How do you go about interviewing a web programmer to make sure that his code isn’t as rumpled as his shirt?

We’ve been hiring at Sebo Marketing, and my experience leads me to focus on four main areas when I talk to potential hires:

Four Parts of a Web Programmer Interview

1. General Knowledge

   It’s usually a good idea to try and take stock of a candidate’s knowledge by asking some basic questions that cover a wide range of topics in web programming to test the breadth of his or her skill set. The W3Schools has quizzes for XHTML, CSS, PHP, and many other topics. These aren’t a perfect measure of someone’s knowledge, and some of the questions aren’t all that great (Like the one in the XHTML test that asks whether or not XHTML will replace HTML), but they can help you get a general idea. If your candidate misses more than 5 or 6 questions, you may need to keep looking.

2. Specific Task Performance

   I try to give interviewees a specific task or small project that will utilize a mix of skills to solve a (limited) real-world problem. They don’t even have to finish the task—it’s useful to see how far they got and how they were going about solving the problem.

3. Portfolio of Work

   In order to learn web programming, one must do it. There’s no escaping it. If potential hires don’t have a portfolio or aren’t willing to share it, they may never have done any real work. Even first-time hires need to code something that they can show. In my mind, a candidate’s portfolio is the most important gauge of ability in the interview.

4. Overall Fit

   Even if a candidate can write AJAX in his sleep and is helping write the upcoming CSS3 spec, he still may not make sense as an employee for your company. If salary/wage requirements are too high or if a part-time hire can’t work the proper hours due to scheduling issues, for example, then things just won’t work out. Candidates that aren’t a good fit for your organization are hard to pass on when they are well qualified, but trying to compromise on requirements and needs so they can work for you is a dangerous thing.

You’re Hired!

If your candidate can answer general web programming questions, solves your sample task, has a portfolio of well-crafted projects, and fits well with your organization, offer him or her a job! If there are a few problem areas, see if the situation can be managed through training, trial hire periods, or lower pay. If there are lots of red flags, many missed questions, and no samples of previous work, be warned! Good luck with your interviews.

Every once in a while, it’s important to step back and evaluate how you are doing when it comes to the fundamentals of your field or industry. Because my field is Internet marketing and websites, I came up with 10 questions you can ask yourself to determine how well your site and online strategy are working.

10 Website Questions

1. What kind of Web presence do I need?

   Don’t worry too much about what kind of web presence you have just yet. Think carefully about what kind of presence you really need. Do you need an informational site, an e-commerce platform, or a community or network site? Which suits your business best?

2. What does my website need to accomplish?

   Is your site primarily meant to distribute information? Sell a product? Get subscribers? What are the end results you need to achieve?

3. Who do I want to visit my site?

   Think about your ideal audience. Are they tech-lingo-speaking engineers? C-suite managers? Teenage girls with generous spending habits? Do you need to serve more than one audience? How will you serve multiple audiences? Some reading about personas might help at this point.

4. Who is visiting my site?

   Do you really know who is visiting your site? This can be tricky to determine, but there are clues to who it is that is viewing your site. A web analytics package will go a long way in helping you to determine what content and which calls to action are resonating with your current audience. You can also ask your visitors directly—a short, online survey can do a lot to help unveil your visitors’ feelings and background.

5. How will I drive traffic to my site?

   There are many methods for driving traffic, and you need to figure out which will be most appropriate for your site and which are the highest priority. Natural search engine results? Pay-per-click ads? Viral, word-of-mouth marketing? Links from related sites? Press releases?

6. What is it that I want my visitors to do or learn?

   These actions are the baby steps towards achieving your main purpose in #2 above. Do you want your visitors to read a certain page, download a whitepaper, and then contact sales? Do you want them to read product reviews, look at a photo gallery, add a product to their cart, and check out? What are the most important actions that lead to achieving your goals?

7. How can I engage my visitors?

   Often the problem with a site is not getting visitors to come to a site, but making them stay. How can you connect with your audience and encourage them to stick around? What (small) set of calls to action are going to be used to motivate your visitors to explore, learn, and enjoy your site?

8. How can I increase repeat visits?

   How do you make a website “sticky?” Is your site a one-trick pony? Does your site have more to offer visitors at a later date?

9. How will my website be built and managed? In-house or outsourced?

   Once you’ve determined what your site needs to be, you need to think about how it will be built and maintained. Remember, it’s often the case that whatever site and system you have now is a sunk cost and therefore shouldn’t unduly influence your decision about what to do going forward.

10. What kind of website can I afford?

    Once you know what you need and want, you have to look at what you realistically can have, at least in the near term. You may have to prioritize your goals and simply try to accomplish as much as you can with your limited resources.

More Than 10 Answers

These 10 basic website questions don’t have perfect, unchanging answers, even for the same company at two different times. The best answer often changes with growth or challenges your company is facing. Each question is also open-ended, so there are multiple answers to each one. The main point is simply to think about what’s important regularly so that your company or site follows its optimal path on the web.

The Internet is a fantastic place. Websites are simply clamoring for your attention, and many of them will give you something for free just for stopping by. You don’t have to pay to access most web sites, either. You can browse or search for just about anything and find a free resource that fills your needs. Articles, indexes, ebooks, .pdfs, and images are everywhere.

Accessing these resources is easy, legal, and free. How you use these materials, however, can be like walking a tightrope—there are lots of ways to screw up, and many of them hurt.

Images Are Easy to Grab

If you need images for a project, it’s really easy to grab images off the web using Google Image Search, Microsoft Live Search Images, or any stock photo site. Some of them even come formatted just the way you need them. With others, a little work with a smudge tool or creative use of cropping removes watermarking and makes the images look just like they came from your copy of Photoshop or digital camera. Is it ok to gather images this way? We have to look into the definition of a copyright to know for sure.

What Is a Copyright?

Copyrights are intended to protect a creator’s rights to the content he or she created, especially with regard to financial compensation for the use of the content.

Private incentives to create are supported by the exclusive rights that owners of copyright enjoy. Copyright owners (or their assignees) have the right to carry out or authorize reproduction and distribution of their work; preparation of derivative works; and, for literary, musical, and various visually based works, the public performance or display of their work. (1)

How Do I Know Something is Copyrighted?

The U.S. Copyright Act states that a copyright exists once an “original work of authorship [is] fixed in any tangible medium of expression . . . from which [it] can be perceived, reproduced or otherwise communicated.” (2) Thus, images “fixed” to files and hard drives are copyright, by default and without notice, the moment they are created. Everything on the Internet is copyrighted—how you use content is simply a matter of what permissions the creator has given you for its use.

Infringing on Copyright Holders’ Rights and the Consequences for Doing So

Using images from websites found through a search engine image search or from stock photo sites without permission or payment is infringing on the copyright holder’s rights. This includes creating derivative works.

There are some exceptions to copyright rules that fall under “fair use,” but most of these are in relation to educational purposes or making copies of something you already paid for the right to use. It you are going to use an image or other content for monetary gain (like on a blog with ads), then you definitely need to follow copyright law.

If you infringe on a copyright holder’s rights, there are three general outcomes. You might not get caught, but then you have to live with knowing you broke the law. You might be caught and asked to pay fines or damages. Finally, you might get caught and have someone take you to court.

Getting caught does happen, too. I have recently seen at least two companies that have had to pay fines. One had to pay $240,000 for the use of images it didn’t have the rights to. It nearly sank the company.

Play by the Rules

It’s more expensive to get caught than it is to pay for images up front, and all three outcomes for infringing on copyright holders’ rights reflect very poorly on your character. If you respect copyright holders’ rights, then you can justly expect others to do the same and you can morally enforce your rights. You could also put a line on your web site or on your work that states you comply with all copyright laws. This marketing statement may help reward you for following the law. Finally, following copyright law will let you be comfortable in your own skin—you’ll be able to feel that you are an honest person.

Some people have wondered: is Blog Rush against the Google AdSense terms of service?

Blog Rush, as I see it, is NOT against Google AdSense’s terms of service.

The Google AdSense blog says:

As many of you already know, our program policies strictly prohibit any means of artificially generating ad impressions or clicks, including third-party services such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, auto-surf, and click-exchange programs. These programs offer incentives for users to view web pages or click on ads, resulting in activity that is harmful to our advertisers.

Google wants to make sure that site and blog owners aren’t providing people with an incentive (beyond normal interest and curiosity) to click on AdSense links.

Blog Rush Is in the Clear

If you examine each part of the quote above, you can see that Blog Rush does not violate any of the statements made.

No one is paid to click on AdSense ads after they land on a page they found through Blog Rush. Doing so does not result in a reward for visitors.

No one is being paid to surf or autosurf—in money or clicks. Even if you surf your own site for an extra 1000 pages, you’ve only earned impressions. If your article titles suck, no one is going to click them. This will be even more true as cheating is weeded out of the impression system. You can see this even now—the cheaters are generating thousands of extra impressions, but no extra clicks. Click-through rates are simply falling. If someone does click through, it’s because they are truly interested in what you have to say.

Blog Rush is not click exchange—no one is using the system to agree to click each other’s AdSense links.

There is no incentive to view other web sites’ pages.

Because Blog Rush in no way affects visitor behavior in relation to AdSense ads, it does not violate the terms of service. So go ahead and join Blog Rush and see if it increases your blog traffic.

No? Good. Otherwise I’d be skewering you in this post, too.

We all know the type, though—two-faced, double-dealing, hypocritical, dealing behind closed doors, polished smile with forked tongue, amicable but back-stabbing.

A Real-life Weasel

I have a recent example. No real names or specific information will be used because I’m not 100% sure I have all the information correct and I wouldn’t want to ruin someone’s name due to inaccuracy, but this is the way things appear to me.

A young entrepreneur I know, we’ll call him Adam, had some really good ideas and decided to start a business. He figured out a process that is tricky and has a learning curve too big for the average consumer, and so he began a service to carry out the process for customers. Things got moving, but Adam quickly figured out that to hit critical mass he had to get some outside help. He asked a friend to invest in his company and a relative to help manage the business.

Being an entrepreneur, Adam continued to have good ideas related to the process he created. For some reason, he didn’t feel like sharing them with his investor or his manager. He began working on his ideas parallel to his first business. Eventually, they were developed enough that Adam left his first business to start a new business. The interesting thing is that the new business is in the same industry, performing the same service, in the same geographical area. The only difference is that his new business incorporates his new ideas and doesn’t involve his investor or manager.

Analysis of a Weasel

Why was Adam willing to stab his friend/investor and family member/manager in the back?

Maybe it was greed. He wanted a bigger share of the profits from his good ideas for himself.

Maybe it was bad personal skills. Adam couldn’t work with his investor or his manager very well, and rather than resolve issues, he decided to just leave.

Maybe it was malice. He was mad at his investor and/or manager for a perceived wrong and wanted to punish them.

We may never know with Adam, but these reasons usually point at a flaw in the weasel, not his situation or coworkers.

Consequences of Being a Weasel

Despite the immediate gains that a weasel may reap, there are some negative effects:

1. I will never do business with Adam, and I will try and persuade anyone who is considering doing business with him that it isn’t a good idea. I can only look at him with contempt for what he did, and I can’t trust him. In general, a weasel can expect to lose the trust and confidence of some (or all!) of his associates.
2. Depending on the contracts he signed, Adam may have done/be doing something illegal. For example, there are often non-compete clauses or issues of intellectual property at stake. The process may have been associated with the business and not Adam himself, which means he may be stealing his former company’s intellectual property to use in his second company. In general, if weasels take actions that are illegal (and not just unethical), they can expect to be caught eventually. The odds are certainly against them.
3. Adam may work for a while with his new business and realize that it is going to fail, that it isn’t as successful or efficient or profitable as his last business. Weasels often don’t realize how good they have it until they’ve burnt their bridges on the way to something that appears better, but turns out not to be.

There are lots of ways to be a weasel, some of which are illegal, some of which are not. The reason you would be called a weasel, though, is because they are all unethical. Be careful about how you deal with people and make promises. If you change your deal or break your promises for your own benefit, you risk being labeled a weasel and facing some or all of the consequences that come with being a weasel.

We’ve released a new version of SeboMarketing.com!

Old Site

The old version of SeboMarketing.com had a number of problems with it. Many of these problems fell into “The cobbler’s children have no shoes” category—as Internet marketers, we know better than to make some of the mistakes that were being made, but we’ve been so focused on our clients’ sites that we neglected our own.

Click to Enlarge

Table-based Layout, Invalid HTML

Our site was put together with a dated version of DreamWeaver, and so the layout was based on a series of nested tables and the HTML was awful. The use of CSS was limited, and the code was bloated and full of presentational elements and markup.

Too Little, Stagnant Content

The overall size of the site was less than 30 pages. The content hadn’t been updated to show some of our new clients, any news from Sebo Marketing, or even new copyright dates.

Insufficient Navigation

Perhaps the greatest sin for a site that is meant to have a clear conversion path and to present Sebo Marketing in a good light is the fact that its navigation was confusing and inadequate. It was difficult to find the client bios or case studies that had been placed on the site, and it was nearly impossible to know what part of the site you were on.

New Site

The new version of SeboMarketing.com is much improved over its predecessor. Besides a visual update, we have made the following improvements:

Click to Enlarge

Valid HTML, CSS Layout

Because it’s a new site, there are probably some few mistakes left lurking in the HTML of the site, but overall SeboMarketing.com is now 98% valid. The layout and presentation have been effectively separated with the use of stylesheets. Maintenance and the next visual update to the site should be a breeze.

Updated Content

We updated and added a lot of content. We have all of our clients whose sites we’ve completed listed, and we have case studies to show the success we’ve had since we last updated our site. We’ve also posted some informational articles about different aspects of Internet marketing.

Clear Navigation

The navigation on the site is leaps and bounds better. A more complete list of options is presented, and a highlighting scheme for showing the visitor where they are on the site has been put in place.

Additional Credibility

Finally, since we last updated our site, Sebo Marketing has been recognized as an Adwords Qualified Company by Google. Pay Per Click advertising is an important facet of our service offerings, and being an Adwords Qualified Company strengthens the trust that our clients, both current and potential, can have in us.

In conclusion, we’re happy with our new site, and we’d love to have you come take a look sometime.

Many user-generated content sites face one (or several) problems, including the following:

1. Copyright Issues

   Site users occasionally post content that is copyright, or steal the content generated by others on the site.

2. Quality Issues

   Without an incentive to do high-quality work, users will post “just good enough” (or “not quite good enough!”) content to fill a particular purpose.

3. Quantity Issues

   Without motivation to create more, communities don’t have enough users contributing content.

A Solution to Some of User-Generated Content’s Problems

Getty Images, which specializes in all sorts of digital images, has purchased Scoopt, a company that is using a new model for acquiring and distributing user-generated images. Users who contribute images that are chosen for distribution are compensated with a percentage (currently 40%) of the image’s sale price.

This model could be a solution to issues two and three from the list above—a financial incentive would motivate the public to submit high-quality (more likely to be chosen) images more frequently.

I think this is a novel approach to an application that could really use the “wisdom of the masses,” and perhaps one that could be applied to other content-types or industries.

Is there anything that your customer-base or audience could do for you that you wouldn’t mind paying for?

People are the most decisive factor in your company.

Think about it: without people, who would be running the computers, operating the machines, or answering the phones? Who would be buying anything that you sell?

I know that this is definitely an obvious observation, but I thought I would take the time to make you think about it again. It’s so obvious, and we have often thought through who is involved in our business, and thus we tend to forget that the human element is the most important element.

How Can People Be More Decisive?

What can you do to make the people involved with your company happier and more effective?

What are your customers asking for? What need can you fill for them? What pain or irritation can you remove from their lives?

What do your employees need to work more efficiently? What hampers them from meeting (or even setting!) goals? How can you help your employees to be more motivated?

Just remember to periodically look at how each part of your company affects the people involved. People will thank you.

Or are you like me?

I had a recent experience where I didn’t get what I needed to understand, and I didn’t even know what I needed to know. It was one of those situations where my lack of experience was so profound that I couldn’t even possibly be expected to understand what I didn’t know or to discover it without being told.

What They Don’t Teach You In School…

There are two things that I didn’t learn in school that life had to teach me in other ways. First, school teaches us so much about success and avoiding failure that we don’t know how to make, and recover from, mistakes. Risk taking and risk management is not encouraged or taught. Innovation isn’t encouraged or rewarded, either. In fact, if you don’t follow the prescribed system, you get punished, and there is no reward for exceeding expectations. All this changes when you’re not in school. Risk management is a vital skill, and innovation is hopefully seen as a good thing and rewarded.

The other thing that really cannot be learned in school is what things are like in a real-world, full-time, non-internship, graduated work environment. This is where I had some shortcomings lately. I had some inaccurate expectations of what my work environment would be like, and because I have not been graduated and employed long enough to have experience with this situation, there was no way I could know. This problem for new graduates is universal enough that my current employer has previously avoided hiring fresh graduates, preferring that they learn their first lessons somewhere else.

Getting It

So I spent the last two weeks recovering from some mistakes I made and learning some lessons I had to learn at some point as a new (almost a year ago) graduate. Don’t get frustrated when you run into situations like mine—much of the time, you can’t even be expected to know any better, and we all have to learn to recover from mistakes. Just focus on mitigating and repairing damage and learning your lesson correctly the first time so that you can move on to your next set of challenges.

Let’s imagine that you have a hot new web service. An AJAX-powered, Web 2.0, community-based Google killer. Let’s also assume that, like most new web services, you have limited time to reach critical mass and profitability before you run out of money.

How Do You Promote Your Service?

So what do you do to promote your service? What methods are available to those who are strapped for cash and time?

• Viral Campaign

  Create a video, contest, game, or activity that people want to pass on to their friends and that uses or mentions your service.

• Press Releases

  Put a press release out to every possible effective PR source. Accurately describe the benefits of using your service.

• Reviews

  Ask bloggers, magazine and newspaper columnists, technology pundits, futurists, educators, and other influential experts or members of the media to have a look at your service and share what they think.

• Word of Mouth

  Encourage, promote, and assist people to take the effort to share

• Pay-Per-Click

  You could pay to drive traffic to your site, but this would only work for a start-up under the above conditions if the cost per click was low and competition sparse.

In short, you should gratefully accept any interest or exposure for your product, especially if you are receiving qualified prospects.

Mum’s the Word

What would make you swear off one of these methods? Expense is a big one that might be involved in a few of the items listed above. What else? Not much.

But that’s precisely what one particular service is doing. ChaCha Live Search’s user agreement has a clause that limits its guides from asking people to become guides in public forums, blogs, or classifieds. Let’s think about this for a moment: ChaCha could potentially be receiving large numbers of interested, qualified guides, but is limiting itself to the people who fall into its guides’ close group of friends and family.

That seems silly to me. ChaCha is dramatically limiting the speed at which word of mouth can travel by limiting who its guides can invite. What’s wrong with the total strangers who express an interest in ChaCha and have the skill to do a good job? Nothing. And what would ChaCha have to lose if it accidentally let someone less skilled or interested through? Nothing. So why clam up its guides, its most effective advocates?

Breaking the Silence

Instead of clamping down on what people can say about you or your service (especially legally), you should try to help people to discuss and promote your service. Make it easy for them, and create incentives that will attract the right kind of people, rather than controlling the methods by which the word can be spread. Remember, your promotional methods will be vitally important to the success of your service, and you don’t want to punish or limit those who are helping you.