|
|
| About Us |
| Contact Us |
| Living Guide |
| Special Occasions |
| Recipes |
| Gift Guide |
|
The Ranch and Penthouse site.
Useful tools: |
|
Who are we and are we nuts?
We're your average middle class family of 6 (with another due in a few months). The kids ages range from 10 years old to 14 months. None of us are college graduates, so don't expect a lot of theoretical mumble jumble here. We'll just tell you what we do, what works, what doesn't and at times even ask for your input. We'll even provide you with our 'to do' list, our costs, our goals and any helpful links and shortcuts we might come up with along the way so you can follow along. Our goal is to be up and running by August 30th so that we are prepared for the CHRISTmas rush and to keep the total start-up costs under $1,000.00. Remember, we are not professionals, so if we can do it, so can you. (But you might want to see how it works out first.) FYI - There may be times when a lot is happening here and times when nothing happens. We'll keep you posted as quickly as possible as to our progress, but remember, we are a family first, so some things like the birth of a child may slow us down a little bit. Also, there may be times when we are working on the business itself, but there is nothing new to report. Don't worry, keep checking back and you won't miss anything. As we proceed, the whole process will also documented on our website. (Once we get to that point.) Getting Started - the basics Well, let's start with the basic equipment. Since this will be an e-commerce business, we'll probably need a computer and some sort of connection to the Internet. Fortunately, we already have the computer. It?s not the newest thing on the market (we have 6 mouths to feed, remember), but then again, we're not launching a rocket to Mars for goodness sake. All we have is an old system with 133 Mhz, Windows 95, 32k of ram and a 2 gig hard drive. I hope that's right, I'm no computer scientist. The whole thing cost us $1500.00 new, now for that price you almost can send someone into outer space. When the time comes we'll probably have to invest in a decent printer to print mailing labels and packing lists. But then again, maybe our inkjet can handle the job. I dread thinking of the costs of ink cartridges though. Maybe we'll be able to come up with something to reduce the cost there. We're also going to have to find an ISP. Right now we're leaning toward a cable modem, but the cost is about $45.00 per month in our area. Oh well, even if this fails, we'll still have a heck of an internet connection. That should about do it for equipment. Like we said, this is an ongoing project, so we may find something we need later on. Finding a Product Finally, we get to move on to the fun part, finding a product or products. But how do you find one? Being novices at all of this, we did it in the novice way. We wanted to see if we could find a drop-ship wholesaler so we wouldn?t have to worry about any of the shipping stuff. So we did a search on 'wholesale drop ship' and received 63,700 results. We started at the beginning and then would skip a few pages so that the guys at the end wouldn't be slighted. You never know what you might find. Unfortunately all we found is that for the most part there are a lot of people trying to sell a directory of wholesale drop shippers. Being a bootstrapping business, we decided not to spend $20.00 for something that from what we could tell probably wouldn't pan out. We're not saying these directories aren't good, we just didn't want to go that route. So I decided it should be something I like. I happen to like a good cup of coffee occasionally, so I decided to do the normal thing, I did a search for 'wholesale coffee'. This gave me a list of 453,000 options. I started to go through that and realized that what I was really looking for was 'wholesale flavored coffee' and whittled the list down to a manageable 10,800. At this point, let me be honest with you and admit that I did not research all 10,800 results. If you've done any kind of a web search you know that many of the results were duplicates. I've narrowed that list down to 2 possibilities. I was looking for something in my area (which is kind of remote) so that we could possibly pick up our orders in person and save some shipping costs. Our First Crisis After doing all of this diligent research, it was brought to my attention by my partners and staff (the ones who live in the same house that I live in) that I was the only one interested in coffee. In business only 2 days and already there is rebellion in the ranks. What's a CEO to do? While pondering our dilemma, I decided to walk to the vending machines during my day job and buy a candy bar. (It's not in the budget, but I mentioned there may be unknown expenses.) Across from the vending machines was a table with a display of scented candles on it. Of course, it's CHRISTmas time, many of my fellow employees run little side businesses. Maybe I could get a deal on some of these candles and sell them on the web. I quickly jotted down the phone number on a scrap of paper and put it in my pocket. I was in full brainstorming mode now. I raced over to the bulletin board where many of these side businesses are listed to see what else I might find. There was a listing for card stamping. That didn't seem like something that would be very easily mass produced, but I took down the number anyway. Then, to my amazement, I saw an add for scented candles with a web address. I added the name to my list. Later on I logged onto the aforementioned website and found that they not only had scented candles, but body lotions too. And even better than that, there was a place to contact them about wholesale information. I sent them a quick email to get more information. I didn't say too much, just that my wife and I are starting a small business and were interested in any information they could give us as a supplier. We could hardly sleep that night waiting for a reply. And it came the next day. There minimum order is only $200.00 with a $150.00 requirement after that. All we need is a vendor's license. They've also offered to give us a couple of samples, but we haven't taken them up on that yet. No sense getting there hopes up since we don't even have a web page. And the best part about it is, they are only about 2 miles away, so we'll save on shipping charges. Alright, crisis averted, management is in agreement, flavored coffee, scented candles and body lotions. Now we just need to get the rank and file interested. We'll cover that when we talk about the vendor's license. P.S. I did get a candy bar. Introduction to Networking (the people kind) In the business world you here a lot of talk about networking (people, not computers). As a matter of fact, where I work now the business was founded by a gentleman who networked his way to a multi-billion dollar corporation. But you may be sitting there asking yourself, 'who has time to network?' and 'I don?t know the right people to network with.' It's only natural, I used to ask myself the same questions. The people I hang around with have regular jobs, families and a real life. They don't belong to any fancy organizations or groups. (If you're not thinking these things, congratulations, you're way ahead of the rest of us.) But we've already discussed how we used networking (more or less) to find a wholesale supplier for our store. Now we're going to give you another example. It involves our vendor's license. While we were putting our 'business plan' together, we were looking at various options. A friend of ours supplements his income by selling merchandise on one of the online auction sites. He has a store there and everything. We had created a couple of recipe CD?s and a couple of CD?s of interesting emails that we had received. Our thought was that maybe we could offer them in his store and maybe auction some off. After discussing it with him, we decided to go in a different direction. We still have the CD's, so maybe once we get going we can offer them as a giveaway. The production cost is about $2.00 each and we know we can lower that. Anyway, he mentioned that he's working on getting a vendor's license so that he can snag some of the really popular stuff to auction. The cost is about $300.00. We're thinking of possibly splitting the cost. We haven't looked into the logistics and legality of splitting a vendor's license yet, but if it works out, we've cut the cost in half. Still, that takes a big chunk out of our $1,000.00 budget. Added to our initial order of products, we're probably around $400.00 now. But, we have a few months to save up. The good news, he specializes in toys. Now we have products that the whole company can endorse. There's nothing better than a happy work force. By the way, we've included our email address on the left side of the page if you'd like to contact us. Just so you know, don't spam us, anything that looks like spam is immediately deleted. Webpage Design - Part 1 Now that we have your creative juices flowing, we're going to start talking about what we've done in the really creative area, web site design. Before you start thinking, "oh no, now I have to break out the wallet and start paying", stop thinking. Assuming you already have your computer (an assumption we make since you are reading this), let's talk about 2 ways to build your site without spending cash, only time. They are: - Find a free host and build your site. Get some experience if you don?t already have any. The free sites are just that, FREE. So why pay when you don?t have to. That?s actually how we created our first site. We then purchased our domain name and had it point to that site. But we got tired of the little pop-up add covering our content, so we went to the paid host. If you want to see what it looked like, go to Our Original Site. It's kind of messed up because this wasn't our actual homepage, but you can't see that one any more because all it has is a link to the new page which you can't see for reasons that will be explained later. The beauty of designing your page this way is that you can have your friends and relatives look at it and tell you what they like, dislike and think you could improve. - The second way to design your website is the way that we are doing it right now. If you have a web browser, you can create a document in notepad, save it as an html file and open it in your browser. There are 2 ways to do this (probably many more, but we only know 2). Both of these are assuming you have a Windows operating system with Internet Explorer. The first method is to go into windows explorer, select the drive you saved your page on, find the file and double click on it. This will open a browser window and there you will see your page. The second method can be used if your browser is already open. Click on file, then open, then browse, select the folder your file is in, then select the file, click on open, click on ok and there it is. - We'll conclude this section with a couple of pointers. Create a main folder with all of your web content. This will make it easier to find. Call your homepage index.html. This will make it easier when you upload the file. Also, try to group your content into sub-folders. This will make it easier to find things when you decide to make changes. Also, when it comes time to upload to your host it's a lot easier to select a folder to upload than a bunch of individual files. We have a folder for images and then one for each individual page. Webpage Design - Part 2 So how's that webpage coming along? Since we're writing this from the novice point of view, we thought we'd add a few more helpful hints. The first is to be nice to your family, they're the only one you have. After that, here's some advice. As we mentioned earlier, we have not gone to college or had any special training in any of this. That's the great thing about the internet, if you look hard enough, anything you need to know can be found for free. Here's the best piece of advice I received from a website when I was trying to learn html, view source. All it means is that if you see a page with something you like, click on view, then source. This will give you a text view of the site. Try to do a search in the text for a keyword you picked up on the main site. See how they did it and then try to emulate it yourself. Don't steal it outright, you can't learn that way. Sometimes you might have to play around with it a little bit to get it to work and sometimes we got so aggravated that we just gave up and looked for something else. If you want some really good tutoring, go to the Useful tools on the upper right hand side of this page and click on Webmonkey. They have real down to earth explanations of a lot of stuff. Or, if you're lazy like we are, go to the stuff to steal link. Again, once we have our site up and running, we'll clean this up a little bit. For now this is the best we can do. We're off to design our page now and of course celebrate CHRISTmas. We'll report back when we are done. We're getting into the nitty-gritty now, so it will probably take some time. Our plan is to have a few pages set up and let you comment so that we can get them just right. Have a nice holiday. Change of Plans Hope everyone is enjoying their holiday break. I know we are. WOW!!! I have a lot to report here and not much time to do it in. Those who have been following along in this blog know we can be kind of wordy. There are some big changes in store for yurdlecity.com. As you know, we had a little discussion on networking. We mentioned that in doing this we found some suppliers for a couple of potential products we might put on the site. We also mentioned that we might have a way to split the cost of a vendor's license. Well, that person talked to someone he knows who already has a site. He specializes in 'fine gifts', which is sort of the direction we're heading in although we haven't made a decision yet. That person started talking to another mutual acquaintance who also has a web site he's working on that features art and things like that. Together they asked us if we might be interested in joining them in creating more than another e-commerce site. So now we're working on a content site that basically has some 'fine living' information for us average folks. It's not the way you would live your life everyday, but if you have a special occasion coming up or something like that, we'll provide tips and pointers to make it go a little smoother for you. We've started to design the site. Hopefully we'll have it up and running in a couple of weeks. In the meantime I've added the links for my partners sites so that you can get an idea of where we're heading. HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! Our First Site Hey!!!! We have a website!!! Have a look. It's pretty much just a shell to start with, but atleast now you can see we're not totally nuts. The link is on the right side of the screen. Now that we've made it this far, we should get back more often to update this blog. The site has been built using a free host, so unfortunately you will have to put up with the adds until we raise the cash to move to our paid host. As we mentioned earlier, we've paid for that, but need money to renew our domain name. For those of you who are keeping track of these things, we've been working on this for a little over a month and so far we haven't spent any money from our $1000 budget. We do have some time involved, but it beats watching tv. We've gone with the basic 3 column look (much like the page you are looking at now. It includes a menu on the left, content in the center and some miscellaneous information on the right. It's done by placing 3 tables side-by-side. There are those who suggest creating 1 big table and putting other tables inside it, but then there are others who say that the screen will stay blank until the full table is loaded. We're not gurus here, so we figured if that is true we would have 3 separate tables. One of these tables is very basic. This means that something should appear on the screen encouraging our visitors to wait for the full page. Our goal is to keep the pages simple and allow them to load quickly no matter what kind of connection our visitors are using. It's nothing fancy yet,but we're still going through the design stage. We'll update it with some fancier buttons on the menu and things like that as we go. Right now our goal is to get it operational. Currently there are only a couple of operational links, but the information is real. Have a look. Have any suggestions? Feel free to contact us and let us know what you're thinking. We've haven't gotten anywhere as far as our vendor's license is concerned yet. There's that money thing again. Since we've changed the focus of the site that is not a high priority at this time. We'll get back to it shortly. Our plan is to have that done by June so that we can put some products out there and make some money. The Basic Layout So, you ask yourself, this family has built a website, but how did they do it? Let us apologize at this time for not giving you a lot of details. It's not that we're trying to hide anything. After all, the point is to tell you how we did it!!! Since we've gone the content route, we've been working on the content. OK, we've already told you that we started with a basic page with 3 tables. The beauty of this is it's simplicity. If you look at the main page and any subsequent page, they are all very similar. What this allows us to do is create a new page with very little editing. All we do is copy a page that we already have and paste it into our text editor. At the present time, each page uses an identical right column (or table). This will probably change in the future. As a matter of fact, we'll probably set it up so that the content in that column will rotate. Once that is done we will let you know and make sure we put the code out there for you to steal. But for now we won't worry about that. This means that that table never has to change. The center table contains the content for that page. Since it is in a table, it automatically wraps the text for us and we don't have to worry about that. We also put all of the content in a single cell so we don't have to worry about missing a or something like that. For a more detailed description of tables, click on the stuff to steal link at the right and look for tables. The left table is the trickiest. On the main page we divided our content into categories. Some of these categories can be divided into sub-categories. This means that our main menu has some sub-menus. To keep from driving ourselves crazy, we actually layed all of this out on a piece of paper. It looks something like this: Main Page Basics: This is the folder that contains basic information like the about page and the site map page once it's created. Living Guide: This is the section that will contain our main content. Currently we are working on tips for planning a party. Therefore, if you click on the living guide link, the menu table will contain a link to party. If you click on the party link, the menu table will contain the 3 elements that make a party successful. If you click on 1 of those links, such as preparation, the menuwill contain the links involving party presentation. We also offer the oppurtunity to go up levels on the tree. This prevents having to use the back button on the browser, because who really remembers how many levels you've gone through in the tree. Recipes: This section will contain various recipe links in the future. As you can see, we do not have a recipe home page developed yet. Gift Guide: This will contain helpful gift buying info. Site Promotion - the very, very basics Well, we're moving right along now. The excitement of actually having a site has started to fade. The realization that we've joined the millions of others with obscure, unknown and unvisited websites is starting to sink in. Now comes the task of promoting our site. You may be asking yourselves, "are these super site designers? Did one family build a completely functional web site in less than 2 months?" And, of course, we would honestly answer, "no way." As we've mentioned earlier, we are not college graduates and have no special training of any sort. We may be doing all of this totally wrong. That's one of our purposes, to do this and let you know what works and what doesn't. You may look at the way we do it and say what a bunch of morons, I could see that would fail from a mile away. Or we might do something and you'll think to yourself, why didn't I think of that. Most likely it'll be something in the middle. We'll try something and it will spark a thought in your mind and you'll say to yourself, "that was good, but if we make this minor change it'll be even better." We are extensive readers. As a matter of fact, when we go grocery shopping, our one son spends his time reading the labels on boxes and cans. That's a little overboard in our opinion, but we're not going to discourage it. Anyway, in our reading we've learned some things that we think might help us. The first is the matter of when you should start to promote your business. We could wait until the site is completed and start to promote it. But will it ever be done? Not really, we will always find something new to add, some changes to make it look better, rearranging to make it more functional. Let's face it, there comes a time when you have to say this is it. We believe we are at that point. We base this on a couple of things. First of all, we read of one very successful businessman who never totally has a completely functional product when it is introduced to the market. He brings it to the market, judges the reaction and then makes changes as necessary. Also, there is an old show business saying. "Always leave the audience wanting more." This has been proven time and again. Take a look at what happens when a tv show becomes very successful. The amount of time it airs each week may be increased or spinoffs are created. Before you know it, there is a glut and people drift away because there is no sense of urgency. Oh, you missed last night's episode? That's ok, there's another one tonight. So our goal is to draw people in and then have them return for updates. Look at your local newscast. What do they do? They tease you with a story that will be upcoming to get you to stay until the very end. We've taken the first step to site promotion. We've included a link to our site in the signature for any emails we might send. THIS DOES NOT MEAN WE ARE GOING TO SEND SPAM!!! Who reads it anyway. However, if we do send out an email, the link will be there. In an upcoming edition of this blog we'll explain how this will be helpful. See, there's our tease. Stay tuned, as promotion will continue in just a matter of time. Contacting the Press We already know what you're thinking. Big deal, put your site address on the signature line of your email. Like we haven't heard that 2 or 3 billion times already. Everybody knows the story about the guys who built their free email site by having a little link to their site offering people free email accounts. But what's the next step. We're glad you asked. As we've stated a few times before, we're avid readers around our house. You wouldn't think that with 6 people we'd be able to find a quiet place to read. But, believe it or not, we do. We read about alot of different subjects, child rearing, the history of NASCAR, useless trivia and biographies. Well one business biography explained how the founder would take 1 day a week and call the trade magazine which covered his type of business and feed them stories or parts of stories. It didn't always concern his own business. But the reporters came to depend on his information. Over time, they began writing articles concerning his business on a regular basis. Just because he took the time to try to help them out. We've revised his technique a little bit to serve our needs. There is a site called U.S. Newspaper list. It's a great name because that's exactly what it is. We've been going through the list (and it's pretty extensive) looking for newspapers in smaller cities. We then look for some sort of event calendar and contact information. What we look for in the contact information is an email address. The reason we do this is to ensure that our link is going to them. If we find both items, we send them the following note: Thanks for the great special events calendar. My wife and I are designing a website and one of the sections is called date night. One of the objects is to find something that won't break the budget. We encourage couples to check the event calendar in their local paper. You may be asking yourselves, "why focus on small cities? Wouldn't it be a better idea to focus on major metropolitan newspaper?" Our theory is that the major newspapers are flooded with emails. What are the chances that someone is going to read our note and actually follow the link to our site? However, in a smaller city, there is more of an oppurtunity for the note to be forwarded to someone who may just be interested enough to follow the link to our site and see why we are thanking them. From there it's just a small step to a small article with a link to our site. You never know. One thing to remember if you try this yourself. Keep the note short and pertinent. Don't have a gardening site and thank the folks at the newspaper for the great sports page. And it goes without saying, keep it positive. Remember, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. The Press Responds Success!!! In a previous blog we mentioned that one of our marketing ideas was to send a note to smaller newspapers commenting on their event calendars. Since the site wasn't exactly where we wanted it to be before we did anything major, we just sent out a preliminary note to 5 newspapers. We received a reply. That's a 20% success rate. Sure, you can look at the fact that we randomly picked 5 newspapers and we can't extrapolate (how's that word for a couple of high school grads) it out to mean we'd have 20 replies out of 100 notes, but it beats ZERO!!! After rereading what we thought was going to be our original note, we did make some changes. Here is the note that we actually sent: Thanks for the great special events calendar. My wife and I are updating our website and one of the topics we discuss is date night when a couple can get alone for an evening. We try to keep it as inexpensive as possible while still allowing for a good time. One of the things we suggest is checking the local newspaper's website for events. Before doing this we decided we had better do a little research to make sure this was possible and have found many sites which do not contain any type of entertainment listings. However, we found yours to be well layed out and stocked full of oppurtunities. Thank you for making our job easier. This is their response: Never thought of the calendar as a date planner, but that's a great idea. Maybe we should call it "Calendar Dates". Thanks for writing. Because our goal is to try and strike up a 'conversation' and possibly receive some free publicity, we sent the following reply: To be perfectly honest with you, neither did we. But we were talking to some friends of ours and they were telling us about some of the things they've been doing, so we asked them where they heard about them. That's when they told us about the newspaper listings. Having been married for several years and drifting out of the 'dating scene', we decided that there were only so many movies that we wanted to see and even with reservations it's hard to get into a restaurant at a reasonable time with the clock ticking on the babysitter. Now we know some of you are thinking, 'these people need to get a life. I've never seen anyone get so excited about having a website and receiving an email from an anonymous newspaper person.' Well, this is truly a grassroots effort. We currently don't have any investors willing to put up big bucks for an advertising campaign or a staff of MBA's to advise us on what we should do next. We're just regular people trying to live out the American dream. And hopefully we'll make it and anyone who reads this blog and learns from our mistakes and copies our successes can do it too. The best part about it is, we're not charging some enormous fee for something that may or may not work. A Quick Review We finally have what we believe to be a viable website. You might be asking yourself, "is it done?" Our honest answer is, "no." But then again, there will probably never be a point when we say, "that's all we can do." But before we go any further, we'd like to review a few things. As we stated in the beginning, this is a learning experience for us and our goal is to pass on what we think we've done right and also what we think we've done wrong. We're pretty happy with the overall layout of the site. The only thing we would like to improve is the left hand table which contains all of our links in our site. The original intent was for this to be pretty constant, but as we added content, we realized that it was more of a burden to update the table than it was to enter the content. I'm sure we've done it the hard way so we'll probably be taking a trip to the web monkey to see how we can improve it. This will probably involve some sort of training on our part since we are hampered by the fact that we only know html. In order to set this up the way we want, we'll most likely need to learn something a little more involved. But, as we said, it works. Now here are a couple of pointers on things we think we did fairly well on. The first decision we made that seemed to be a real time saver was actually laying out our sight before we ever attempted to code it. We knew where we wanted to start and layed out where we wanted to end up. Mind you, we hand typed all of the html ourselves so that we could debug it or change it rather quickly since we knew where to look. It probably would have saved some time to buy some software off the shelf. However, we have limited ourselves to a $1,000.00 budget, so we cut corners whereever we could. And like we said, we know what it is supposed to look like, so it was easy to find our mistakes. Another thing we did was construct our sight modularly. In other words, we started with the main page. Then we created a content page and connected the two. If that worked we moved on to the next page. We also typed everything out before hand and saved it as an html document. This allowed us to open the file up in our browser and look at it before we uploaded it to our site. This is actually something we stumbled on to after we started. Originally we would upload a page, view it, find mistakes, fix our original file, upload again, find mistakes, etc. Now, as things became more complex, we created a spreadsheet. We listed each of our folders and all of the files within each folder. Then, as something was added or changed, we would make a note on our spreadsheet of all of the files that would be affected. We also made a list on the same spreadsheet of everything we wanted to do. As a job was completed, we would delete it from the list. In this way we stayed organized and did not get half way through 1 change and realize that there was something else we wanted to do and forget the original change. Organization was a very important key. Once we uploaded all of the pages we systematically looked at them to see if we could see anything wrong. We also checked all of the links to ensure that they worked. There's nothing worse than a busted link when you think you've finally found what you're looking for. As we checked each link we made a little diagram to show where it went. We compared this to our original layout to be sure we would always end up where we expected to be. Hope this helps. Our next blog will return us to our old friend marketing. The Happy Return to Marketing The marketing campaign has become a 2 pronged attack. First we are sticking with our original newspaper email. We are slowly (very, very, very slowly) building a list of newspapers to be used to send our original email message concerning the event calendar. To give you an idea of how slow it is going, we are now up to 10 recipients. We think the pace should pick up a little now since we are not as focused on getting content on the site. There are still things we want to do, but, we are now ready if that enormous ground swell appears due to our original 5 emails. However, we are also heading in another direction. Because we have added a more serious recipe page, we have done a few searches for recipes. It appears that there are a few sites that will allow you to post a recipe on their site and provide a link back to your own site. Granted, these are not the top of the line sites, but, they are an oppurtunity. We're just looking for some freebies right now. As an added benefit, by using our little email campaign and receiving links from other sites, we still have not had to spend the money on a domain name. That's because noone ever looks at the domain name. The only time that really makes a difference is if you have to type it. Since it's already in a link type form or can be easily cut and pasted, visitors will just have to click on it. We have a couple of other ideas we are working on. For those of you who are tired of watching us cheapskates try to do this without spending any money, rejoice, we are coming to the point where we will have to break out the cash (but not a whole lot of it). We are working on a plan to hand out some promotional cd's which hopefully will draw some people in. Once we get it set up we'll let you know and of course provide you with all of the vital details. For now, we're off to the newspaper list. Flyering Away
Where have we been and what have we been doing? As those who follow this blog on a regular basis know, we are attempting to build an e-commerce website and keep you updated here on our progress. You also know we like to read alot. And that's just what we've been doing, reading and trying to put that information into practice.
On the Move
So, what's new with you folks. We have a couple of important things to let you know about. First of all, we've moved. We are still on a free site, but we've moved to a new free site. One of the main reasons is that we now have a shorter url. The first one was just too long and cumbersome for people to attempt to type in themselves. We did some searching (love that ability on the web) and were able to come up with a host that creates a subdomain. This means we have a name that is separated by periods without a bunch of slashes and other stuff thrown in. We still have the adds on the site, but at this point we'll live with it. The one drawback we have noticed is that the site seems to take an inordinate amount of time to load and we occasionally receive errors, although the site does load. It still loads the same way of uploading what we've created on our pc to the site itself. There is an option to create the files right on the host, but since we have time constraints, we prefer to create the files on our drive and then upload them to make sure we always have a back-up if something goes wrong at the host. In this case we have 2 backups, the original site and what we've edited for the new host.
100 - 100 = 0
WARNING!!! WARNING!!! WARNING!!!
Stay Focused Well, we're sure by now many of you are asking, "whatever happened to the "Family Business". You probably thought we gave up and went back to our day job. Au contraire!!! However, we did learn a valuable lesson. We told you all about being organized and making lists of things to do and so forth. The gap in this blog is a perfect example of why that is so important. It's not that we weren't doing anything, it's that we were doing a whole bunch of things and accomplishing nothing. We would start working on one aspect of the site and then that would lead us to something else, which meant that the first project became neglected and before you knew it we were ten projects down the road and nothing was being completed. This realization hit us last week, so we went back to the basics, made a list of things we needed to get done and started working to complete them. To get to the root of the problem, what we did was come up with a big list of ways to promote the products on the site. However, while researching things like online auctions, e-commerce solutions and things like that, we never updated the site to make it easier to find what we had to offer through the folks who are helping us. That oversight has been resolved. We will shortly update you on the progress of our flyers and some other promotional ideas we have cooked up. (We promise). |
