Broom vs. Vacuum

I prefer using a broom to a vacuum to clean hard flooring.

Hardwood, linoleum… anything other than carpet.

I’m not kidding.

We have a vacuum, but I don’t use it.

I bust out the broom and sweep the kitchen and living room when it needs a quick clean.

Why?

Vacuums are a total pain.

They’re heavy.

You need to plug them in.

They’re loud.

You have to navigate the cord around furniture.

They’re heavy.

With a broom, I can clean a room by the time I have the vacuum set up.

While tech is great, sometimes going old school is the best way.

Another way of looking at it is “simplicity rocks”.

I live for simplicity.

Especially in my online business.

One glaring example of simplicity is website design.

Far too many bloggers getting started get bogged down with website design.

It’s unnecessary.

Most premium WordPress themes look great as they are.

I use the Bimber theme on my niche sites (mainly because it has an amazing infinite scroll feature). It looks fantastic as is. I merely customize the colors.

Other than that I don’t bother with any CSS or coding to make changes.

I install it and start publishing.

These days most people surf on their phones.

Can you tell the difference among themes when you visit sites on mobile devices? Probably not.

They pretty much look all the same.

So why waste time or money with custom designs.

When you start earning $25K per month, by all means, drop $10K on a custom design. I earn more than that and still use themes as-is.

That said, once in a while, I need some coding help. I don’t know PHP. I know enough CSS to botch my site.

For example, with Bimber I wanted to add a text input area below the post grid on category and tag archive pages.

I wanted this so I could add plenty of content on these pages in an effort to rank them in Google.

I’ve had mixed results.

Some of these archive pages get search traffic.

Some don’t.

All in all, it’s been worth it.

It’s been worth it because I spent all of 5 minutes adding the code to make it happen.

And I’m not a coder.

What I did was hire a coder on Codeable.

Actually, I’ve hired coders on Codeable for 10 projects so far. Most were small little coding tasks that cost me around $100.

I would have had to spend days trying to figure out the code.

A coder who is trained can usually fix your issue or add your feature in minutes.

And while the hourly rate might seem kind of high, I love the fact that Codeable vets all its coders before permitting them in the platform.

That way you know you’re getting someone who can do the job.

I’ve yet to hire a coder there who couldn’t do the job.

And they do it fast.

It’s an amazing platform.

Again, I don’t pay for a custom design but sometimes I need a PHP tweak or some CSS and it’s Codeable to the rescue.

Another example is once upon a time I needed a child theme added to my site.

I had no idea how to do that.

I hired a coder on Codeable who did it for hardly any money within a couple of days.

With Codeable you don’t have to hire anyone permanently.

You can let several applicants submit bids – you can choose the lowest.

Best of all, because Codeable does the vetting, you don’t have to.

I usually hire the first person who shows an interest in the job.

I don’t like wasting time.

I like to hire them and get the job done in a day or two.

Don’t waste days on something someone who knows what they’re doing can do in minutes.

When you need help with any coding, head to Codeable.