Everyone who works with computers has run into a problem and asked for help. But few people realize that how you ask for help can have a big impact on how quickly you receive a solution. Here are three guidelines to follow that will make the technical guru in your life happier, and help him or her help you:

1. Describe what happens, not what doesn’t happen. The vast majority of problem reports I receive begin with “I can’t ______,” as in, “I can’t log in” or “I can’t send an email.” Unfortunately, this says very little about the problem you’re experiencing. You wouldn’t tell your auto mechanic, “I can’t start my car,” or tell your doctor, “I don’t feel well” and expect them to diagnose your problem. Instead, you would say something like, “When I turn the ignition, I hear a rrr-rrr sound and the check engine light comes on,” or, “When I stand up quickly after a meal, I feel dizzy.” You can do the same thing with computers: “When I enter my username and password and click Submit, the login page reloads,” or “When I click the Send button on an email message, the window closes and a moment later I see the following error message: [copy and paste].”
2. Provide specific details. When you’re describing what happened, go ahead and be as specific as you can. If you’re having a problem logging into an account, be sure to mention the username you’re using. If you can’t send an email, what email address are you sending to? If you have trouble viewing a web page, what is its complete URL? (Just copy and paste it!) If you can’t add a product to your shopping cart, what product did you try? Any of these details could be the essential clue that helps find the problem.
3. Don’t assume everyone else can see the problem. If the problem you’ve encountered were obvious or consistent, it probably wouldn’t exist because the software developers themselves would have seen it and fixed it. That’s why the details in step 2 are so important. Logins probably work with most usernames, and most products can probably be added to shopping carts … it may be the particular data you’re working with that triggers the problem. The goal is to put someone else in your shoes so he or she can see the problem, too.

These guidelines are valid whether you’re asking a friend for help, calling tech support or hiring a programmer to build custom software for you. If you’re that programmer, you know what I’m talking about, and I have a tool that can help your clients: check out Betaboard, which asks all the right questions to gather this key information for you.

But even if you’re just making a phone call or sending an email message, keeping these guidelines in mind will help get the job done faster.

The one step that virtually every potential client has taken before they contact me about a new project is registering their domain name. I can understand the feeling of wanting to grab that name as soon as you have the idea for a new project. I have a few domain names for “some day” projects in reserve myself. But some registration companies are easier to work with than others, so the choice you make in registering can have an impact on the cost and flexibility of your project. If you have a new website idea, here are some ideas about where to register the name:

Low cost, easy to use: DomainSite
I started using DomainSite (also known as Name.com) because of their $8.88 registration cost, but stayed because of their no-fuss administration tools. In just a few minutes, I can log in and redirect my domains or email from one server to another, and I like being able to renew my domains without clicking through pages of “special offers” for other services I don’t need. DomainSite is a small company based in Denver and I’ve since gotten to know some of the employees by name, which is nice.

Big name, easy to use: Register.com
If you’re more comfortable with an older, bigger, higher-profile company, I suggest Register.com. I used them for years and some of my clients still do. Their control panel isn’t as straightforward as DomainSite’s, but it gets the job done and I’ve learned some of the tricks of using it. Register.com still uses the base $35/year price for domains, which was standard before smaller companies came in offering lower prices. That’s fine if you have one domain, but if you end up registering lots of them, you’ll start to feel the price difference.

Low cost, hard to use: GoDaddy
Among the aforementioned smaller companies with lower prices, GoDaddy is the most popular. However, they’ve come to offer so many different add-on services that it can be difficult to find domain registration info on their site. Whenever I need to change your domain settings, I have to click through pages after page, and popup window after popup window, to find them — and then I get logged out and have to start over after a few minutes of inactivity. I charge by the hour, so this is not in your best interest. Besides, Mr. Daddy — do you really need race cars and cleavage to sell domain names?

Big name, hard to use: Network Solutions
Rounding out my list is the original, big name registrar, which we used to affectionately call NetSol. Now they’ve taken on the worst of both worlds — the cost of Register.com plus the complexity of GoDaddy. Actually, Network Solutions isn’t much harder to deal with than Register.com, but last time I used them, it took 24 hours for domain changes to take effect — during which time the affected sites were completely unavailable. I don’t know if that was just a fluke, but I’d rather not try it again.

There are many registrars out there, but of those I’ve used, I would recommend DomainSite or Register.com and stay away from GoDaddy and Network Solutions. As for the next step of purchasing web hosting — that’s even more important, so let’s wait until we start our project!

I’m a pretty detail-oriented guy, but the number of times I’ve sent an email message without the attachment I referred to is unnerving. A while ago I had the idea that if my email program could scan for the word “attachment,” and an attachment wasn’t present, it could show an alert before letting me send the message to confirm whether I meant to include one. I decided to try and write an AppleScript plug-in for Entourage, my email program at the time, and put it on my low-priority to do list.

Before I had time to do that, I switched from Entourage to Thunderbird, and was delighted to find that such a plug-in already exists. I tried it and it worked exactly as I had imagined:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/attachreminder

Then I switched from Thunderbird to Apple Mail, and found a plug-in for that, too:

http://eaganj.free.fr/code/mail-plugin

I haven’t used them, but it looks like similar plug-ins are available for Gmail and Outlook:

http://www.techsuperb.com/email/forgotten-attachment-detectors-for-gmail-and-outlook/1536.html

I’m afraid that still leaves Entourage without a similar feature, but it won’t be me who builds it — I’m happy with my new mail setup.