Be a HERO and proactively help your colleagues

Morning!

So nice to see you swing by my site today – I hope your day has been as mind-numblingly thrilling as has mine!  You just cannot believe the joys and excitements that are stalking me today, including:

• Signing up for 31+ Social Networks and getting all those links straight
• Tackling home improvement with my trusty screwdriver and getting our future garage sale ready
• Figuring out why I cannot delete categories in my Wordpress setup

Admit it, you envy my day! 

But I digress. 

Over the weekend, I sat down to do my usual "check out my clients’/friends/colleagues’" sites online and found the usual score of 404s (ie, page not found), broken images, messed up tags and the like.  After imbibing my 27 cups of coffee, I alerted the site owners and considered it a job well done.

Well, this morning…I was indulging in my relaxing "What can I uncover and stumble today?" pastime when I noticed a furniture designer site had his header image point to "index.shtml."

This is peachy….IF…and only IF……index.shtml actually exists. 

In the case above, it didn’t (and the designer in question didn’t have a 404 redirect either), so his top level navigation was essentially up the proverbial paddle without a creek.

Now, I don’t know this designer personally, and never saw his site until this morning. 

But as I know I’d be most appreciative if glaring mistakes were pointed out to me, I dropped him a line about his site’s problem and sent it off.  

And that, of course, brings me to the topic of this post!

How many times have you visited a site online, noticed an operational problem, and then….surfed off to find something else?

I confess, in the past, I’ve done that quite often myself.  After all, I generally parallel process about 28 different things at the same time; stopping my concentration and proactively sending a headsup email, well, stops my concentration and it takes some time to regroup my thoughts.

But….

Reality gently dropped a brick on my head last year when I missed the renewal registration email for Real Estate Resources.com…..and ended up losing my domain.

If only someone had thought to let ME know my domain was suddenly parked!  I’d still own it today. 

Ever since then, I’ve made it a point to take out the minute or so it requires to give people a headsup whenever possible.  My callousness was justly rewarded when I lost my site…and I took that as a profound lesson to learn.

So let’s now bring this post back to the most important person in the world….YOU!

What do YOU do when you see a mistake online?

• Do you ignore it?
• Do you send the webmaster email?
• If you can’t find a contact address, do you twitter a request for someone to help?

Hmmmm?

As you know, making a living online is difficult at the best of times….it’s so easy for things to slip thru the cracks!

Thus, make the choice to be a hero for someone even if you’ve never met that person online.  What goes around, comes around….and making a positive contribution to someone is simply a Very Good Thing indeed.

Enjoy,

Barbara Ling

ps – speaking about heros:

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