Update on online payments:-Worldpay (RBS Group)

Aha! I've found the answer to my online payments problems. Worldpay are part of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group. They are far less expensive (although the cost per transaction seems a little high at 3.95 per cent.

They take Laser payments which is a definite bonus. Worldpay also provide merchant accounts as part of the package (not surprising I suppose since they are part of the RBS).

They have quoted me €145 setup fee, €25 monthly fee. That's way better than Realex were offering. The downside is I have to wait 28 days for payments to clear.

The upside is that payments are handled on their site (negating the need for me to shell out for a secure cert) and that I can pass any information to their payments page and have it passed back again to my own site which means that I can send course dates through so that I know which date somebody has paid for without having to make each date an individual product. That saves so much work.

Added bonus: Worldpay let you customise their payment page to match your site using CSS.
They offer phone and online support. It doesn't matter if you are a company or a sole trader. I don't have to jump through hoops to set up a merchant account with AIB.

Worldpay Win!! Oh, did I mention that I can accept payments in just about any currency?

Online Payment Systems in Ireland

I'm having a little adventure with Online Payment systems at the moment. In Ireland there are essentially just two options. The first one is Paypal. The Second is Realex. PayPal is very easy to set up if you are selling products. Unfortunatley the company I'm working for is selling training courses. Setting up a price for a course is easy but setting it up so that the relevant dates are passed back and forth is another matter. Exit Paypal.

Enter Realex. An Irish online payment company. They accept Laser payments as well as Visa and Mastercard. We can run it all on our own site rather than sending our clients to their site to pay. They will talk me through the setup. Sounds perfect.

But there are hitches. There are requirements. The first is a Secure Cert. This wouldn't be a problem if the company didn't have their hosting with the least friendly and hardest to find webhosting company in Ireland. You would swear that they don't actually want any business. They are a computer shop that sweet talked the business owner into moving from a large and well respected hosting company to themselves where they provided less service than they should for way more money than they should have been charging. I'm not changing it over until the yearly contract expires but getting anything done with them is like pulling teeth! Enough of that little rant and back to the subject in hand.

They charge a €250 set up fee which didn't seem unreasonable given how much I will be relying on them for support in setting it up.

They charge just under €50 per month minimum for transactions (I think that's for 1900 transactions but don't quote me!). Now that's way more transactions than the max of 100 we are expecting! So that looks more like a bit of a rip off. But it's still getting the green light. Now all we need to do is open a Merchant Account with our bank to receive payments into. Great.

Wrong. More hoops. To set up a merchant account is about as straight forward as successfully operating on a hyperactive hamster with one hand and a blindfold on. They want 3 years accounts. They want projected sales, You can give a business plan rather than the accounts but they want you to show that you will have a rather substantial sum in turnover. If we were selling products then it all makes sense. We would have to have a huge turnover to support making a profit. With training courses the overheads are comparatively low. Profit margins are far higher than somebody selling cd's. Sales volume is lower though. Turnover is not that massive either, because the company is in a niche market. They should meet the limits the bank is insisting on but it is not guaranteed.

Once you have put a lot of work into gathering all the information together for the Merchant Account you can then have the pleasure of paying for it! Another €250 set up fee. More charges per transaction price depending on type of card. More percentages being taken.

It's not worth it. We are going back to the drawing board. I'll post here when I come up with an Online payment solution that helps assist profits rather than taking as big a chunk of them as possible.

Finding Good Information. Tutorials

The hardest part of learning anything to do with coding on the Web is finding good information. There are some excellent sites that give some exemplary tutorials. My favorite of these is Tizag.com.

The trouble with these sites is that the tutorials stay at a fairly basic level. They are full of good information on things like basic database manipulation. But if you want to do something a little more complicated like combine several conditions in a search query on your database then they are of less use.

The people that can be of real help with more advanced stuff have been doing it for so long that they have forgotten what it is like to be a beginner. So what happens is that really good information gets lost in a haze of technical jargon. Any tutorials written for the more complex assume a reasonable level of technical ability in the user.

The biggest problem however is that people who write tutorials on advanced topics seem to all, without exception be lazy. None of them comment their code properly. What really annoys me is a lack of comments after closing brackets or closing divs. Trying to figure out the code then involves lots and lots of scrolling up and down looking for the beginning and end of if statements and loops. To make matters worse, the code is usually not properly indented either.

So learn this people. You are wasting your time writing a tutorial if you don't do it properly. The only people who can understand your code are people that could have written it anyway. . . . . even then they will probably have a hard time following it.

When is a blog a splog?

One of my blogs recently got removed from a blogging site for being a splog. Splog is short for spam blog. When I say one of my blogs got removed, I really mean seven of them were mistreated in this way.

General thinking on the matter is that splogs are full of rubbish. The text is either scraped (meaning copied and pasted) from another site or is often just gibberish with a liberal smattering of keywords. They exist in order to create links to other sites and thus try to influence search engine results for that page. Lots and lots of them exist. In fact I know somebody who runs a site much like blogspot where anybody can ad a blog. Yesterday in the course of a 15 minute conversation with him he had 13 new spam blogs created with their first posts. There are over 3,000 of them at the moment. They seem to have complete disregard/contempt for the captcha he put on the site to try and stop them. A splog on the domain is updated every 5-10 seconds. The IP addresses of the people creating them appear to be from literally all over the world.

Why are they splogs? They all contain nothing but adverts pointing to Ebay or other similar ecommerce sites. There is no good content.

My blogs? Why don't you look for yourself and see what you think: Irish Jobs Guru

Sure, I have links to sites I want to promote. I don't have all that many though. The content of the blogs are original. Even when I write a fact based peice I make sure to use several sources for my information. I reword everything too. I don't want to be held up for duplicate content!

I argued my point but the heathens were having none of it. Give me your opinion. Leave a comment on this post.

From Health Care Assistant to a career in IT in a year.

This is my first ever blog post. A year ago I had no idea what a blog was (other than a vague notion of people writing stuff). This blog is the story of an accidental career.

It all started last October (2007) when my wife launched her own business Jackie Brown Medical Ltd. She is a recruiter par excellence but we were a bit lacking in the technical department. I undertook the challenge of creating her website.

It should be noted that I had absolutely no knowledge or experience. The first thing I did was go and buy a copy of 'building a website for dummies'. The only dummy was me for buying the thing in the first place. It is already about 10 years out of date. It did however teach me some very basic html.

I have discovered that there is plenty of information on the web for those who look for it. A few sites spring to mind as being particularly useful to a beginner. The first is www.tizag.com for excellent tutorials.

Since I needed to make job pages for the site I also had to get to grips with mysql and php. I cannot recommend phpfreaks enough! It is a forum full of really helpful people who know just about everything to do with building websites.

To cut a long story short I got so interested in the web and coding that I changed my preferences for a college place this year from nursing to computer science in DIT. I couldn't believe it when I got in! I start next Monday. Four years full time. I can't wait. I'll probably be the oldest student in the year but I feel like I've won the lottery.