Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Newsletters and shopping carts are two of the most used services for websites today.  It seems like everybody has something they want to sell for their business whether it’s a physical product or a downloadable product so they turn to their websites to increase sales.

As a website owner you also want to keep your clients and customers informed with what’s going on in your business and portray yourself as the expert in your chosen field so you start a newsletter.

The most popular service for both a shopping cart and a newsletter is by far 1SC (1Shopping Cart). After all, spending $99/month to offer a newsletter, physical products and downloadable products seems like a steal considering how much you believe you will earn from your products.

The truth is it takes time to get a website found online and even when it does get found, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your visitors will purchase your products.  You have to have a superior product and portray that throughout your website.  Your newsletter has to have something of interest for it to get subscribers.

Depending on what you charge for your product, it could take you a long time to just break even when paying $99/month. What if there was an alternative to that costly monthly fee?

There is and it’s called Virtuemart and Acajoom. Virtuemart and Acajoom are made specifically for the CMS, Joomla and they are both free.

Virtuemart-

Virtuemart is a fully functional, high powered shopping cart made specifically for Joomla.  Some of the features it includes are:

• Shopper groups-this allows you to be able to offer discounts to customer A but not customer B.  This is a great feature so that you can offer discounts to repeat customers.
• Multiple currency
• Shipping address based tax calculation
• Unlimited number of products
• Online Catalog
• Featured products
• RSS feeds to update subscribers on new products
• Easily add and remove products
• Live credit card processing or pre-defined payment gateways like paypal, authorize.net and more

Acajoom-

• Unlimited subscribers
• Subscription through URL
• Create a default HTML template for each mailing
• Unlimited lists, you can have a list for marketing tips, a list for startup tips, a list for whatever you want and have different subscribers to each.

You may be saying it’s great that all this stuff is free but I already have a website so I don’t want to redo it.  That’s perfectly understandable.

It will cost you approximately $900 or less to get a full-featured shopping cart, newsletter manager, and easy to update website. With 1SC, you are STILL going to either have to put in a LOT of work to set it up, template it, configure it, load the products, etc. In fact, the SAME amount of work that is required for a Joomla site. And you’ll have to either do the work, or pay for it, at about the same rate.

The real comparison is not in setup fees – those are the same. The real comparison is in monthly. A Joomla/VM setup can be maintained for $35 or less per month, and with that, you can often get assistance and advice on how to actually EARN with the site. Compared to 1SC, that’s a significant savings.

Let’s do the math:

Shopping cart and newsletter using 1SC-$99/month
Joomla, Virtuemart and Acajoom-$35/month
1SC for 1 year-$1188
Joomla, Virtuemart, and Acajoom for 1 year-$420
That’s a difference of $768 for 1 year

The proof is in the math.

I understand change is tough. Especially when you have virtual assistants, coaches, marketers etc telling you to stick with 1SC but the truth is, you could really be costing your business a lot of unneeded money waste.

If you don’t mind wasting thousands of dollars to keep in touch with your clients and sell your products online because 1SC is the “norm,” then more power to you. But if you are looking for a cost-effective, long-term solution to your newsletter and shopping cart needs, give us a call and we can help you decide which solution is right for you.

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Recently I had the unfortunate task of telling a business person some really bad news about her site.

She was asking for some ideas on how to get more visitors to her site as well as making it more visible on Google. I checked out her site which was very nice but I noticed one HUGE problem, it was completely built in flash. Because the site was built in Flash it probably cost her roughly $1000 dollars. The bad news about it being in Flash is that the search engines will only index it as a single page site without any content.

Considering content is one of the most important aspects of SEO if the search engines can’t read it, I don’t care how nice it is, the site will bring minimal traffic, if any.  You can add description tags and title tags that are excellent but because that is not a primary concern with search engines, you will receive minimal benefit from it.

It is true that Google purchased the rights to the technology to interpret Flash. However, they have not implemented it and no other search engine can read it.  When they do implement it, they will only read the text inside the Flash, not pictures of text, since Flash sites are basically moving pictures, Flash sites will still not be as indexable as other sites.

There is NO aesthetic advantage to designing an entire site in Flash. In fact, you can achieve almost the same effects with JavaScript, and CSS, which won’t interfere with search engine indexing.

Flash is great for accents, but not for entire site coding.

I wasn’t really thrilled about telling the person about her site.  Especially since I knew approximately how much she paid for it, but as a web designer I felt I had a moral and ethical duty to tell her.  Was she upset?  Probably, but I haven’t heard a response from her.  My only concern is that she went back and talked to the person who created the site for her, asking them about it.  Not because I am fearful of the backlash but because of the fact that her web designer probably told her I was full of it and that Google and other sites can index her Flash site just as well as any other site.  The reason I am sure that her web designer told her not to worry about it is because they created the site for her to begin with, knowing that her site would have a hard time getting indexed and getting traffic.

Just because a site can have a ton of bells and whistles doesn’t mean it should.  This also goes for advertisements, or anything that does not serve a purpose to your site visitors such as music playing in the background, a video of the site owner/CEO talking about how great their business is or even saying welcome.

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A lot of people believe that when they decide they want a website it can be up and running within a couple of weeks.  Unfortunately, that is not so.  The truth is building a website is a process.

Domain Name And Hosting- Obviously this is first and foremost.  The domain name needs to be purchased quickly so that it is not purchased by another person.  There are several businesses and people who are on the internet and it may be difficult to get exactly the domain name that is wanted.  Hosting needs to be purchased as well because without hosting, there is no website.

Site Design-The site design is one of the most important aspects of the whole website.  You have to get the colors, pictures, navigation and all around organization of it correct.  Then it needs to be sent to the client for approval.  It is commonplace for some additional tweaking and design work to take place before it is out for the world to see.  This could take several days, or even weeks, depending on how quickly approvals are returned, and how intensive the changes need to be.

Site Structure Install-If you are using the CMS Joomla,  this is actually the easiest thing to do as long as the designer has Joomla already configured.  Then it is just as simple as installing it into the hosting account and making sure all the components are there.  This also includes installing the template that was created. This can take between 1 and 4 hours to do, depending on how much is pre-configured.

Content-The content is the hardest part of creating a website.  The content has to be written and it has to be written well.  A client can do this themselves, or hire it.  However, a good web designer will take a look at client provided content and tweak it to better suit the site visitors and for SEO purposes.   This will go on for every page that is on the site.  This can take several days or even weeks, depending on how many pages the site consists of and how much needs to be done to speak to the site visitors.

SEO- When a site is built correctly, the SEO is largely accomplished in the design and content areas. Too often, a site owner hires a designer to do the site, a content writer to create the content, and then hires an SEO expert to optimize it – the problem with this approach is that it results in a lot of unnecessary cleanup, and may produce handicaps in the site that are prohibitively expensive to correct. It is best to include the Optimization in the site build process from the beginning. Because when the site is built correctly to begin with, SEO becomes a simple process of adding the titles, descriptions, alt-tags, and creating a backlink and online Search Marketing plan. Search Engine Optimization helps to attract higher placement in the search engines and results in more traffic to the site.  It begins and ends with good content, and happens best within a smart site design.

Training-Joomla can have a learning curve to it, as does any software that is worth using, that is why designers who create websites in Joomla SHOULD include training.  Training can be from one hour up to several hours.  Depending on how much the site designer and site owner agreed to and how much the site owner needs help with.

The average time between contract signing and site completion, is two months. It can happen faster if the site is fairly simple and the site owner returns required items promptly and gives approvals quickly. Sometimes it can take longer, due to unforeseen complications (technology is that way), or unexpected events in the lives of the site owner or designer. Getting a “Website Tonight” though, is a myth. If you get an instant website, it isn’t going to be a complete website.

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Collins-Admin Services and Fabulous Frugal Websites is proud to announce that they have two new vertical markets for web design services:Virtual Assistance and Private Investigation.

What this means is that we are now offering web design packages with the virtual assistant and private investigator/judgment recovery agent in mind.  These packages include some of the most asked for addons for the particular industy.

For virtual assistants our sites include:

Newsletter manager (no more paying third party companies)

Events calendars

Task management ability

Event and seminar registration

Companion blog (with matching template)

and more…..

For private investigators and judgment recovery professionals:

Newsletter manager

Ability for clients to download contracts directly from website

Collaboration software

and online client bill paying

These addons are just one’s that are already included in the package.  Should you want another feature, chances are it can be added.

So whether you are a virtual assistant or private investigator who needs a website or wants their website revamped check out our two vertical markets:

Virtual Assistant

Private Investigator/Judgment Recovery Agent

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If you don’t want an opinion, don’t ask

I remember when I first started my VA business. I was on a limited budget and I didn’t have a lot to spend on my business. I knew I needed a website but I didn’t have the money to pay to get one professionally done so I took it upon myself to create my own and let me say what a challenge that was. Anyway, I set out to create my own website so I searched for free hosting, free templates, and how-to html coding sites and I found some so I started my journey.

I got my site done after spending many, many weeks on it and endless amount of hours working on it. I was so proud of it that I couldn’t wait for the world to see it. I decided to put my website up for review thinking for sure I would get nothing but rave reviews. Boy, was I wrong! In fact, I don’t think any of the critiquers said anything nice about the site. I’ll admit, I got mad and got really defensive. I felt as if they were all attacking me. Honestly though, I think what was the worse is I got my pride hurt. I was so proud of my site and here it wasn’t as good as I thought it was. I did eventually take their critiques to heart and started fixing it and let me tell you, it did wonders for my site and my image.

Anytime you ask for a critique of your website you need to realize that you will get the truth on what people see on your site. They are not trying to be condescending or ignorant when it comes to reviewing them. Believe it or not, they are actually trying to help. There ARE some people who are just ignorant who won’t give you any advice and just tell you give it up and hire a professional designer. To me that is not being helpful that is just plain ignorant and shameless self promotion. Just ignore them. They forgot what it was like when they were just starting out doing web design and now they don’t believe that anybody can do it but themselves and they are not truly out to help, they are out to get business.

When you are looking for a website critique ask yourself a few questions:

Am I ready to have my site critiqued?

Can I handle the constructive criticism that I may get, good or bad?

If I do get a critique, will I take the opinions and run with it or will I just ignore them and walk away?

Do I truly want my site to be a success or do I just want to have a web presence?

If you ask yourself those questions and you can honestly answer them in a positive way then you are ready for a website critique. Personally, I think one of the biggest reasons why people get so defensive is because they feel that people are attacking their hard work and that is not the way it is. They are honestly trying to help. Those who offer the reviews are taking time out of their day to help your website and your business become a success. There is nothing in it for them. True they may get a few clients from it but in all reality, that is a very small percentage.

If something isn’t working, you have to accept hard truths to be able to fix it and make things better. And if you refuse to accept help, or if you decide to hold a grudge against someone who tried to help you, you are shutting off your own ability to succeed. Remember before you ask for a website critique, ask yourself those simple questions and above all else, if you do not want a TRUE opinion, don’t ask.

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