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Blogs » Archive for October, 2004
Here is a Web site that does what a professional’s Web site is supposed to do!
http://www.qmacshelp.com
Check out the link above and see a Web site that does what a professional’s Web site is supposed to do.
Mark is not a Web designer per se. He is a professional who generates reports for health care organization that use a software program called QMACS.
But his Web site is something EVERY Web designer can emulate:
1. Very focused target market.
2. Great URL.
3. Great headline to suck his audience in and get them to read more.
4. Terrific free offer so that prospects test him out before they buy.
5. An impressive testimonial that explains why Mark is unique.
6. An offer for a free report, showing that he educates people about what he does and establishing him as an expert.
7. Copy focused on the user, not on how great Mark is (although that comes through loud and clear).
I know some of you Web designers will say: Where’s the award winning design? Where’s the fancy splash page? Where’s the flash animation?
Well, I say: Who cares? Yes, there are differences that you need to incorporate as a Web professional. Of course. But too many of your Web sites (your own and your clients where it makes sense) don’t take advantage of these simple …
Should you post prices on your website?
A recent Sitepoint forum posed a great question: Should you post prices on your website?
The answer depends on your strategy:
1. If you are primarily a product-driven company and not a service firm, by all means list your prices. For instance, if you offer templates or rapid logo design, provide pricing.
2. If you offer some low-cost products as part of your offering, then list those prices. For instance, on my web site, I offer books and copy writing. Both are a small part of what I do, and I list the price to get people to test out my knowledge/services.
3. Now here is where it gets interesting:
3a. If you think of yourself as a trusted advisor, and price based on value, then I would avoid posting your prices on the web site. That’s because you want to assess the client situation and price based on your value to them, as well as how challenging this specific project mightbe. Also, by posting your hourly rates, you set yourself up as a vendor rather than a relationship-driven advisor.
3b. Having said that, you might check out a very successful consultant who posts $550 per hour rates: http://www.treyryder.com
He markets to lawyers, and his philosophy …
Open Source Licensing Breakdown
Since open source has emerged and shifted the way we think about technology solutions, the discussion of open source is now settling around business and legal issues rather than technical ones.
Recent major stories speak to intellectual property, patents, copyright and source code management. Another significant topic for that list would be licensing management.
Whether choosing the right open source license for your own development project or selecting a core application solution for your business — understanding what an open source license means and its implications is crucial. This becomes even more critical when thinking about web applications in which you incorporate open source, extend the development of and then sell.
A new book from Prentice Hall, authored by attorney Lawrence Rosen (an author of several open source licenses himself), Open Source Licensing, should be all you need to get started on the path to becoming an open source licensing guru.
Rosen, a lawyer and most recently selected as an advisor to Black Duck Software, goes beyond just roomy explanations of each license. Instead he starts out by providing a primer on intellectual property law, followed with a dissection of the open source license model and how the law applies to it.
It is this …
Flickr, PHP and that word… scaling
Via Keith, Flickr and PHP (PDF) by Cal Henderson. Some interesting quotes;
- Stateless method-call APIs are easy to extend
- [Unicode] It’s really easy
- Normalised data is for sissies … Keep multiple copies of data around … Makes searching faster
Would be interesting to hear more from Cal on the other side of scalability - what’s it like to maintain “~60,000 lines of PHP code”?
What makes Flickr interesting as an online application is it’s use of RSS, among other things, and how that in turn enables social networking. Although the term “social networking” is currently a buzzword, what Flickr and del.icio.us have achieved, by exposing simple, easy-to-access APIs, is it’s a great way to “embed” yourself in a user’s daily surfing and thereby hold your position. Consider the Flickr Firefox Toolbar, delicious.mozdev.org and Foxylicious…
New Article: Making XP-style Icons
My “week” vacation turned into something more of a “two week” break! But I’m back, and I’m excited to say that SitePoint just published the third and last article in my series. Please visit Create XP-style Icons Using Illustrator or Freehand, which takes the foundational Illustrator/Freehand techniques from my previous two articles and combines them into a real-life practical application!
Enjoy!
Quick-and-dirty Web Development with Java Studio Creator
Sun’s latest push to make Java a more attractive platform for smaller Web developers came in the form of Java Studio Creator, first released in the middle of this year. Sun last week announced a free update to the product that would now support Mac OS X, although from what I can tell this has actually been out since August.
Bogus press releases aside, Studio Creator came from criticism that there were no easy-to-use tools for putting together Java Web applications in a hurry without getting up to your elbows in code, the way you can throw together an ASP.NET application in Visual Studio .NET.
Java Studio Creator takes full advantage of the latest standard for designing Java Web application interfaces: JavaServer Faces. With JavaServer Faces, you no longer have to build your Web application interfaces out of HTML form tags, but you can instead use a collection of more advanced components that generate the HTML code for you. These components provide facilities for validating user input and maintaining the contents and selections in a form for a particular user across requests.
Developing a Java Web application in Studio Creator becomes a very quick-and-dirty process, which is often just what you need. Set …
.NET Hiatus
The Daily Catch is on a brief hiatus at present, as Phil turns his attentions to his PhD.
We’re currently sourcing a new blogger, so watch this space over coming weeks as we introduce SitePoint’s new .NET guru…
How to figure out what price to charge via split testing
Sspivey asked in a recent comment about how to know how much to charge for a product. This blog makes the assumption that he is asking about products sold via the web, although the process outlined here applies to almost any type of product sales.
First, some background. Before the web (for those of you too young to remember that simpler time), direct marketing professionals developed a series of processes that now inform lots of web-based marketing and sales.
So, let’s say the marketer of an Elvis collector plate wanted to know whether to charge $19.95, $29.95 or $39.95 for a “limited edition” Elvis plate. He (or she) would conduct a 3-way split test as follows:
1. Mail out three direct mail pieces to the same list (e.g. people who have visited Graceland and signed their name and address on the guest register). Send only to enough names for a statistical test (usually 10,000 names does the trick).
2. Change only ONE THING on the mailing: the price. Split the mailing 1/3, 1/3, and 1/3 to the same list, but offering the plate at a different price point.
3. Collect response and determine which offer got the best response (e.g. most profit after all expenses).
This …
Portable Linux Virtual Machines
Quite the buzz is building over the technology preview released by MetroPipe. This package runs on Damnsmall Linux and uses QEMU (a CPU emulator).
Essentially an Internet communication system, it can run entirely on a USB mini-drive key (128 MB) and other flash-media devices, and even iPods. It includes a bootable Linux OS, a web browser (Firefox), email client (Thunderbird), Enigmail GPG (for email encryption) and a persistent home directory.
It is this last feature that intrigues me from a web application development perspective. The core feature of this portable machine is that while it can run atop a Windows, Linux and OS X (the latter soon) machine, all traces of its activities are segemented on the bootable flash device, this also retaining a level of privacy.
This means cookies, logs and other trails of data do not get left behind as remnants on the host machine being used to boot the device - as the virtual machine exists as its own ‘computer’ while parasitically attached to a full computer.
The buzz has been primarily aimed at those seeking privacy and other individual profiles — I am interested in how web developers can find applicability for this in the applications and solutions they …
Article: Flash Panels: Inspiration, Creation and Implementation
Regarding my recent article on creating your very own Flash Panels, I’d be interested to see what you have managed to create using the article as a starting point for your own projects.
I’d love to see your creations, and what you have managed to accomplish using the article and included source files as a starting point, so why not mail them to steveg-at-phireworx-dot-com, and for the best 5 submissions, I’ll blog here on SitePoint with a review of them, and you’ll get a free copy of the Juno 1.0 and Foto 1.0 Fireworks MX extensions!
Get your coding fingers ready, on your marks…get set…go!
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