahead.

So. how much should a person charge? Realistically, you may only get two jobs per month – if that. Most artists don’t. Either you’ll need to seriously improve your marketing strategies and obtain more jobs, or fit the average quantity of jobs you receive per year into that $5,000 month target.

Guess how much most professional rendering artists at the top of their game charge per image? $4,000 on up. I’ve heard of figures on the order of $12,000 per image for the very best. They may spend half a month working on a single image, but that may be the only image they get. If they receive two or more, then they’re often happy. The next month they may have none. You’re doing yourself and others no favors by low-balling one another. All it does to serve in the long-run is lower the overall quality of work involved.

I’ve also heard of some well-known 3D studios charging around $10,000 per image. Is it highway robbery? Absolutely not. They’re simply trying to meet their overhead in a rapidly changing economy.

You may be saying to yourself, “haha, I don’t live in a city so I don’t need to charge nearly that freelancing amount” or “I’m married so that doesn’t apply.” I have news for you – pull your head out of your ass. We are living in a digital age now. Those boundaries and rules do not apply. It’s also a matter of time before the playing field is more or less leveled. There’s no reason why any of us should become complacent to simply struggle and “get by” on keeping that car of your running on fumes. If you value your work and hard-earned efforts, than that value has a minimum price tag you should try to meet. You need to change your mind-set. $2,500 per image at the very least is a good target goal when starting out on your own. It’s not always realistically possible, but you should keep that target figure in mind. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you should be targeting over $4,000 per image in your mind. The more you value your work to be that figure, the more it will actually become to be worth that amount. Don’t sell yourself short.

Taking Your Practice One Step Further – Getting Ahead

So now that I’ve hopefully convinced you that you may be charging too little, I’d like to point out another angle. Pretend for a moment that you are an actual business with an employee. Not only are you taking your original figure of $60,000 that you had to make, but you also have to insure their salary over the course of the year. That figure alone could easily run $50,000 (or more) in a very technical field. You also wouldn’t simply want a helping hand – you deserve to make a profit for the additional risk and responsibilities you’re putting upon yourself. So you’ve basically more than doubled the amount of work you must do and charge in order to keep your head floating above water.

The artist needs to stop thinking of “me, me, and me.” Unless you have an extraordinary gimmick, luck, or style – that “fame” you might be seeking will often prove elusive. You need to take your ego out of the mindset of being the lone artist. Pretend for a second that you are a full-fledged company. Whatever charges you proposed in the previous section starts to quickly look small. Not only are you targeting that $4,000 mark, but you have to set your sights even higher than that.

Summary

I have many reasons why I wrote this article. In particular, I’ve seen many artists ask themselves over the years, “how much should I charge?” I’ve seen many crazy answers. I also speak from personal experience. When a little more than half of all small businesses fail within the first five years, I consider LunarStudio to be a success in that department. By helping fellow artists and businesses alike through healthy discussion about this topic, in turn I hope to raise my own standards and rates. If we all work together (and stick together) to help determine the lowest common single denominator any single one of us can charge, then we can prevent drastically undercutting one another which often leads to more harm than good. Artists and freelancers alike need to start valuing their work, time, and efforts and stop selling themselves short. As much as I don’t like thinking of our artwork “as a business” from a philosophical perspective, being a “professional artist” entails that we carry ourselves in a professional and respective manner.

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Small Claims Court for Artists

Introduction

First, I have to state that I am not an attorney. Anything you read here is not to be considered legal advice as I am only speaking from my own personal experience. I cannot say that this article would even apply to other countries, let alone individual states within the U.S. I hope that this article can provide you with some ideas as to options you can take in case you ever encounter a similar situation of non-payment or refusal to pay.

I’ve been a member of various art-related forums for over eight years now. I’ve seen other fellow artists post on bulletin boards and forums over and over again that they occasionally run into issues of non-payment from their clients. For the most part, if you’re an employee of a company – you generally don’t have much to worry about as the letter of the law is very strict when it comes to employers. However, if you are a freelancer, contractor, or sole-proprietor, than this article may be of use to you as you are technically all on your own. I never expected this to happen to me in all of the years working, but unfortunately it did.

I feel that it is necessary for me to write about this incident. Artists as a whole are very vulnerable to injustice. A simple comparison might be:

If you were to walk into an electronics store such as Best Buy, grab a small television, and walk out without paying for it – you’d probably get arrested. However, if create an image for somebody and they accept it via email without paying, do you think they would get arrested? Absolutely not.

This is just one small example of what artists have to face when it comes to the digital age of instant communication. We are not attorneys, and we often look to each other in our forums in order to determine what, if any, appropriate steps fellow artists can take in-case we are clearly taken advantage of. Believe it or not, this happens quite frequently – I suppose I’ve just been lucky up until now.

Background

I recently encountered my first situation of a refusal to pay back in January of 2010. This is the first time in over eight years of working with some very large and at times, famous clients (The Federal Reserve, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Pepsi, Coca Cola – so on and so forth) that I’ve ever encountered this problem. My contracts are fairly “iron-clad” and I thought nobody would ever try to argue it. I never expected this to happen. I didn’t think another company would conduct themselves so unprofessionally as to jeopardize their own business. I was completely wrong and left dumbfounded by their actions.

I was contracted to create 3D renderings for Coffee Cart Biz (also doing business under the name of Advanced Fabrication.) The intent was for them to sell their coffee shop manufacturing and instructional services to their clients by partially using my artwork to show clients a “vision” of their products before it was actually built. As per written and signed contract, I met my obligations to them and actually went over and beyond my obligations to try to help them out – an estimated two weeks of free work to be exact. As their demands for changes became abusive, I informed them that they went over the contract allowance and that I would cease work until I received payment for the work completed. The owner of Coffee Cart Biz, Tim wrote back demanding even further changes. He offered up an unacceptable $100 for an extra days worth of work (which he incorrectly assumed to only take two hours – perhaps in his own little world but he’s not a 3D artist…):

“Make the changes and get paid or don’t and continue to send unprofessional e-mails and you will not be paid because the project is not complete. As of right now with your last e-mail two things are certain, you will not get paid without these corrections and you lost a customer with a pipeline of upcoming business with no intention from you of making things right.”

I realized at this point that this client was being unreasonable and there was a high probability that I wasn’t going to receive payment. I wasn’t about to be “bullied” or “threatened” into performing additional free work for this company. I had my limits as well as obligations to other clients to meet. So, that was the situation surrounding my case. I could get into all the mechanics of my contract and our emails, but for the sake of brevity I’ll spare the reader all of the details (5 pages of contract and legalese to be precise.)

Analogy

I’d like to bring up an analogy here:

Let’s say you are a professional painter that works on home exteriors. Someone approaches you and asks for you to paint their home a certain color. You agree on a price and time and set about painting their house. A week later, the owner takes a look at the home and decides he doesn’t like the color. He mentions that he has additional work for you later on, but wants the color changed for now. So out of courtesy, you paint the house all over again the new colors he selected. Now he comes back and starts demanding changes three more times – complaining about the reflections, the gloss, the tint when dried, etc.At a certain point, you stop and say, “woah, wait a minute. This is taking a lot of unreasonable time now. I need to get paid because this has gone way over our time or we can rework our agreement.”

Now how many times do you think is enough? Most painters wouldn’t even change the first round for free. On the other hand, I offered two rounds of changes out of courtesy beforehand. But to be asked five times in total and threatened to be withheld payment is completely unacceptable.

Mind you, all of these requests are documented in archived emails (30+ pages – average of 2 emails per page to be exact) and proven by the test renderings I produced.

Actions to Take

With all the facts and emails in place, I had a few options:

  1. Write an email or place a phone call and explain what you intend to do as a result of their refusal. Point to your contract. This may include hiring attorneys (expensive), filing to a small claims court (inexpensive), or sending their information off to a collection agency (roughly 1/3rd of the amount owed.) You may also write about what transpired, but you have to be honest and you have to realize any potential legal problems you may run into. Freedom of speech is covered under the US Constitution but be wary at which tone you convey your message. You hope at this point your message gets across and that you and your client would come to some sort of agreement to prevent this from transpiring. If this works out, then this is the best scenario. The client walks away and pays you the amount owed or at least (at the very minimum) partial payment for the services rendered. Both companies cease communications after this point.
  2. File in small claims court. This is one of the most inexpensive options for coming to a resolution if the first method doesn’t work. Keep in mind that there are limits which vary from state to state. In Massachusetts, the limits for small claims court judgments is $2,000 maximum except under certain specific conditions. In California, the last I checked it was $5,000 maximum. Filing costs in Massachusetts is $40 for under $500, and $50 for $500-$2,000. You need to just show up to the court’s small claim office and fill out a piece of paper with your name and address as well as that of the defendants. You write the office a check, and within 10 days they deliver a certified letter to the defendants doorstep.
  3. After filing in small claims, then try to mediate by attempting to use your filing as leverage to make your case.
  4. File in a higher court. Chances are that you will need to hire an attorney which is going to be fairly expensive ($400/hour.) You may be able to get an attorney that works on contingency or on a pro bono basis, but that is rather unlikely. It’s only really worth it if the amount and damages owed exceed a substantial sum of money. Any additional fees incurred by the attorneys (assuming that you win) can be made billable to the defendant. Obviously, in the case of something that’s only worth $1,000-$2,000 (even up to $5,000), then hiring an attorney is probably not justified.
  5. Hire a collections agency. Obviously, there’s probably a chance that if it got this far in the first place, then you would never ever want to work for that type of person or company again. You could hire a collections agency off of the web to basically hunt down the money owed. They do this type of work for a living. They’re cold and hard people that know how to argue their way to get the desired results. This also comes at a cost or roughly 30% for some places. You have to weigh the positive and negatives. Is spending 30% better than receiving nothing at all?

I immediately picked up the phone and tried calling. No response. I also shot over an email outlining some of my intentions with the hopes of coming to a conclusion. It probably wasn’t the best phrased – I was rather upset at the time. But that still doesn’t change any facts. He replied:

If I see an attachment I will open up your next e-mail, otherwise I will save them in your folder without reading for an attorney to review.

Again, he is trying the bullying tactic. He wants an additional round of changes on top of the free ones already provided. It was becoming increasingly obvious that he wasn’t willing to mediate, but at least I tried.

I eventual talked with four different attorneys. One was a friend and she helped me out with a little bit of email correspondence. We hadn’t talked in a long time, and I didn’t want to take bother her much with the details. She kindly some of the methods of approaching the court in small claims. The other three attorneys happened after my filing, and I’ll discuss that in a little bit.

The next step was to file for small claims. After filing, I followed it up by writing him again and CCing his employee (from a different email address so that it didn’t get trashed) with an email stating what I had done. I was giving him one last opportunity to mediate before trial. As typical, there was no response.

Assembling the Offense

During the next few days, I spent time to collect all of the emails and written correspondences we had. I established a time-frame in which the events had folded as well as making sure to document all the prior requests for changes. I also printed out all of the artwork which I had done including their stages (close to 25 pieces in total.) I also outlined the inconvenience he caused in order to receive damages for time lost. The more evidence I had, the better my case. Unfortunately with small claims, it is a very quick process so you have to condense all the major points in your argument down to a few pages. Don’t expect the judge to read 30 pages of email, but it is best to have them handy just in case.

Catching Them Red-Handed – Copyright Infringement

The court appearance was to happen a month later to this very day of writing. In the meantime, I decided to visit their website to see if they had posted any of my images. They did.

Now, you can’t just take someone’s artwork and post it to your website without paying – that’s actually copyright infringement – a form of theft. In most typical situations with a good client, I wouldn’t have minded at all if they did that. But the situation was far from typical. It also invalidates any claim that the defendant might have in stating that he “didn’t like” or “didn’t approve of the results.”

I took a screenshot and also had one of my friends take one as backup evidence in case that came into question.

The copyright infringement, while-related, is a completely separate offense. It’s one thing to have someone not pay you. It’s totally another to have someone steal from you on top of it all.

It doesn’t only have to be posting your work without permission – if the client uses your image in the interim to help “sell” his idea on a $50 million dollar building (and in some cases several billion) without paying, you should and would rightfully be entitled to a portion of those damages.

As time was of the essence, I marched straight down to an attorney around the corner from me. I wanted my screen capture of his website to be notarized.  I described my situation and he said that as I had the screenshot, then the notarization wasn’t necessary (I think this is debatable.) He also put me in touch with his brother out in California who happened to specialize in copyright infringement and trademark issues.

I headed home and in another email using a different email address, I sent a short letter off to the defendant informing them of their infringement.

The Copyright Attorneys

Almost two weeks later, my image was pulled down from their website. I got into touch with two attorneys that specialized in copyright issues. One worked on a pro bono basis. He basically said that copyright damages are awarded based on how much damage the court thinks the offender has done. In this case, the cost of my images were deemed minimal. The attorney said that unless it was a very large client, that it probably wasn’t worth his while as he would normally bill out $400/hour for his services and that the image itself cost far less than that. If they also agreed to pull down the image in a short amount of time, then any reward for damages would be small. He recommended small claims court.

The second attorney who was the brother of the very first guy I met more or less said the same thing. He recommended small claims as well. His first step in this situation would have been to ask for the image to be removed from their website which they had already done. I brought up the other case of non-payment to him, and he said that it probably wasn’t worth any attorney’s time as the costs would exceed the benefits.

In our conversation, I brought up the point that I didn’t think this was going to send any message regardless. Even if the defendant ends up paying maximum damages in the court, it’s such a small amount that this wouldn’t even probably give him pause for further reflection. The attorney brought up a few more additional points.

Going Beyond Small Claims Court

If you are rewarded the judgment, there’s a few more options you have at your disposal. The court will make their ruling public in association with the docket number you were originally provided. At this point, you should be able to (again, I am not an attorney so follow this writing at your own risk – these are not recommendations…):

  1. Submit the ruling to the Better Business Bureau for the state the defendant resides in. The BBB doesn’t want to get involved in financial disputes between two parties, however if you have a ruling than all is said and done.
  2. Contact the Secretary of State that the defendant resides in and present your ruling.
  3. Inform the bank officers of the ruling. This information can be trickier to find out, and may require a court request for a writ of execution to be served up by a constable.
  4. Contact one of the three major credit reporting bureaus – Experian, Transunion, and Equifax. A mark on someone’s record should make things such as obtaining loans and even conducting business a bit more difficult. Information can be found throughout the Internet about this process. Here is one link that partially explains this option.
  5. You can write about the incident. Be truthful. This falls under the First Amendment – Freedom of Speech. Be very cautious to make sure this doesn’t fall under the grounds of libel and defamation although that is often very difficult to prove. The definition varies from country to country and state to state.

My Day in Court

I was to appear almost a month later from the time of filing in front of the judge. This was scheduled for 8:30 in the morning. It’s best to show up early. This is one date you do not want to miss. If you do miss it, the defendant can be awarded the case and vice-versa. In my situation, the defendant was located in California. Special rules apply as they are considered to be “out of state.” A letter had been delivered to his doorsteps with the option to make a written statement if he couldn’t attend the hearing.

He had written a reply, and I was sent a copy of his 3-page letter to the court. Earlier, I had taken the time to dissect his writing, and effectively counter every one of his claims with either my emails or my contract. So I had been prepared to counter every one of his arguments.

I showed up early in the morning, dressed in a suit and tie with all of my materials, portfolio (if asked), and letters of recommendation by my side. I passed through a metal detector and was then shuffled through a general court room with others before a clerk.

At the scheduled time, the clerk starts to read off names. You reply by stating that you are “present” when your case comes up. Probably more than half of the names are “defaulted” due to someone (or even both parties) not showing up – either one party is awarded in this situation, or the case is thrown out. The name calling moves rather fast and the court room quickly thins out.

When my name came up, I said “present.” The clerk told me that the case was defaulted to me, and that I was allowed to leave. However, the clerk had made a mistake. I happened to leave and go downstairs and mentioned this to some people working in the office that this was out of state and that the defendant had written a letter in his absence. I was told to go back upstairs and also present any additional information that I had.

So I went back into the general courtroom and waited as the rest of the names were read off. At the end, the clerk stands to one side of the room, and anyone with questions can approach her. I stood aside and mentioned that the defendant wrote a letter in his absence as he was located out in California. She admitted to making a mistake of announcing the default and took the paperwork off of me. She said the court would probably get back to me within 10 days.

I thought this was over with so I headed back downstairs to finish filling out the separate complaint, this time for copyright infringement. About 5-minutes later, I unexpectedly heard my name mentioned over the intercom and I was told to appear in a separate court room. I scrambled to get back up there. Good thing I didn’t leave because it appears that even the court system doesn’t even have their act always together. That was twice in one morning that I was told erroneous information as to what to do.

I showed up in front of the judge in what seemed to be an informal setting. The best way to describe this was a “cram session.” The judge quickly asked a series of forceful questions and you have to be prepared to answer them with facts backing yourself up. I kept pointing to all of the paperwork he was handed, and he seemed to want to ignore it. In his own words, he quickly (and when I say quick, probably less than 5 minutes) came to a decision that the defendant was lying. He was ready to come to a judgment in my favor. Where my proceeding got held up was in the details – the judge was trying to determine if I was entitled to any extra damages for time lost. He asked if I had anything else to say, and I pointed to the papers once again and said that “it’s all in the paperwork.” The judge looked up at me and replied, “well, it looks like I have some reading to do.” And that was that.

I’m confident that I received a positive judgment for the work I had done. As to any extra damages, I will have to wait about another week before I find out.

The Follow-up

Assuming that nothing “short of freakish” occurs in the interim, I will receive judgment in my favor. As to any extra damages – that is a complete guess at this point. I can’t get inside a judge’s head. At the very least, I should recover payment for the work done as well as my filing fees.

As to whether or not the defendant actually decides to pay or pay promptly is also a best guess. The chances are a little bit better as he is a business owner. I could have additionally obtained (for an additional fee) what the courts call a writ of execution to help make certain that the defendant would follow-up on the judgment by holding some of his assets in check (mind you, this is not a lien on a home – that is costly and usually requires an attorney.) As soon as I receive the final resolution from the court, I will approach the defendant one more time and make it known that I will follow through on items 1-4 of two sections above, entitled “Going Beyond Small Claims Court.” I will also be certain to bring up the topic of copyright infringement as well. If that final email fails to satisfy the judgment in a timely fashion, then I may turn the ruling over to a collections agency.

Moving Forward

I’ve been taught a few important lessons here:

  1. First and foremost, if a potential client is going to be “cheap” with the work requested, then there’s a good chance you don’t want to work with them. If you can avoid it, great.
  2. Do not hand over your images without watermarks on them. You can blend the opacity or screen enough so that the details are still visible. Only remove the watermark upon receipt of payment. It will also make your business operations run a lot more smoothly overall.
  3. Make certain your contracts are very well thought out. If you don’t have one, try to find artist contracts online. You could probably cobble one together to meet most situations. Take the time and make certain that it tries to cover all situations.
  4. Don’t agree to make changes (aside from your own errors) without charging. You can ultimately use your own discretion in this matter (I really don’t recommend this unless it takes a few minutes of your time), but as the saying goes – “you give an inch and they take a mile.” It’s in your best interest to be upfront with your client. You can either build charges for changes into your quote (not recommended), or itemize the costs on an hourly basis afterwards.
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Valuing Your Work

I have a few tips and advice that is applicable to most people running their businesses, freelancers, professional photographers, and artists alike. I thought I’d put it down in writing as I think it would help everyone benefit from developing better working philosophies, strategies, and standards.

Giving Discounts.

I woke-up from a much needed power-nap a couple of hours ago. A history show on Benjamin Franklin was on the television. It so happened to have landed with perfect timing on something I’ve been thinking about recently. A professor went on to say:

“Franklin worked really long hours. He would wake up early to make certain a job was done. He also produced a quality product. But he made sure people knew that he was working long hours.”

The key here is that he made sure people knew. Franklin was a master at marketing. He produced a great product but he didn’t hesitate to let someone know what efforts he put into that product.

This is a similar lesson I learned a long time ago when I first started out. In the beginning, I started out by giving my clients very low prices. I just assumed that they would recognize these low prices and would continue to work with me based on those figures. It turned out to be a completely wrong assumption. Clients would come back with even more changes and it eventually started to wear on me. They didn’t recognize the discount. The problem lies in the fact that you shouldn’t expect a client to be a “mind reader.” If you discount your work, you have to make it known to your client that you are going to give them a break – whether it’s a first time thing, because of the sheer bulk of products you are producing, or because they’ve been a steady and consistent client in the past. One way or another, you have to make it known that you are giving them a break.

Putting in Extra Hours.

If it comes down to extra hours, you may not charge them additionally (I call this “out of courtesy”), but this falls into the same situation. Start getting into the habit of documenting those extra hours you’ve put into your projects. If it ever comes down to extra changes or unreasonable demands that puts other projects into jeopardy, you can pull out your fact sheets and tell them how much extra work you’ve put into their project. If you don’t let them know, then don’t expect them to recognize your extra efforts.

On Keeping Busy (or keeping the ball rolling.)

Every time I call one of my friends, he is constantly busy. You almost have to schedule a time to talk with him. Yes, he happens to produce some kick-ass highly-stylized pieces that are in constant demand, but there’s never a shortage of work for him. The first impression that comes to mind is, “this guy is really good.”

On the other hand, my work in some ways is probably at the higher-end of the photorealism spectrum. They’re not always the best artistic pieces (compared to someone who spends a whole month on one picture) having often been limited by budgets, changes, and time – but all things considered, I think my live projects often turn out very good. In times where it was slow, if a client called up and asked what my schedule looked like, I would tell them frankly that “things were a little bit slow right now.” From an outsider’s perspective, how do you think that is perceived?

Now, I am in no means advocating lying here. I never have. I think when you lie, you are treading on dangerous and unethical territory. But if you are busy, then feel free to make it known. Learn to use this to your advantage. It shows that people are coming to you for work and that others value the work that you do. When you say to someone that you have to schedule time for them, not only does that limit the more exotic requests for changes (and they can get quite demanding), but it also puts you in a position of saying, “hey, if you want to work together then great. I’d be happy to help you out but there’s other clients currently waiting in line. If you put down a retainer and I’ll get back to you on this date.”

It’s similar to passing by a restaurant that has a line going around the corner while your looking for something to eat. You have to stop, scratch your head and think to yourself, “now why is there a huge freakin’ line going down the street?” If you’re an odd-ball like me, you might say “there’s no way I’m going to wait in that line.” But if you continue to pass by that place from week to week, chances are that one day you’ll catch yourself checking it out.

Time is Money (and sanity, and health.)

There – I said it. I hate that statement but it is completely true. When you’ve been busting your butt for two weeks straight, working 16 hour days and weekends – the last thing you want is for additional changes to come through the door. Sometimes you do need time to decompress and get motivated again. Perhaps it’s a walk in the park with your dog, spending time with relatives, spending time with your children, going out for a night on the town – whatever. We are not built like robots. The fact is that you need to build in time for yourself. However, when you’re running a business you also have an obligation to your clients. If you don’t charge for the extra time you put into your services, then not only are you doing a disservice to other fellow artists by undercutting them, but you’re also doing a huge disservice to yourself. Your free time is your free time and if a client is going to occupy that space, you need to make it known that you may charge for any extra hours that you will put into a project. In this way, not only are unreasonable changes (and I say unreasonable simply because most people don’t know how much effort goes into them) are kept to a minimum, but you’re able to keep your motivation and health in somewhat proper balance.

To Sum Things Up.

I hope that some of this advice is useful to my readers. Perhaps a lot of what I said about “valuing one’s own work” is common sense, but at least it may provide some positive reinforcement. I don’t know what a business school or a MBA teaches people, but these lessons are what I’ve come to learn from being in the field and watching other successful people run their practices. When setting-up your own company or freelance business, the best thing to do is to look towards other people who have charted that same territory before you and are doing well. This also applies to other facets in life whether it is love, family, socializing, or finances. Learn from your own mistakes, but also learn from other people’s mistakes that are a few steps ahead of your own. And last but not least, it is not a sign of weakness to recognize when you don’t know all of the answers.

A professor of sociology at Harvard once said to me over a game of chess:

“I may not be the smartest person here, but the one thing that got me to this position in life is that when someone would approach me with a question – if I didn’t know the answer, I’d tell them, ‘I don’t know the answer to that question, but let me get back to you on that.”

Words of wisdom from one of the top professors in this country, let alone the world. And I didn’t have to pay tuition for that single moment of education. All of his life summed up in under 30 seconds. I don’t know to this day if he was alluding to my game of chess (I was getting my butt handed to me), or if he was just making a general statement. If I ever do figure out what he was implying, I’ll be sure to get back to you on that.

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Current Schedule

I’ve said it a few times in other posts – I’ve been slammed with work recently and there doesn’t seem to be any stopping the onslaught. They’re not the huge, multiple rendering and animation projects that I had a couple years back. They don’t pay nearly as handsomely, but they’re small and there’s tons of them. It’s the busiest I’ve ever been in all of the years I’ve been doing this. Combine that with personal items (grocery shopping, phone calls, etc.) and things get crazy.

When my architectural work starts moving, it usually means a few things. First and foremost, consumer confidence is on the rise. People feel like they can spend once again in order to move buildings, rent spaces, and renovate. Development and real estate of course ties directly into the economy and employment. I’m one of the first people to feel that level of optimism amongst people and business sectors, and it usually trickles down to other facets of people’s lives. I’m also one of the first people to feel it when things go sour.

My current schedule for the week looks like this:

  1. Bistro interior modeling, lighting, and renderings.
  2. Bistro exterior changes.
  3. A residential modeling and rendering project.
  4. A library rendering with changes.
  5. An exterior development of an office building.
  6. Changes for a board game development company.
  7. Possibly starting up again on a house for Saudi Arabian royalty (one year delay.)
  8. First time court appearance for a client that flat-out refused to pay then decided to use my work on the front page of his website. I hate to air “dirty laundry”, but that will take a few hours and has taken quite some time to assemble all the facts, emails, renderings, and contracts together. Again, in all the years I’ve been working with some of the biggest clients, I have never had this happen to me.
  9. Creating another website (optional but needed eventually.)
  10. Finish prepping some models for sale (optional but needed eventually.)
  11. Updating the LunarStudio website (optional but needed eventually.)
  12. Creating some marketing brochures (optional but needed eventually.)
  13. Brush up on some Render Element pass techniques.
  14. Sending out some images for a photography website.
  15. Visiting my brother and sister-in-law because they just had a new baby earlier today.
  16. A meeting.

There’s also a few other items in talks:

  1. 8 renderings for a bathroom manufacturing company.
  2. A catalog cover of a boardroom for a company that specializes in modular walls.
  3. Taking 360 virtual reality photographs of a salon located in Boston.
  4. A beach location residence.
  5. A concept of a retail property.

This doesn’t include any other jobs which I may get called up on or may come through. I also have other personal projects which are waiting on the sidelines. Almost each one of those items above typically includes micro-items (wall colors, lighting fixtures, chairs, sofas, tables, etc.) that one has to keep good track of. As you could probably tell from that list, my head is about to completely explode. We’re looking at 16 hour days, 7 days a week for quite some time to come…

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Marketing an Architectural Business

I had a wonderful phone chat with Jeff Stikeman the other day. He took the time out of a very busy week for him to talk and for which I am very grateful. He is a very talented architectural illustrator and architect with close to 20 years of industry experience. We discussed some of the pros and cons to our practices. His work encompasses phases that range from more sketchy types of illustration work to more finalized, illustrative renderings. My work on the other hand tends to lean towards the more photorealistic end of the spectrum. In essence, some of those differences appeals to different types of projects and clients and often serves different purposes.

Jeff has had a significant base of architects and firms to have built his practice upon. A lot of his sources come from word of mouth. That, and the fact that he employs a very high standard of quality, efficiency, and creativity to his work speaks volumes in of itself. He appears to have no shortage of clients – and I hope and firmly believe that will continue well into the future. The aesthetic quality of his work is excellent. If you have a chance, please take a moment to view his websites at:

http://www.jeffstikeman.com

http://jeffstikeman.wordpress.com

As for myself and Lunarstudio, I didn’t have anyone to turn to when I first started out. I literally started from scratch and had to fight to get Lunarstudio started and noticed. That’s not to say that this is any “better” – by no means do I think it is – and in some ways really wish I was in his position instead.

In order to land my first few clients, I spent a solid month on the phone – cold-calling local architects and developers and seeing if anyone needed any work done. Now please keep in mind, I don’t really have much of a sales background and telephone experience either and that proved to be an added challenge. Out of the 200 odd phone calls that I made that month (not including emails and follow-up), I only had one return from a developer and that happened to have been a fairly large client. That project alone gave me a huge jump-start in business. From then on, I was able to use that one single project as a base to launch all my other projects.

But still till this day, my work is not a constant flow of projects. I don’t always have the luxury of being able to essentially, “pick and choose.” I have times where I am very busy and times where the work is completely still. I’d much rather be in a position to have work constantly flowing through the door. It’s starting to look like Lunarstudio and I might eventually get to that point, but many years later it is still proving to be somewhat challenging. Marketing art-related services in general is a very tricky subject.

Jeff accurately described my approach to marketing Lunarstudio as “casting a wide net.” I tend to throw my work out on to the web (through my website) and not rely on word of mouth alone. I put a lot of emphasis on my website’s search engine rankings and Internet visibility. While I get a lot of inquiries and hits, a good percentage of them turn out to be less substantial than I’d like them to be. On the other hand, I do get a lot of different inquiries – everything from large scale, city-sized project inquiries to logo creation and dairy farms out in Wisconsin. The varying projects I get approached with can keep you on your toes, but sometimes I spend more time responding to people and job applications than doing the actual work itself. Lunarstudio has a lot of exposure, but the quality (financially-speaking) of returns on being marketing mostly through the Internet seems to be watered-down.

In a nutshell, we both had very different approaches to starting out.

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