I will boldly say upfront that there is one reason WPArena exists and that is to make money! I am a Capitalist and don’t apologize one bit for it. WPArena is setup to help others with their WordPress blogs and when it takes up a good bit of my time to help someone personally I expect fair compensation for my time. I do however understand that to make money I need to do my best to provide good content that is free for all to read, use and share. But when my site is being used by others to profit from then that pisses me off!
Two points I want to make here in my rant: Recently some clueless contacted me regarding some PLR WordPress templates he purchased (or got ripped off with junk). He asked if he sent them to me he would pay me to look them over and explain to him how to “put them together”. The fist files he sent were a bunch of junk HTML splash page templates. I replied that these were not WordPress themes. He insisted they were because they used CSS stylesheets. I then took the time to explain to him that CSS is used in more than WordPress, it was a long informative email that took me some time to compose. He then sent another batch and the link to the site he got ripped off from. The link had no reference to WordPress or how to use these PLR files.
The second batch had two poorly coded WordPress themes that were nothing more than the default theme with a custom header. I wrote back again telling him how to upload and use these files, and again that these files were all just separate templates to use or resell. The funny thing is that in all the 6 or so email exchanges he replied within an hour but after the last one with all the answers… no reply. I contacted him a few days later regarding payment he went off on me saying I didn’t help him and was rude for asking compensation. I spent about two hours messing with this idiot and since he didn’t like the fact that I told him he paid for junk he didn’t want to pay me. Lesson learned: Get paid upfront or at least partially for any freelance work you do online. I don’t always ask for payment upfront because the time it takes is unknown for some of the special requests I get.
The next point is very bothersome and has required me to password protect one of the more popular pages on this site. Recently it came to my attention that another freelancer who is setting up WordPress blogs, rather poorly I might add, has been sending people to this site to learn how to finalize and use the WordPress blogs he is setting up for less than I charge. These sites have no SEO, permalinks or a ping list (among other critical missing configurations) and his people are coming to me asking for help! Hey, I don’t mind the competition at all but I’ll be damned if I let him or anyone else uses my site for his support system. I spent a lot of time writing the guides on WPM to help my clients and many others, and all the content is still available to all except for the one page that has all the critical information on one page.
So beware of the cost of anything if it is real cheap there is a reason. Be careful online, people will steal from you even if they don’t take your content they can take your time or use your content for their gain. There are lazy thieves everywhere even on the Internet.
If I have setup your blog for you and you want access to the now password protected WordPress Optimization Guide, click here to contact me for the password.