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Was that line every used in the Karate Kid movie? I don't know but it's certainly something that someone should say to me from time to time ... and maybe it needs to be said to you as well.

If you're like me then you get excited when you're starting a new website ... I certainly get all excited when a new client tasks us with building his or her business online and I can't wait to get started. I jump right in and decide on colors and the header and sometimes even think about navigation before the client has even finished telling me what they want.

The excitement remains as I start building the pages and talk with Steve or my other staff about what they need to do to get the site finished. But after a while the excitement begins to wear off ... there are other new sites to get started ... and I'll happily hand off the site I've been working on to someone else.

If I can't hand it off because the others are too busy and I have to finish it myself I tend to get a little bored with it and I rush to get it finished so I can tackle that next new site that is really getting me excited. Of course in the rush to finish a job and make the site live I can miss things ... I can think that I've done something when I haven't.

And that's what happened this week, a new site that had taken way to long to finish ... mainly because the client kept wanting more and more stuff added to it ... went live and I breathed a sigh of relief. Well I did until Steve pointed out that there was a whole page on the site that had absolutely nothing on it.

Fortunately he picked it up before the client saw it and by the time the client reviewed the site all the content was on the page ... but it was a close call and I could have ended up with a very red face if Steve hadn't picked up on the error.

I know that I should have gone through every page on the site and checked but I was out of patience and I just wanted the site finished.

So how many times have you been in the same situation? How many times have you been in such a hurry to get your latest gallery or free site finished so you could get on to something else that you didn't bother to check the site?

If you get impatient and rush things to get a job finished and then don't bother to check what you've done you wouldn't be on your own. It happens far more frequently than you might imagine and when I ran my own link lists it was not uncommon to find sites that had been submitted without being checked first.

Both my reviewers and I often came across sites that were full of red crosses where the images should have been. We also came across sites that had the right number of images but had no advertising on them because the webmaster had forgotten to include it.

It happens when you rush things. Like me, you're in a hurry to get the job finished and you miss important things and don't take the time to check your work. When that occurs you waste even more time because you either have to go back and correct your mistakes or your site or gallery doesn't get listed so it earns you no income.

So grasshopper ... be patient ... don't rush your work ... and make sure that you check everything that you have done to make sure that you've done it right before the site goes live or before you start submitting it to the links lists and TGPs.

Letting impatience take control and not checking your work can really cost you both time and money.

Passwords
Don't you just hate long and involved passwords? Isn't it so much easier to use short passwords that are a snap to remember?

That's certainly the way I once felt about passwords but I changed my mind long ago and I think that we might have helped a new client who came to us yesterday change their mind about easy passwords too. Their host had sent them an email that warned them that there were trojans on their website and if they didn't remove them they would lose their hosting.

That certainly got the attention of the people who owned the business and they ended up talking to us because their "IT guy" had moved on. Fortunately removing the offending files wasn't hard and in the process of doing that we also found that the FTP access to the site included a password that a script kiddy could have cracked in his sleep.

So what are your passwords like? Are they easy to remember and easy to type in ... or are they a pain to remember and an even bigger pain to enter?

One option will make you an easy target for hackers while the other might be a pain in the ass but then cleaning out trojans and other nasty files can be an even bigger pain.