From a personal point of view I've been window shopping online and working out everything I need for my wedding which is now in 10 weeks time! It's quite fun, especially as I enjoy shopping!, and we're both really looking forward to the day when it finally arrives. It'll be great to see all of our family and friends, and the food sounds fantastic

Workwise we've been quite busy. I've been working a lot on a calendar availability system using jQuery and PHP to control it, update dynamically and refresh to keep the calendar updated between a number of users. It's a bit of a challenge and a lot of reading to find out how to do things and how to do them the most efficiently, however it's great fun and different from the normal websites we work on.

I've managed to get a migration script in place for my Page Menu Editor plugin for WordPress. About 6 weeks ago I discovered that the developer on the All in one SEO pack plugin had integrated my code into his plugin at the request of a number of users, which rendered mine a bit obsolete when both are running. However, there was no migration script and he'd used different option names to me, so nothing was copied over. Having both plugins on a number of sites myself, it's a pain to sit and copy it all over manually. So I've now set up a simple migration to allow users to do it themselves if they wish, so if you do use both plugins then an upgrade should be coming through soon with the new migration system.

Finally, our new venture Blog Themes Club is going well. We've added a new theme and I've been adding a number of additional page templates to all our themes to hopefully give our users more than just a basic theme. We're looking to add another new theme next month too and have plenty of ideas for themes to keep us going for a while.

It's all going well

Now I have two PayPal accounts (don't worry, it's allowed!). I have a business PayPal account which accepts credit/debit card payments, and all income received is charged a fee unless it comes from a payee who's paid to waive the fee (usually from somewhere like Text Link Ads that do bulk payments). I also have a personal PayPal account to accept donations off my site towards the use/upkeep of plugins, help given to people etc. and also it means that I can easily test PayPal scripts such as an IPN, on client sites. I use my personal account to make a payment to my business account. It avoids the potential of never getting a refund from the client (yes this has happened before!). In fact it's what PayPal advises.

So, I have a personal PayPal account. Now when I got this account my understanding at the time was that any payments received to it would be fee free, so if I lent money to a friend they could send it to my personal account and no fee would be charged. This was correct and still is (providing the payment is sent as a personal payment). I was also of the belief that credit and debit card payments could not be accepted by a personal account, this has actually been changed and up to 5 card payments a year can be received, of course with card processing charges.

Therefore, with this knowledge, I originally set up a donation link on my own site (it's on the right near the bottom of the sidebar!) and on all the donations I've received through it, I've never been charged a fee, after all it's a personal account accepting a PayPal payment, therefore I refer to my first point above whereby payments received are fee free.

Fast forward to last month when I set up a donation link for people to donate to the memorial fund. After a number of payments were made I happened to log in and looked at the details of one. You see the new PayPal overview page doesn't show you if fees have been deducted off a payment and how much, it just shows you the original payment amount, so I hadn't twigged at that point about what I was going to find out. Viewing the details of a payment made through a PayPal account I saw a fee had been deducted. Until then I'd figured that the total in the account (which was virtually empty otherwise) was just an odd figure as I'd had a few people donate using a credit card, which of course had fees due to card processing (which I completely understand).

So despite my account being a personal account, and the payee using their PayPal account to pay, a fee had still been taken. Yet if the same person had just gone into PayPal and sent a payment to the email address set up for donations, it would have been fee free! Naturally I was a bit confused at this and so emailed PayPal for clarification. I simply asked (version without the waffle)

I currently have a personal account, and have recently been accepting donations, due to the death of a close friend, to go to his family.

On checking my account today I can see that every donation, regardless of whether it was made via a paypal account or card, has been charged a fee. Is this correct? Surely donations should not be getting charged a fee?

My first response was a text book copy and paste job that simply explained about commercial and personal payments. This, in part, was probably because the person responding couldn't type considering the initial part was half finished as if something had been deleted. Not to mention, the response did not include the word "donation" anywhere!

So I responded:

Thank you for your email, however this doesn't tell me where a donation payment comes under. A donation is not a commercial payment, yet I have been charged fees on donations made from other users' paypal accounts.

Please could you clarify why the personal donations (not the credit card funded ones but the paypal funded ones) have been charged a fee.

PayPal's response:

The reason why you have been charged is because you still have a 'Personal' PayPal account, also you would still need to set up your PayPal account as a charitable institution in order to recognise your organisation as a charity.

I must admit, at the time of receiving this I wasn't in the mood for laughing, but now you can't do anything but laugh at this. All I've asked is a simple question and suddenly I'm being told how to become a charity on PayPal! The email proceeded to go on about the documents they would require to prove I was a charity. I never said I was charity! My response pretty much sums up my frustration at this point:

I am not a charity, I've never said I am a charity and I'm not about to change my personal account, for my own personal payments, to a charity account.

I also stated my question quite clearly yet again:

On receiving personal donations, why have they been charged a fee?

Third time lucky maybe? I also received a customer satisfaction link at this point, where I wrote quite a long essay on the lack of support when their staff clearly couldn't read a simple question and reply to it!

So I got another reply from PayPal

I understand that you're asking of there is a way to flag the receiving fee when accepting a donation.

No not really! It would be nice if they could but I never asked that. So I decided on my final response as it was the evening after the funeral, I was shattered from driving across country and just beyond fed up at this point:

No I didn't ask if there was a way to flag the receiving fee when accepting a donation. I asked why receiving personal donations were charged a fee when receiving personal payments are not charged, as there's no difference in my opinion besides the way in which the money is sent. It still goes from account A to account B and it's a personal transaction.

Of course they responded, and to be fair, the final person tried their best. They still didn't fully explain why they charge a fee on a donation but not a personal payment, it's no different in my eyes, but they simply said that a donation is treated as goods or service. One point that did stick out was:

I strongly do not encourage you to use that option to receive money for your donation regardless any reason as it if the system finds any slight unusual transaction in your account, the system might have the account locked permanently.

Right, so in other words, don't use donation links?! Well after this experience I won't be anyway. I'll be changing my donation links to be standard payment links and just set it so that the user can specify how much. It's clearly a ridiculous system with PayPal especially if this is their advice.

So there you have it. If you want to receive donations for yourself for help and work you give for free, or donations towards a cause of any sort, don't use a donation link!

(Please note, I appreciate the PayPal Personal account is free and PayPal doesn't owe me anything. The point of this is not to moan about PayPal charging fees, as I know they do, naturally I wish they hadn't, but it is about the lack of explanation as to why they charge a fee on what is essentially a personal payment. Pay one way, it's free, pay another, it costs around 4-5%).

Club Membership

The site is primarily a themes club (in case you hadn't already guessed that!), selling 3, 6 and 12 month membership plans which will allow users to sign in, download and use any of our themes available, get updates of the themes as soon as they're available, get quality support via our private support forum and also via a support desk.

The membership prices are below however we've also reduced these until 1st August as we appreciate that starting with 4 themes isn't a large amount, however our prices are based more on support and continued upgrades:

• 3 months membership – $49 $29
• 6 months membership – $79 $49
• 12 months membership – $99 $69

Single Purchases

Going from experience I know a club membership isn't for everyone, and not everyone will need support or want more than one theme, so we've also got the option to purchase themes individually for a single use. This option doesn't come with any support, but the themes themselves go from $19 which we think is a fairly reasonable price.

Also until July 31st 2009 you can get 25% off the purchase of any Single Use purchase by entering the discount code LAUNCH25 during the checkout process.

Theme Designs

Of course we're aiming to cover all the subject areas that a design can be used for with WordPress including Blogging, CMS, Photoblogs, eCommerce and more. We've already got another theme almost ready to go plus a 6th is being planned ready for design soon. We're hoping to add at least one new theme per 2 months and of course keep our current ones up to date.

Win membership for a month!

To celebrate the launch of Blog Themes Club we are giving away 10 membership accounts for free to readers. These accounts are valid for one month. During that time you will be able to download all of our themes and get daily support.

To enter the competition all you have to do is help us spread the word of our site via Twitter. All you need to do is:

• Follow us on Twitter @BlogThemesClub
• Tweet or ReTweet the folling message via Twitter :
  

  @BlogThemesClub have just launched their new wordpress themes club http://tinyurl.com/n7rhnh – 10 memberships up for grabs in a competition

• Leave a comment linking to the status link of your tweet on our launch post

The deadline for this competition is Sunday 21st June 2009. Therefore, no tweets after midnight Eastern Time (New York Timezone) on Sunday (about 5am GMT) will be counted. We will select the winners randomly and do our best to announce the winners the following day.

» Read our launch post – Blog Themes Club Opens

Okay, so I appreciate that people looking for work will look through the local businesses and tout their work to them. If you're low on work you need to see what you can get. Luckily we've never been in that position, but I know if I was then I wouldn't approach it in the following manner.

First the developer visited the shop, asked if they needed a new developer and pointed out a few design/content issues that needed addressing (some of which are already being addressed anyway). My contact was away at the time but the owner was there and he entertained the guy a little. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do. The developer clearly took that as the green light and turned up again when my contact was there. She told him that they were not interested, they already had a development company on board and he wouldn't be hired. He didn't really take the hint however, then asking who did the site, who hosted it, what platform it was running on (it's not hard to find this information out but still…). She asked him politely to leave, eventually he did.

A week later he was back (persistant, or desperate, that's for sure!) and just sat down waiting for the owner who was in a meeting. My contact again told him to leave, in which he replied that as they didn't seem that bothered in his content points he'd gone and phoned the press office of their supplier, pointing out that the supplier's name wasn't mentioned on the front page of the site, and that the catalogue on the site was out of date (although that's the supplier's fault for not getting the current one sent out until last week!). Strangely enough, that didn't go down too well!

I can appreciate in these times that people are maybe low on work, but honestly, if you're going to try and get new clients, or steal clients from another developer, then do it a bit more ethically and don't treat your prospective new client badly or try to go above them! You really won't make any friends and potentially damage your own reputation.

On a lighter note, shortly after a regular customer of theirs asked for their site developer's details as they loved the site and really liked the functionality and design of it

Another nice point is the ability to run Windows and Linux scripts side by side, which is something I needed back in January for a site that needed Windows to auto update the database nightly into MSSQL (a supplied program from the database provider) but PHP to allow me to write the code, as I've long since forgotten ASP!

Finally, the additional bandwidth costs on this type of hosting are a lot less than standard hosting, around 50% of the cost. A friend who runs a popular entertainment site recently had a shock when a trailer they were hosting became a bit of an internet sensation sending visitor numbers soaring. The only problem is their 24 hours in the spotlight racked up bandwidth bills of almost £700 on their shared hosting account, and that bill was reduced by the hosting company in good faith. If they'd been on cloud hosting then that bill would have been around just half that.

As I mentioned Cloud Hosting is quite new to me, however a good friend of mine has started selling it through his hosting company who I recommend for all types of hosting. The packages are sold on a monthly contract and you get an inclusive bandwidth and space in that price, then any extra you need is charged for at the end of the month, a bit like our pay monthly mobile phone contracts.

So if you've got a site that can go up and down in bandwidth, or have large bandwidth bills, or you need to be able to run PHP and ASP together, then take a look at Cloud Hosting.

I mentioned last time that David and I had merged our businesses to form a company, which starts trading on 1st April. So we've been making a few preparations for that, getting the client list in check, getting the clients added to our online accounts system – Kashflow (read my review), and also sorting out the new company site, bank account, insurance etc.

We were also planning on using WHMCS to manage all of our hosting and domain clients, along with those on support contracts, however the main reason was for the automated billing, which I then discovered Kashflow could handle, so why duplicate the work and the cost!

In our personal lives things have taken a major turn in that we got engaged a couple of weeks ago and hope to get married towards the end of the year This is obviously a bit of a distraction, and also means we need to work even harder to save up for all the costs involved!

So yes, it's even more all go here than normal!

I've been a soletrader for almost 8 years now, and have thought/intended to go limited earlier however a lack of time and organisation just meant I never really got around to it. However, last year we were thinking about forming a partnership (and never got around to it!), so this year we're getting everything sorted, the new server, a new company and it'll be VAT registered too (VAT registration is not a requirement of a UK company under a certain turnover, but we've gone for it anyway), automated billing software for the client hosting and domains, and more.

There's so much to sort out now! New bank account, business cards (courtesey of Moo Cards), letters to write, client details to input, plus to still work full time!

March is going to be a busy month of sorting things out, but it'll be worth it

Maybe I need to elaborate on a couple of things. At most we have maybe 3 or 4 people on a project, or sometimes it's just the two of us, so standard project management software is too excessive for our needs. All I need to do is create a post, write a to do list, add the initials after each item for the person who's dealing with it, and that's it. Then we can just make comments on the post with questions and/or updates about the work. The comments are timestamped which obviously helps, and I'll get an email for every comment. You can also subscribe to the comment feed for each post, so all everyone else will need is a lightweight feedreader and they can just add the comment feed for current work posts to keep up with the discussion.

It's simple, but that's all we need. Somewhere for me to list the work needing to be done that we can all access, and somewhere to share the discussion, where the discussion is logged for future reference.

Today I decided to try out a plugin called Allow Categories which allows you to restrict any non Admin to only see posts from specific categories. This isn't to try and hide our work from the freelancers that we employ, but more to simply reduce what they need to wade through really. The restriction/hiding of posts works fine, however all categories were still being displayed in the category list in the sidebar, so after various attempts I've managed to use a function to override the wp_list_categories() output, and remove the specific categories that shouldn't be displayed.

I've added my first actual project post for a new site that needs to be sorted out over the next couple of weeks. It took me all of a couple of minutes to type up what needed doing plus leave a comment with an update of what we were still waiting for from the client and what could be started.

Besides adding the other projects that are currently on, I just need to work out how I want the front page to work and look. So far so good

So how am I using WordPress? Well this is the plan, once it's set up I'll let you know if it works! At present I've decided to create a category for each web site we maintain currently, then work on each site will go up as a post. The idea is then as we (2+ people working on each site) work through things we can leave comments, questions, requests for opinions etc. on the posts. As work is done the post can be closed and a new one started, and if there are different sections to the work ie. for a whole new site, then multiple posts can be made.

Then on the front page the latest posts for each site can be displayed, or I can easily just control which sites to display on the front page so that sites that are not being worked on can be kept out of the lime light. I've not worked out the front page yet as you can tell!

I personally find it much easier to just type out a to do list and then update that with the del and ins tags as and when things are done rather than creating a record for every single task.

So WordPress is installed and now is just the task of adding all the work to it. I'll let you know how it pans out Any suggestions on how to structure the front page are welcome!

Next step is to install some good billing system software to deal with all of the hosting, domains and support invoicing, which should save us a fair bit of time. Then we have a lot of other things to sort out for some important news come April (business news, before anyone wonders!). So there's plenty to be doing as far as administration goes, plus working full time!

Workwise I'm currently battling with ODBC to get Sage information online, which really doesn't want to work for us, and also working with an MS SQL database containing thousands of records on cars for a leasing site that I'm working on. This means I've had to adopt a new method of connecting to the database via another ODBC (the mssql extension isn't available on the server), but thankfully the ADOdb Library has proved to be very useful. I'm still having to work through the Documentation to find parts I need, plus I'm mixing it with calls to MySQL as well, which makes for a highly confusing site!

We're currently busy up until at least April, and then potentially until the end of June, which is great news in the current climate. I'm also aiming to hire someone part time to do some work for us, ease my workload a bit hopefully, and let me get back to a bit of normality instead of working all hours just to keep up!

So yes, it's all go here