As a freelance web programmer, I am often contracted by other web developers to write custom widgets for their projects. These widgets generally require adding some rules to the stylesheet and - prior to today - I would just write these rules into a CSS section in the demo page with a note that they needed to be included.

While this isn't a bad method, it can really get confusing on complex sites or when the widget itself grows into a mini-application like this one. In fact, it had become so cumbersom that my client, a much more experienced web developer than myself, was unable to get it working properly!

Ugh, how embarrassing!!!

It is clearly not my client's responsibility to understand my code and wrestle it into their project... So I asked to refactor the widget into something more manageable.

How to Give Great Code

The solution is actually very simple and involves two steps.

1. Nearly all of my projects include the jQuery framework, as did this one, so I wrapped all the code into jQuery plug-in.
2. I used the excellent jQuery.css() function to put all the essential CSS rules into the markup.

The combination of these changes gave the project a very clean and simple interface.

What was the response to my changes, you ask?

"Sweet - that works instantly"

Music to my ears.

My feelings about the legitimacy of the offer aside…

I’ve been meaning to sit down had have a beer with him so we could discuss his internet marketing strategy but our busy schedules just haven’t aligned lately.

Before spending money to drive any kind of traffic to a website, I encourage you to ask yourself - is it ready for traffic? Otherwise, you might be “putting the cart before the horse”.

Consider the following questions as you ponder the state of your website:

• Why do you want visitors to your site?
• What actions do your visitors need to take in order to achieve your objectives?
• How much money are you willing to spend to find a visitor who will take the desired action?
• How much money do you expect to make from the average visitor who completes those actions?

What I’m getting at is this, if your website isn’t designed to monetize your visitors then it is far too early to consider driving traffic to it.

There are some simple (yet very specific) things we can do to get most web sites ready for traffic but I’m afraid those details will have to wait for another blog entry. After that, there are a mind-numbing variety of options for driving traffic and few of them are as slow and imprecise as SEO…

Until next time!

All of that is about to change. Quickly.

I invite you to follow my progress as I build my internet business up from nothing. I will be sharing my successes and failures, what works, what doesn’t, the products I like and the ones I would avoid.

If you are also new to web entrepreneurship and would like someone to commiserate with – I am here for you. If you would like encouragement from someone who will appreciate your hard-earned success – then I am especially here for you.

If nothing else, come learn from my mistakes. I have invested thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in my marketing and web-entrepreneurship education. Nearly a year’s worth of my evenings and weekends were spent figuring out who to listen to and where to find the most cost effective tools to accelerate my business development.

I will share these lessons and insights with you in hopes that you can reach your success much faster than you ever thought possible.