Dragil Blog – San Francisco Bay Area Web Design and Web Development Company Located in Palo Alto California

The Sans-serif family
Arial, Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, sans-serif

The Serif family
Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif

The Monospace family
Courier New, Courier, monospace

Here is how each one is displayed on a web page

The Sans-serif family
Arial, Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, sans-serif

The Serif family
Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif

The Monospace family
Courier New, Courier, monospace

(Windows font | Mac font | Font family)

1. Arial, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
2. Arial Black, Arial Black, Gadget, sans-serif
3. Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS, cursive
4. Courier New, Courier New, Courier, monospace
5. Georgia, Georgia, serif
6. Impact, Impact, Charcoal, sans-serif
7. Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif
8. Times New Roman, Times, serif
9. Trebuchet MS, Helvetica, sans-serif
10. Verdana, Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif

(Windows font | Mac font | Font family)

1. Lucida Console, Monaco, monospace
2. Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif
3. Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Palatino, serif

If you are using PayPal to invoice your clients, you will ask yourself sooner or later how to calculate the fees PayPal is charging per transaction. If you know about the rate details, you can possibly pass the fees onto your clients as convenience fee (which is justified since it allows the client to have you started on the project without any further delay [a check usually takes about a week to arrive and then to clear]).

Depending on your monthly sales you will be charged either 2.9%, 2.5%, 2.2% or 1.9% per transaction (plus 30 cents regardless of what rate is applied). For transactions processed with the Virtual Terminal you will be charged 3.1%, 2.7% or 2.4%  per transaction (plus 30 cents).

In order to take advantage of the lower rates, you have to apply for PayPal’s Merchant Rate as soon as the first threshold of $3,000 is passed. This can be done online once logged in. For higher monthly sales volumes the rate will be adjusted automatically and it is no longer necessary to apply for it.

First Formula: If you want to receive X dollars from your client after PayPal’s fees, you have to charge X plus PayPal’s fees which I will call Z. The entire amount to be charged is then Y (= X + Z). Y is calculated as (X + $0.30) divided by (1 – <applicable rate>). Z is then Y minus X.

Example: You want to charge your client $1,000 and you have a monthly sales volume of $5,000 (applicable rate is then 2.5% and no longer %2.9). Y is $1,000.30 divided by 0.975 (= 1 – 0.025). Y is then $1,025.94. So you would have to charge your client an extra $25.94.

Please keep in mind that the rate that needs to be applied varies if you are using the Virtual Terminal to charge the client’s credit card.

Second Formula: If you want to know how much of the client’s payment will be left after PayPal deducts their Fees (Z), you will have to look at the following formula.
X (amount that you will receive at the end) is calculated as Y (amount that you will charge your client) – $0.30 – <applicable rate>*Y. Z is then obviously Y minus X.

Example: You are about to charge your client $1,000 and you have a monthly sales volume of $2,000 (applicable rate is then 2.9% and not %2.5). X is $999.70 minus 29 (=0.029*1000). What you would receive in your PayPal account is then $970.70.

Here is an interesting article that we came across this week. It tries to categorize existing client types and how to deal with them:

http://freelanceswitch.com/clients/12-breeds-of-client-and-how-to-work-with-them/

Interestingly enough they all sound familiar to us

Something web development companies (and of course all others as well) should be aware of is the buyer’s remorse syndrome. Once fully understood and accepted it can be addressed and won’t cause (that many) unexpected problems during the execution of the project.

In the phase before signing the contract, the client is impressed with the positive aspects of starting a project. The client is finally giving in to the desire that he has had for some time, the client is seeing an array of new possibilities, and of course is looking forward to either using the actual product himself or to showing it to his friends).

Also, before the contract, he  has the full array of options, including not purchasing, which is a very comforting position for a lot of people.

After signing the contract, he is more likely to focus on the the negative aspects: all the opportunity costs and the loss of purchasing power.

After, one’s options have been reduced to two: a) continuing with the project, or b) renouncing it. So that before signing, one experiences oneself as acting in a virile way, creating a situation; while afterwards the time of acting has passed: one is deflated and experiences oneself as having been acted on by the former virile self; one feels bound by one’s remaining limited choices.

According to San Jose Business Journal the companies listed below (Top 5) are the largest web companies for the year 2007 based on the number of created websites.

Here is a map that shows the location of the 25 biggest companies.

1. Statement of Information: Corporations must report to the state information. In most states it is required to update this information once a year.

If a business fails to file the “Statement of Information” on time, the corporation will be subject to suspension or even dissolution in addition to penalties and late fees.

In California the “Statement of Information” can be filed online at this address: https://businessfilings.sos.ca.gov/

Last week we accessed Google Webmaster Tools for the first time and saw that it allows one to upload (rather indicate the location of it) Google sitemaps for each of the managed sites. So we decided to create one manually for our main site and placed it into the root directory.

When using WordPress it is rather easy to create and maintain sitemaps since there is an available plugin (“Google Sitemap Generator”) that takes care of that and also updates it whenever there are any changes to the site.

A sitemap is basically a simple xml file that lists all URLs for a site.  Additional information such as the last change date or how often the page is being changed can be specified for each URL allowing search engines to crawl and index the site more efficiently.

Below is a very simple example of a Google sitemap:

<urlset xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84                      http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd”>

<url>
<loc>http://www.dragil.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-08-28T00:19:35+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>

</urlset>

If there are at least two URLs/pages it makes sense to add a priority tag to each URL. That allows the search engines to prioritize the pages for the entire site.

Before we even looked into changing the blog’s design we downloaded and installed several helpful WordPress plugins such as:

1. “Wordpress Automatic Upgrade” (allows me to automatically keep this wordpress installation up to date)

2. “All in one SEO pack” (Helps me to edit all Search Engine relevant fields such as page title, page description and meta tags)

3. “Google Sitemap Generator” (Creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of my blog so that Google’s crawler has an easier job indexing my blog entries)

4. “One Click Plugin Updater” (Provides single-click plugin upgrades in WordPress 2.3 and up, visually marks plugins that have update notifications enabled, allows to easily install new plugins)

5. “Share This” (Allows users to add posts to the most popular social bookmarking sites, or to send post links via email, AIM, Facebook or MySpace)

6. “WordPress Security Scan” (Scans this installation for any security loopholes and vulnerabilities.)

7. “WordPress Super Cache” (Increases the WordPress’ speed by producing static html files for most of the blog entries)

8. “Google Analytics for WordPress” (Helps adding the Google Analytics tracking code)

All of these are available for free at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/browse/popular/

We created an account with Technorati (basically the equivalent to “Google” when it comes to blogs) in order to have this blog indexed on there.

Technorati makes everybody post a link to their technorati profile to verify blog ownership. Ours is: Technorati Profile

Technorati must have quite a few one way links pointing to their site