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Wow it's only Tuesday afternoon as I write this and I'm already whacked ... I feel like I could sleep for a month if only I didn't have so much work in front of me.

I'm writing this now because we're supposed to be leaving very bright and early on Thursday morning ... try 2.30am ... to head well down into the next state to visit family for a few days. Unfortunately just at the moment there's no guarantee that's going to happen. Our SUV is having clutch problems and it's in the shop as I write this and I won't know till later if it will be repaired in time but by writing this now but at least I'll be prepared if it is fixed.

So we're being positive and working on the basis that it will be repaired and we will be heading off ... at least that's what Steve and I are telling each other. I'm beginning to think that something doesn't want us to leave town this week but we'll see.

The cost of ripping someone off
Have you ever had one of those small jobs you want to do on a website but never seem to have the time to do it?

Steve has been facing one of those jobs for a couple of weeks now. The job wasn't just fiddly ... it required him to do some quite simple PHP stuff that he really didn't know how to do as well ... so yesterday he decided to post the job on oDesk.

He thought that it would only be a five minute job ... a new theme for one of his blogs needed something taken out of the page template and he knew that all that would be needed was to have a line of code removed. By his estimation it would be just a five minute job.

So off he went to oDesk but instead of opening the job up to all applicants he listed the job as 'invite only' and then contacted one of the oDesk contractors that we had used before. The contractor looked at the job and came back with a quote of $80 which led to Steve falling off his chair in shock.

$80 for a five minute job was just too much for Steve but the contractor assured him that the work would take a whole lot longer than five minutes. Steve wasn't convinced ... he may struggle with PHP but he's no fool ... so he decided that he would do it himself.

Off he went to the support board for the theme that he was using where he posted his question. Twenty minutes later there was a response with an answer and five minutes later Steve had made the change he need to make and uploaded the amended file.

Total time taken to do the job ... about 10 minutes in total and that included posting the question on the board. Total cost in terms of Steve's time ... about $15.00. I wonder how many hours our oDesk contractor was planning on wasting at $16.00 an hour to make the $80 he quoted.

And there's another oDesk contractor that we'll probably never use again.

How to waste $2000
Today I was talking to a guy in America who runs a mainstream website. He'd posted in Twitter that he had been approached by someone who had offered to get him a guaranteed top three spot in Google for 20 different keywords for just $2k and he wanted to know whether he should take the offer or not.

I'm not sure whether I convinced him to avoid it like the plague or not but I sure hope so. I can understand why he was tempted to take the deal because the site is really not working in the search engines at all but it was really a case of him throwing good money away.

His problem was never going to be cured by any SEO snake oil salesman and it would have been a much better use of his money to have torn the site down and started all over again. He had pages that went below the fold but had no scroll bar ... there was blue text on a black background and file structure and page URLs that were among some of the worst I've ever seen ... and I've seen some very bad ones.

Somewhere back when he first thought of building the site someone must have told him to use a content management system coupled to a site builder to build the site because that would make everything so much easier. It might have made it easier but it also produced an ugly mess on just about every level.

His waste of $2000 wasn't because he was thinking of spending it on some bogus search engine optimization ... his waste of $2000 was not spending it on hiring someone to produce a better e-commerce site than the one he has right now.

Sometimes you just have to wonder about people and money. Now I had better head off and discover how much it's going to cost me for those repairs to my SUV.