We made a pitch recently for one of potential clients - unfortunately we lost the deal.
But the remains of the pitch gave us unexpected results… My website about the pitch displays first on the Google results page, and the client's website - fourth!
That's why it is no longer sufficient to merely “make a website” - it needs to be done prpoerly to allow people to find you when they look for… you :)
If so - then your basic resource should be the Presentation Zen Blog!
And especially read these tips here.
You'd be amazed how much these “small” things mean (and how thin a boundary between a good presentation and a boring monologue is!)
No, you don't have to be on top of every news that comes into your RSS reader every day.
You don't have to be proficient in all new technologies that appear daily.
But you can at least try, and I think you should try.
Not to know it “all” but at least know the advantages and disadvantages of each solution, e.g. using Object-Relational Mapping as an alternative to Stored Procedures in MS SQL which return DataSets.
To know the difference between various coding techniques - will you want to develop each “page” of your application by copying the code from the previous ones, or will you embrace the Custom Controls mechanism built in into ASP.Net? Will you mix HTML with PHP code, or maybe you'll invest your time in learning how to properly use template engines?
All these things might seem like a hassle and a waste of time - because you already know HOW to do something. And that fact itself - “know how” - if not taken lightly - might badly damage your attitude towards learning new skills and technologies.
You might be good at “doing websites”, but if you won't be interested in “the greener grass on the other side” you'll always be doing just that - what you “know how”.
Sorry guys, but the technology world now runs as crazy, before I managed to use Ruby on Rails for my first project we already have the second version of the framework ready, and some companies are springing up which specialize solely in that technology! Awesome!
And scary, at the same time.
So, what will you start learning Today?
Don’t take this literally - ISPs are great when they don’t cause you any problems, but no matter how good yours is - try to have the latest backups of your data/system/code in your own network, and preferrably - on a physical media.
You never know when you’re going to need that.
Even if you use code versioning tool - because not only versioned code can be at stake.
You might have some data on the live servers which you can’t reproduce, whether it being user information, some images that you’ve uploaded using the CMS, or maybe recent transactions.
I strongly recommend automating this backup process for the sake of peace of mind, because even if your ISP does provide backups, it won’t always be quick to recover something from them - the more control you have over your information the better.
And as history shows - not every ISP includes backups in their offer.
The automatic backups of data stored in other networks aren’t so easy to achieve on Windows platform, but on Unix/Linux it shouldn’t be a problem as long as you have enabled the SSH access to your accounts - few scripts should do the trick.
Obviously this might be a huge security hole, but you just have to weigh the pros and cons.
Did you know, that the full version of the Mozilla suite includes a fully-featured Javascript Debugger?
It really comes in handy when diagnosing these stubborn Javascript errors you sometimes encounter - especially in the age of Ajax applications.