Scott's comments

Melinda,

Review my portfolio online and let me know if you still need help.

Zou hao,

Scott

interesting. I have been with GoDaddy.com for 10 years and never had an issue with hosting, domain, support or anything and I currently run 4 sites with them.

Best of luck Melanie.

Scott

Mindy-

This may sound odd, but your best bet might be craigslist. You would be surprised how many small agencies troll craigslist for work. And normally you get pretty quick responses (1-2 hours). The other option is to hit some of the smaller, mom and pop computer shops. A lot of times they help with that kind of stuff as most of their clients are small businesses or individuals.

Hope this helps.

Scott

The length doesn't really matter as much as the quality of the content.

I think the biggest thing to remember is to put your personality into your eBook. Coming from someone who has read several eBooks in his life time, the ones I remember and recommended are the ones that had personality.

eBooks are like motivational speakers - they all say the same thing. They just present it with different personality. And 'that' is what clicks with the listener (or in your case the reader).

If you are writing an eBook that is going to compete against another eBook, what will stand out is 'how' you say what you want to say more than 'what' you say. Because most likely, your readers have read it before.

Best of luck to you.

Scott

Communities are very subjective. You have to consider the market you are trying to engage.

Not seeing your communities, it is hard to give a hard pinpoint answer, but some things to consider: 1) Is your community focused toward a broad market or a niche market? 2) Are you advertising to a broad market when you should be honing in on a niche market and your advertising is just not reaching your intended viewers? 3) Is the market already saturated with communities. This can be the biggest issue. If your community is focused toward a market that already has several established communities you will be hard pressed to get a lot of traffic. In this case you have to seriously consider not how you market, but what you market. You have to provide something that none of the other communities offer. What that is, I don't know but you will need to find out and sell your community based on the difference not the similarities.

In general, unless you hit a really under provided niche market, or offer something everyone needs that no one is already providing in a community site then you are fighting a losing battle.

I wish you the best and hope this helped.

Regards,

Scott

Kristine,

Let me know if you are still looking for help.

Scott

Nanette,

If you are still looking for someone, let me know.

zou hao,

Scott

Well, to answer the original question, there are several reasons to have a domain name different than that of your company name. Say you company name is "Danishum Imports" and you import and sell blue widgets. How many people looking for widgets are going to know to look for "Danishum Imports"? So, needless to spell out, danishumimports.com is not going to get a ton of traffic. A better domain would be bluewidgets.com or blue-widgets.com. Another good reason for this is the name itself. How many people would be able to spell danishumimports.com without reading it 3-4 times or have it written down somewhere? I would think a simpler, easier to remember domain would work better than the companies real name.

Now this may not be the same case for the web site in question, but it does present a couple good reasons why one would not use their company or service name as their domain name.

Hope this helps someone. Oh, and I enjoyed the flavor of the thread as well. I think the challenge is that one can not tell seriousness from sarcasm in text. You must see a persons face to truly know how to take a comment.

zou hao,

Scott

Lynn,

The biggest thing to remember is not to design or develop a web site without help from a professional.

(Not a promotion, just some strong advice) ;)

There are two questions you need to ask yourself that none of us can answer:

1. How will a forum help your visitors?
2. How will a forum help you?

Do you have questions that are constantly being asked? If so, allowing customers to ask these questions in a forum allows them to help you develop an open Q&A that inevitably will help your other customers.

Will having a forum increase sales or customer registrations? This is the most important question. If a forum or blog will not increase sales for you, then it is not a worthy investment of your time.

If you answered yes to both, then a forum is a good idea. I would suggest self managing it, and posting most commonly asked questions. Direct visitors to you forum through 'questions?' or 'support' links throughout your site which will encourage people to use the forum before direct contact.

Ultimately a forum should be a resource that will reduce customer interaction and increase sales.

Hope this helps.

If you are still looking for help let me know. We deal with online and offline promotion and marketing of web sites.

Jeff,

This is exactly the challenge most of us 'designers' have to fight with. Today you can go to any junior college, take a course on MS FrontPage or Adobe Dreamweaver and walk out with a certificate saying you can design web sites. Knowing how to use a WYSIWYG application does not a 'designer' make.

But then again, you can't ask a print designer to design a web site either. Well, you could... and it would probably look great. But how would it function? How long would it take to load? What would the customer experience be like?

I have experienced this first hand with print designers trying to design web sites without knowing UI design or Information Architecture.

Just as in print design, there are standards and best practices in web design. But even knowing those, if you don't have a graphic design background or the like you are not going to be successful at web design.

Debbie, Let me know if you are still looking for help.

Zou hao,

Scott

Excellent point Tia! This is not the 'Field of Dreams'... You can no longer build a web site and site back to watch people come in and sign-up or buy a product. Heck, the smallest amount of competitive results I've seen on Google in a while was something like 836,000. That is almost unheard of with a common search term. Even if you are in a niche market, you have to work at it to get on the first or second page of a search engine (really hard). And don't even start thinking about placement on a new site...

You HAVE to let people know your site is there, whether that is online or offline marketing. You have to do the leg (or lip) work to get the traffic in order for the site to do what it was built to do.

The most simple things to do offline are to add the URL to your email signature, business card, postcards, brochures and storefront (if you have one). Yes, even add it to your business AND personal checks. If you have a commute, plaster it on the rear window of your car. Put it in your voice mail message, and of course - TELL everyone you meet!

Online, join biznik (that was a stupid statement), facebook, and Linkedin. Find groups, blogs and forums that cater to your market and join; then post, post, post (not spam mind you, engage in conversations and bring it up. Add it to your forum or blog signatures)... If you have a bit of marketing budget, do a survey. You can use friends and family, but I would suggest a street corner or grocery store (so the results are unbiased) and create a list of search terms people would use to search online for your product or service. Then set-up a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign with Yahoo and Google.

Once you have traffic, you need to keep them through a newsletter, email specials, etc. Then when you have that client base, you will get that treasured 'word-of-mouth' advertising. Then you can breathe.

Now after you've taken your breath...

Start all over again!

Tia, I agree to a point with Jake. There is a disconnect between the outer columns and the header. But I would suggest against using grey as a replacement color. Grey is very corporate and ridged. You need to keep your site alive and colorful. I would suggest either adding a thin division bar of the red between the header and the navigation and change the orange text to match the red, or bring in the yellow or shade of orange down in place of the red.

I have done several wordpress sites and would be more than happy to discuss minor tweaks to your site to bring it up a notch.

Scott

Check with your local Small Business Association office. They have all the forms you will need to file for grants and government loans.

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who matter don't mind, and those that mind, don't matter." - Dr. Seuss

If Faith doesn't work out, let me know. I have experience in comic animation, Flash site design and product demos and would be glad to discuss your project with you.

Zou hao,

Scott

Hey David,

I have used a little know program for several years called DaDa Mail found here: http://mojo.skazat.com/

This is a CAN-SPAM complaint application that has single and double opt-in options. It also creates all the code for you.

I highly recommend this to anyone looking to do their own opt-in lists or online newsletters.

hope this helps.

Zou hao.

Eli,

With the current market the way it is for realtor's, I don't know if you can honestly judge your marketing success or failures.

So don't restrict yourself just to realtor's. What about gym's, specialty medical offices, high-end daycare facilities, office space rental agencies, etc? These clients can always be sold on virtual video tours of their clinics, facilities and/or office spaces. Deal with the elite first and then work downward showing people what their competitors are doing (or what you are doing for them).

Look outside of your box. And develop new relationships.

Take some of your better pieces and post them on sites like istockphoto.com or shutterstock.com. SMB's use these sites all the time for animation, photo and illustration resources. They pay by the piece and you get paid by the download.

The thing you really need to look at here is total cost. You can go with open source. The applications are free but who is going to set it up, maintain it, fix it when it breaks? You can find yourself in a ton of debt dealing with open source.

Now don't get me wrong, I love open source. But it is not without its problems. Zen cart is very hard to set-up and maintain if you don't know it. oscommerce is a bit easier but still has issues. When you are dealing with open source you are dealing with coders that think they can design. UI design is not easy. It takes research, study and methodology's that developers don't normally learn or use. So open source, while free up front, can be costly in the long run.

If you are an established company, and are looking to upgrade to something better than what you have, I suggest going with a licensed application. it can be hosted by the provider or sold as a stand alone application. But hosting is the easy part. The hard part is all the planning, design and research that went into the development of the product you are actually going to pay for up front which will usually end up being cheaper in the long run.

The strongest e-commerce apps are going to be developed on the ASP.NET platform. I have used several and they are much easier to step-up, build out and maintain.

Remember, it is not the initial cost you need to be concerned about. It's the labor cost afterwards that are associated with the decision you make.

I hope this helps.

Zou hao.

I don't find myself planning either. I go with the intension of chatting... about anything. Do I look for openings? Sure. But it is more instinctive than planned.

I will tell you one thing. I don't take kindly to people who command conversations just to promote themselves. If I want that, I'll walk into your office or booth at the trade shows. But at a networking event I am not expecting to be hard sold too.

And the expert in the field headline is a little misleading for this post. I don't think you need to practice or plan to sound like an expert. It comes naturally because the knowledge is there. Those who 'try' or 'practice' to sound like an expert usually find themselves losing their audience because they use industry specific terms that most people don't know or understand. OK, so they would lose me as an active participant in the conversation.

And there is my input.

Zou hao.

As a web designer I never quote by hour. I always flat rate the job based on scope of work. Yes the total is always calculated using an hourly rate but my clients don't know that. This way they know what they are getting for what they are paying, unless they change the scope of work. I often get people calling in asking how much I would charge for a site. Well that is a loaded question as I don't know what they want in the site. e-commerce, photo gallery, blog?

If I called you and asked if you could do a virtual tour of my house? Could you give me a quote not knowing the size of the house, how many rooms, etc?

Now you said that your prices are too high for some realtors but too low for those large projects. Since you are in that industry, would it work to give a flat rate based on square footage? This way your price is based on size of job vs. hours. You can always firm up a quote after they call, if they need something specific that would require more time.

Just my 4 cents. Good luck Eli.

DeBorah,

If you still need someone, give me a call.

Zou hao,

Scott