Kim Hughes (www.kimhughes.com) a Real Estate Virtual Assistant has recently been accused of scamming business owners. There’s a lot more detail about this virtual assistant scam over at watshit.com scam reports, but this caught our attention for several reasons.

This is not good news for the Online Real Estate Virtual Assistant community, because up until now they have held a clean record as being honest hard working individuals/companies. Never have we heard of such complaint.

How do you tell if someone is planning on scamming you? How do you tell if someone is a well known scammer? Easy, you run a search, ask for signed contracts and always remember to grab as much information from the service providers in case you need to sue their asses.

A simple search like Kim Hughes Scam now returns the warning sign results.

Be careful who you do business with!

Ok so I picked a site (spotlocal.net - they state that - “Spot Local helps you target consumers who are actively searching for your service or product” -we’ll see about that) at random online to check different webmaster SEO skills out. Spot Local is the site, and what a site it is. They claim to increase traffic to advertisers and what not, at least that’s what I got from this site. It’s rather simple really, they have some major no-no’s and I’m going to exploit them by ranking higher than them, or at least rank high enough for their keywords to bug them! Funny, they have a slogan that says “Spot the difference, with Spot Local” haha well let me spot your bloopers then so you can better satisfy your users!

No navigation - Learn from their mistake, the closest thing to your body tag and one of the first thing the search engines absorb are the navigation text based links. They help a great deal and also help spread the PR juice through your site to other important pages you want to have rank higher. Their navigation is crap, sorry to say it like that, but who on earth uses a nav like that anymore? If they were thinking creativity? Originality? Then someone please slap them with a couple pound of ‘reality check’ because it’s tacky, old fashioned, confusing, retarded and crap.

Validation/Code Compliant -  Spot Local’s home page has over 40 errors. With so little content (which poses another issue) that’s way too many errors, Java, Flash, just wrongness all round.

Meta Tags - No meta description or meta keywords, which just makes me want to slap their web developers. Yes it’s not a life or death issue but any web developer knows better.

MAIL TO??? now come on, why not create a simple contact form to make users lives simpler. Fill in a couple fields and hit send, Done!

Page URL’s : They have the strangest url structure I’ve seen in a long time, numbering their pages? That’s a red light right there.

Among other things, their blog for one is not even optimized to rank at all which is sad.

Just goes to show you the sort of mistakes other webmasters are making, learn from these sites i’ll post at random here guys, don’t make the same mistakes!

So, identity theft. It’s a huge deal online, more so than in real life, but then again ‘online’ is real life, right? Today I got a call from a long time client telling me ‘they accept my new terms’…what new terms? After talking to them for a bit, I am shocked to find out, someone with the email (rnichaelkane@yahoo.com - which I guess looks like michaelkane@yahoo.com - the r and n together trick one into believing it’s just an m)  claimed to be Michael Kane, me!! They went on to tell my client that an update on their site was necessary and that a bug was found and should be patched up before it gets exploited, they go on to giving my client wire details and stating payment should be made immediately (They even gave them a 30% discount on a fabricated fee as they were current clients) and that was that.

I told my client not to pay, obviously and have now sent these crooks an email, and one to Yahoo! Hopefully this will get resolved before something nasty comes of this. In the mean time, I have forwarded an official letter to all my clients noting that all emails from that said email address should be disregarded and deleted. Same goes to all my online contacts.

Be careful of online identity thieves!

How many people out there love Yahoo!? The Yahoo search engine, in my honest opinion, is the ONLY search engine for me! Why? Well I go on and on about why Yahoo Search Engine is the best search engine in the world over at iheartyahoo where i talk about pretty much everything Yahoo related. How much I love yahoo and how I am probably the biggest Yahoo fan alive.

I hope you guys can go check it out, it’s a few days old and I’m really trying to do something new with it. Some say I’m on this one man crusade to convert all none yahoo believers, others say I’m just a Yahoo fan boy, one thing is for sure, on iheartyahoo.com I post crap worth reading, crap worth noticing. Crap you probably wont read anywhere else, so check it out. :)

Amanda is one of the few people I respect as an armature SEO. She really does think outside the box. It all started when a friend came and talked to me about giving him a hand in ranking high for a keyword, related to some seocontest2008 contest. Prize for ranking first (if all the rules were followed) would be $1,000. With a prize as small as that you would be right in thinking, what a waste of time, but for some, it’s all about Ego.

Anyway Amanda has been experimenting for the past year or so and she overheard me talking about helping this friend out. Next thing I know, she enters the contest with a unique blog post already late in the game, long after several hundred people had started over 2-3weeks before her. It was her unique post, and some of her enginuity that has now got her ranking higher than that friend that first asked for my help, having started weeks after him, she has skyrocketed from not being indexed, to ranking on the fifth page for that keyword, with only 1 real backlink to her site.

So Amanda, congrats, and show those link buying, spamming fools that it’s really not about all that, it’s about what the rest don’t really know ;)

I personally don’t have anything against freelance designers, I’m pretty much as freelance as they get, but a friend of mine recently hired a freelance graphic designer for a small job, mainly because I was down with the flu and she was too shy to call the office and ask for one of my designers.

Her experience fell in the “I hate freelancers” category which to me was a low blow. I have always tried my best to keep the freelancing general reputation (on my end anyway) as high as possible, but some people, some low life good for nothing design bums have to go and add to the bad name that is slowly being forced upon the freelance community.

To all you new freelance designers out there, please read the following tips with care and carve into the inside of your eyelids;

If you don’t know your clients Gender, for the love of everything holy do NOT guess. After my friend and the Freelance Designer (who i shall call Design Bum here on in) emailed a few times, Design Bum called her, and asked for Mr Murphy. She was at work, and simply said “There is no Mr Murphy.” To which he replies “Oh alright, I thought you were a man.” What a moron, a sexist assumption like this could loose any freelancer a client, in a heart beat. Be careful when talking to a client, word things right, take your time, think before you spit bull shit out of your mouth.

Follow the clients instructions to the bone. Don’t cut corners, don’t be creative, don’t crap where you eat, you’re a designer, not fucking Houdini. Client has a vision, but does not know how to bring it to life, as a designer, that is you job. Sure, sometimes you will see a fatal mistake or decision the client is making, as a designer, it is your obligation to note that so and so could be done in a more efficient way, or adding something here or there would be to the clients interest. Give feedback because the client will feel better that way. Why else would they be paying?!

DO NOT take jobs if you can not meet a clients deadline. This is a big NO NO. The client has a deadline, you don’t meet that deadline the client looses time and money, now instead of helping the client profit, and making money off the project, you’re hurting the client and with any luck will not get paid. Simple math, are you freelancers following me here? 1 + 1 = 2. yes, 2 not 8 or 0.827, just fucking 2. Client says blue text you do the text blue.

Remember, if you run out of time and you’re not done yet, tell the client, don’t hide it and play them for fools. They know what they want, so if it’s not there or not finished they’ll notice!

Don’t rip other peoples work. I wont go into detail on this because I plan to make a full blog post later on this very same matter, but remember, rip a template, you hurt the client and end up loosing all credibility. After being found out you might as ell just kill yourself. Gun to the head, pull trigger.

Just be honest and make a decent living and name for yourself - Michael Kane

I received an email from an old client today. She wanted to thank me again for the t-shirt design I did for her non-profit organization. What they were after was a t shirt, to protest the spread of Hate all over the world, and they wanted to do this in a friendly way. The design took me all of 2 minutes to come up with, simple and to the point.

That’s the thing, designers today underestimate what they are capable of. They don’t realize that a small idea can give birth to an explosion of creativity, which in some cases leads to things far beyond the scope of any normal designer. It’s as they say, a picture really does speak louder than words. Why should people write letters to congress in protest of certain things, why is design not given the respect it rightfully deserves.

As designers, we have the ability to create, to destroy, to deceive or tell the truth in ways no one dared to do so before, all with a simple graphic, be it a funny one, a simple one, serious, detailed, abstract or 3d, we can spark emotion. We can anger people, we can please them, make some cry and others laugh, we have so much influence over the general public, as designers today, we blind ourselves from the truth. We can make a difference.
No need for long speeches, money or power to get on TV and say what we have to say, we just use our creative skills, and create, beautiful designs, that speak for themselves, louder than any words ever can.

We need to realize this, and do something about it. I’m tired of hearing people say they care, designers saying they would love to make a difference, and really not giving a damn. If you truly care about something, however talentless or talented you are, prove it now.

Be Passionate - Michael Kane