I know everyone’s busy this time of year, and when we have problems, we usually need them fixed yesterday. In that blind rush to get the problem before your favorite list or forum, it’s easy to forget that it’s important to make things easy on the people you HOPE will help you. Here are some things I’ve found useful being an habitue of quite a number of help boards, forums (fora?) and mailing lists. Remember, in this line of work, time is money, and time is precious for each and every one of us. Remembering these rules will go a long way toward speeding up the help process. :)

1. Describe your problem as clearly and accurately as you can. More information is better. Except huge long chunks of code. Small snippets of code are okay. Check with your particular list or forum to see if you can use PasteBin (http://www.pastebin.com). If the code is long, you might want to ASK the members if they want to see it OFFLIST and provide it that way only to those offering to help you directly.

2. Give your Subject a meaningful title. “WordPress stopped working” is not as helpful as “WordPress throws out MySQL Error Message” for example.

3. Give a clickable link http://www.mycoolsite.com to the site you want someone to check for you. My mail reader only makes http://… links clickable. It doesn’t take that long to train yourself to do that, especially if you want immediate help.

4. Before you even come onto the list or forum with a design coding question or to request a site check, VALIDATE your CSS and your HTML. You’d be amazed at some of the silly errors and typos that doing so will reveal and it might even solve your problem.

5. Which server? Windows or *nix? I, probably erroneously, make the assumption, unless you state at the outset, that your problem/site/etc. is running on an Apache server and you’re using Windows. I have limited knowledge about Windows/IIS servers and their behaviors so mentioning that at the beginning is also very helpful.

6. Mac Versus PC. Ditto software questions. State at the outset whether you are talking about Windows PC or Macs; otherwise, I’ll assume (possibly wrongly) Windoze.

7. With WordPress especially becoming so popular, stating which version you are using .. and again, whether it’s on a *nix or IIS server helps immensely. Also stating whether it’s in the site root or in a subdirectory helps to troubleshoot some problems pretty much right off the bat.

8. Google for your problem as much as possible; you’d be amazed at some of the great answers out there; a lot of people all over the world have likely had some of the same issues. It helps to go there first for help especially with a common problem. It also helps to visit the support forum of the program or script that is giving the problem since those folks live and breathe that particular program or script and are probably much better equipped to quickly answer the question.

Okay, I’ll sit back down now with my donut and coffee. ;)