Working for Yourself

7 Lessons Learned Going to WordPress.org

May 17, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 9 Comments

I’d been keeping my e-learning samples on a hosted site and my blog on wordpress.com, which WordPress hosts for free. I didn’t like the jagged user experience of following links between the two sites, so I opted to move my blog over to my hosted site, where wordpress.org must be used, to join my e-learning samples. This is the tale of that move.

After an eventful 3 weeks taking my site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, I thought I should leave some lessons-learned breadcrumbs behind to help others through the not-always-enchanted forest between the two.

1. Find the Right Host

Can Their Servers Handle WordPress? I already had a hosted site without WP installed. This is what it took to get it going:
1. When their quick WP install failed for me, support installed it and it ran like glue. Their server couldn’t save down the latest PHP script on their Windows servers and they said I’d have to move to a Linux server.
2. Linux has been OK, but as I sat down to write this, my site was loading so slowly I had to call support because I couldn’t even load the dashboard to write a new post.
3. My host said today they released a WP-specific package with WP-dedicated servers and support, and that the transition would be seamless. I’m giving them one last try, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
  All hosts and servers aren’t the same. They have to be WordPress-savvy.

Can Their People Handle WordPress? Once I reached the permalink redirect debacle (#7 below) this happened:
1. The host couldn’t figure out where its own 404 redirect was pointing and desperate tech people started throwing random HTML files into the root of my directory that just made it worse.
2. After many calls I finally stumbled across a support person who looked at the primary .htaccess file and realized it didn’t have the 8 simple lines of code it needed to make WP work. That was a breakthrough.
3. Then the host randomly wiped it a few days later. I figured out how to fix it myself, but now I check several times a day to be sure my 301 redirects are still working. It’s kind of ridiculous.
  Make sure your host has people who are skilled at WordPress.
Ask Others Which Hosts They Use & Like: As things were looking bad during my test phase, I posted this thread in the Articulate forums and got lots of good recommendations for hosting options and much more. If you’re going to do this, check it out.

2. Set Up & Test Your New Site Before Redirecting from WordPress.com

Export your content from the old site using Dashboard >Tools > Export.
Install a plug-in so you can import your content. I used the WordPress.com Importer plug-in.
Choose a theme. Even if you paid for a premium one on WordPress.com, you can’t take it with you. Look for a free or premium one via Themes > Dashboard, or shop elsewhere. Be sure it’s got the features you want. I wanted a lot of control over fonts, colors, layout, and images – plus access to the CSS and a responsive design for mobile devices. If you’re buying a theme, don’t assume it has everything you want. Find out before you spend the money.
Set up your theme. Make it look and act the way you want using the theme options provided.
Customize your theme, if needed. For mine, I changed the fonts to Google Fonts by adding some code to the CSS. My theme designer had good documentation about how to do that. The only thing I hated about my theme was the ugly gray background added to captioned images. I got lucky and my brilliant instructional designer colleague Ashley Chiasson was kind enough to figure out some CSS to fix it, but normally you’d be heading back to your theme designer to do a custom fix, which means more money.

3. Have Your Security Options in Place

On WordPress.com, they handled the security. Now it’s up to you, so be sure you and/or your host have some protection in place. I tried out a recommended security plug-in, but uninstalled it while troubleshooting all of the other issues. Instead of mucking up my WP install any further with more plug-ins, I opted for back-end security from my host.

4. Have Your Back-Up Plan in Place

On WordPress.com, they backed it up. (Though if you deleted your own content, you were on your own.) There are lots of options. Again, I went with a full back-up service provided by my host, but I also make sure I export a back-up of my content every time I post or make similar changes.

5. Redirect Your Site from WordPress.com

After you’re really sure the site looks and feels and acts the way you want, you’re ready to redirect from WordPress.com. It costs $30 per year, but works well. Just be aware of my final tip at the end of #7 below.

6. Install the JetPack Plug-In & Choose Options Carefully

JetPack adds some helpful features. For me, it made it easy to bring over followers/subscribers and I like their stats display better. There are a lot of options, but I’d suggest only activating what you need. JetPack features are the number one things that tend to interfere with my theme’s features, and the Photon one resulted in very poor-quality images.

7. Coddle Your Permalinks

I always say (and mean) that everything is a gift. Once I realized that not one link from my old site could possibly forward to my new one without going to a host-supplied 404 page that made it look like my site no longer existed (#1 above), I knew I had a real gift on my hands. My host’s lack of WP knowledge was half of it, but permalink issues were the other half.

My permalinks completely lost their minds on WordPress.org. After troubleshooting (could have been several causes), I ended up having to go back to the default permalink format, which then changed all of my permalinks yet again.
I found the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plug-In that let me set up 301 (permanent, individual URL) redirects for every page and post. It still failed until my host figured out that they hadn’t set up my .htaccess file properly, but once that was resolved, this plug-in worked beautifully and was a lifesaver.
Pay attention to your permalinks when you redirect from WordPress.com. The redirect will only go to the exact URL you want if the permalinks are identical, and if you experience any permalink insanity like I did, you’ll want to use a good 301 redirect plug-in.

How Did You Become an Instructional Designer?

May 16, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 2 Comments

The Tweeted Taunt

The fine folks over at ttc Innovations were inspired by Cammy Bean‘s The Accidental Instructional Designer to ask me (and all other IDs) how I (we all) got here. History proves I can be goaded and challenged into any number of things (note my extensive Articulate Challenges activity) – and this Twitter tactic worked perfectly.

Just One Problem

The only thing is I don’t have a great “accidental” story. The only accident was when I discovered, after taking a whole lot of college German because I loved it, that the only way to continue that particular romp in the park was to get a grad degree, and that involved teaching German if I wanted the university to pay for it.

Instructional Design as a Survival Tactic

After playing through the terror in my head – (“I’m not a public speaker!” “My colleagues are native speakers of German!” “I’ve never taught anything and I’m starting by teaching real classes that real students really pay for at a real university?!”) – I just did it.

Four things ended up making me incredibly successful:

The terror. My response was to be the best-prepared human who could walk into that classroom. I’d spend 4 to 6 hours every night – 5 days a week – designing the next day’s lesson, using methods nearly identical to what I now use to create e-learning.
The University of Oregon’s wise move to require classes on instructional education before allowing just any fool to start teaching their classes. This was my intro to instructional design and I loved it.
An outstanding and extremely forward-thinking textbook. It provided a good framework for teaching the specifics of the language, but the real focus was on creating a fantastic environment for endless creativity and real practice.
My adoration of the topic. I’d just returned from a year of grad school at the Universität Konstanz in Germany and my enthusiasm for learning German, traveling, and being an exchange student was literally inescapable.

I didn’t realize how well classes were going until the students coming in for the class after mine began stopping me to ask what the heck I was doing in there. All they could hear were rounds of intense group concentration, roars of laughter, and sustained cheers and applause (for their peers!) – followed by happy chatty people exiting at the end. I guess that wasn’t what the class after mine was like. Crazily, I never even heard all of that because I was so intensely in the moment of what we were doing. It was awesome.

Then There Was More Stuff

After that there was more education and more teaching and lots of other stuff (it would take at least 20 blog posts to get through it all), but in the end I decided I just wanted to be an independent ID, which is what I wrote about here.

Share Your Story, Too!

I hope that’s what ttc Innovations had in mind when they took to Twitter to call me out. I suggest you play along too! Share your story by visiting their blog and/or blogging then tweeting using the hashtag #MyIDStory – and have fun!

This is Why Freelancers Need Floaties

March 24, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 11 Comments

Select Image to Launch Demo

This week’s Articulate E-Learning Heroes Challenge is to create a photo collage that tells a story.

I’ve just gotten home from a (great!) week at the E-Learning Guild’s Learning Solutions Conference in Orlando, and the theme that kept coming up was freelancing. Not just in sessions, but in countless random conversations, and I found myself offering a lot of advice to hopeful freelancers.

I Smell a Theme

So because there’s only so much space in my head and this is the topic currently on tap in there, my photo collage story this week is about a guy who wants to freelance. The points I’ve included are a summary I quickly put together for this piece, but it’s similar to what I was sharing all week.

The Story

Select Image to Launch Demo

If I’m going to tell a story, I need a starting point. So I overlaid our (miserable) hero on top of the rest of the photo collage so that I could establish his yearning-to-go-freelance motivation. The underlying photos and their content, each of which reveals a portion of our hero’s journey, can be visited in any order. And of course you get to see the result of his efforts at the end.

Visual Design

I kept the visual design pretty simple. The photos are framed in a pseudo-Polaroid fashion. The caption font on the top photo is Dawning of a New Day. The title font on the pop-ups is Swiss921 BT, and the main pop-up font is Candy Round BTN Condensed.

I reused a beach and palm tree from a recent post about freelancing, mostly because I wanted the tree for the end scene.

And I reused poor Ian again. I’ve forced that poor man into service as an airline pilot and a beer-guzzling traveler in recent weeks and wanted to give him a rest, but I needed someone who could fit into the outfit at the end, and he had the perfect figure. (Sorry, guy.)

Storyline Design

When clicked, each photo in the collage pops up on a slide layer with more info. Then I have each photo disappear after viewing it. That way I was able to set up a new layer of interest below.

That interest includes having each photo, in miniature, drop down into the palm tree and hang there like an ornament. You can then click on those ornaments to review their content. I did this by adding a second slide layer for each collage photo.

And, of course, I had to show Ian’s transformation after he’d followed his own plan, but I could only show that after all photos had been viewed. To do this, I created a variable for each photo. After all of them have been visited, Ian and his final outfit are triggered to appear.

See the Result!

You can see Ian in all his freelance glory here. Enjoy!

“How Did You Get Started as a Freelancer?”

March 7, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 4 Comments

“How did you get started as a freelancer?” is the most common question I’ve gotten in the last 10 years, and it’s a great one.

There are an infinite number of ways you can get started, and everyone’s story is different. But in case it helps you, or any fledgling freelancers you may know, here’s how I got started and how I continue to build.

My Sneaky Plan

I knew a year or two before taking the plunge that I couldn’t take being an employee anymore. At the time, I was a software and training consultant on the road.

I opted to skip all of the usual fretting and worrying about how to start a new business, how to keep money coming in without a regular paycheck, how to reposition myself in the marketplace, and how to find new clients. Fear and worry are a waste of time. I took the quickest route I could think of.

My brilliant idea was to pick one potential client and sneak up on them. And that’s what I did.

Client #1: They Thought They Were Getting an Intern

I started by finding a certificate program at a local college that included an internship requirement. It was a mostly-online program that took a little over a year, and I completed it in my spare time while traveling for work. I already had plenty of degrees and certificates and experience, so I didn’t need the classes or the certificate. They were fine, but not necessary. The key was the internship.

My strategy was to leverage my well-connected instructors to get into the door of an unsuspecting company that thought it was just getting a contract, freelance intern.

It worked like a charm. As soon as I was approved to find an internship, which was my responsibility to find, I put just one feeler into my network asking for what I wanted. And a connection of one of those well-connected instructors came through.

Within two hours I was communicating with a woman looking for an intern to do instructional design work. She immediately took me on at the “intern” rate, but within a week or two, as soon as I’d finished my first assignment, she took me up to the full rate. I contracted from her for several years. All of those projects were for instructor-led-training.

Client #2: I Built It and They Came

When I decided to transition to e-learning I learned as much as I possibly could about it, invested in the tools, learned the tools, and ever-so-casually mentioned to everyone I talked to that I was now doing e-learning. Within three weeks I got a call from a large company asking if I was available for some e-learning projects, and they’ve kept me busy ever since.

Client #3: Expanding Through Volunteering

As busy as I was, I knew I had to develop more clients over time. So I decided to find a large nonprofit and volunteer my services to design and develop whatever e-learning they might need. They were thrilled. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for their content several years later – but they stay in touch and are very sweet and always thank me for helping and being on the team. They just can’t get it together.

In the meantime, one of their directors moved to a different nonprofit. I made the same volunteer offer at the new place, and she said she’d let me know if they ever decided to start doing e-learning. A few weeks later she called and said they’d decided and that they’d like me to work on contract. They’ve kept me busy for the last few years, too.

Clients #4 and Beyond

Others have become clients just by sitting next to me at a conference and asking for my card, seeing me on LinkedIn and contacting me to do work (this happens quite a bit), and by word of mouth from current clients.

And just today I may have a new one who saw my work in the Articulate E-Learning Heroes Challenges that David Anderson puts together. (The flowers are on the way!)

You’ll notice I do no advertising or marketing or promotion, other than getting myself out there a little bit and doing some minor networking in ways that are very natural – including some blogging and tweeting. I put far more of my energy into learning more and doing the best work I can, and everything else just flows.

But if you’re a natural salesperson and joyful networker – great! My advice is to stick with the approach that feels most natural for you, because that’s the right one.

So that’s how I got started, and that’s how I keep cruising along.

If you’re a current or future freelancer, does any of that help or give you new ideas?