If you are thinking of building a new website or redesigning your old site this great post on speckyboy.com is definitely worth reading.
When starting a new site I try to ask my prospective client not just, how do you want your site to look, but what do you want your site to do? That’s important because most visitors don’t just want to see your brochure any more and maybe more importantly the search engines don’t either.
I’m one of those people who dropped cable a couple of years ago and pretty much haven’t looked back. I’ve found places to get movies, TV shows from every network and sports, sports, sports. Pretty much anything I want to see. It’s amazing really.
What continues to bother me is how so many of the networks who are broadcasting the content and who are always fighting with cable providers about the fees they have to pay, keep allowing the cable providers to lock away their programs behind these imaginary walls.
Today I read how ESPN is trying to keep people who don’t subscribe to a traditional cable service out of their online offerings via their phone apps.
I am able to access the ESPN 3 events through a program running on my network called PlayOn.tv. It’s a good service and one of only two that I pay for (the other being Netflix), but I don’t really even need it. For my main TV I have a laptop with a HDMI cable attached to it and so I don’t need anything else. PlayOn is just something I started using before I bought a digital TV with an HDMI input and I keep it because it’s convenient and I don’t have to buy another computer for every TV.
ESPN is generally paying the cable companies to have their shows for the cables subscribers and so I can’t figure out for the life of me why they would turn away these customers they can get for free.
I can see how it’s bad for the cable companies, but do the content providers think the cable companies would risk dropping them and totally alienating their customers? Not to mention the browser on my Android phone is now good enough that I don’t have to use their app to watch the streams. I do have to use a WiFi connection to get around their blocking my T-mobile connection, but I’m quite sure I could find another way if I had to (there’s probably an app for that).
Well, listen up gatekeepers. Keeping people from what they want to see just to try to squeeze a little more money out of them will only hurt you in the long run and if you won’t allow them to see your content how they choose, they’ll find a way to see it without your service and you probably won’t like that nearly as much.
The days of you telling people how and when they will get to use your programs are about over. No rules, no laws, and no other anti-competitive behavior will help you. Give the people what they want and you will be much better off, and so will we.
Every once in a while you run into such a great collection of tools online that you just have to stop and play with them for a while.
That’s what happened to me today when I discovered this post on a site called Splashnology. There are links to so many good tools here like background image makers, CSS makers and more than I can mention here.
If you are interested in some great free tools to help your website look better I highly recommend that you check out
I’m currently building a new site that’s called Spofferz.com. That stands for Special Offers with a “Z”
It’s a pretty cool site where it free for a business to add a SpOffer. Any business can register free and add one SpOffer every month. Each SpOffer will expire and be automatically deleted in 30 days from it’s posting. Merchants have the option of having their SpOffer expiring sooner, later or not at all, but in any case in order to keep our service current and accurate all SpOfferZ will be deleted in 30 days.
Our only request is that the SpOffer gives our visitors something that will make them want to try your product or service. Something of value. Self serving or strictly promotional SpOfferZ will not be considered.
We have future plans to offer an enhanced membership that will allow for more than one SpOffer at a time as well as premium placement for your SpOffer.
Visitors will be able to print SpOfferZ and take them to the merchant for redemption. Visitors will also be able to vote for the SpOfferZ of their choice and the more popular the SpOffer the higher they will move up in the search rankings. The highest ranking SpOfferZ will appear in several prominent places in our site.
Visitors can also subscribe to our RSS feeds for the entire site or any individual category. That way our visitors will know when a new SpOffer is posted in a category they are interested in.
Because Spofferz.com are a brand new site I’m very interested in your thoughts. I want to know what you like, what you don’t like and if you have any ideas on how we can improve please add a comment and let me know what you think.
There have been many times when I have recommended that my clients use PayPal for credit card processing. They are simple to set up with no upfront fees.
Unfortunately they also have a long history of freezing peoples accounts for minor infractions or even unfounded accusations. Usually the problems can be resolved, but in the meantime your money is frozen. Not good if you are a small business on a tight budget. For that reason I always advise removing the money from PayPal as soon as possible and as often as possible.
Today PayPal froze the defense fund for Bradley Manning, the accused leaker behind the Wikileaks circus even though the person with the PayPal account has never had any problems with them before. No matter how you feel about Mr Manning’s guilt or innocence this is not acceptable.
What? PayPal doesn’t believe in a fair trial?
Pressured by the government?
I, for one, will do my best from now on to find, use and recommend alternatives to PayPal and I’m sure new ones will be sprouting up all over the place due to this fiasco.
Update: as of 6:30 PayPal has unfrozen the account. They claim that the tremendous amount of bad publicity this has generated had nothing to do with their decision. (Yeah, I believe them)
Here’s a really good article on the Google Webmaster Blog about how to make your website more phone friendly.
My friend Sheri Powell ran a promotion yesterday that I can’t remember anyone else doing before.
“On this day in 1792, President George Washington signed the Postal Service Act, thereby creating the U.S. Post Office. In honor of this historic day, shipping is free at Pretzel Crazy on all orders placed today!”
I have written before how I love making up a good holiday for promotion. Looking for a good opportunity to connect yourself to an event that my go viral. I’m sorry I didn’t get this up sooner, but I have marked my calendar to let everyone know about it next year.
Robinson Luncheon – Feb 9, 2010
The department of Homeland Security has taken the domains of several foreign companies for no good reason, except maybe that they index sports streams and the SuperBowl is coming up.
I have many problems with this including.
As far as I can tell none of these sites are down and are still running under non-US controlled domains (http://www.rojadirecta.ws/) So it’s mostly a big show on our governments part, but still very scary for any website owner when they can come and take your domain name without any warning or cause.
It may be time to switch to (or at least add) a non-US controlled domain name for your site.
In my house we subscribe to many different kinds of email newsletters.
My wife gets one from a cosmetic company that all the time says “here’s something to make up for our mistake”
At first I thought that’s a nice way to handle a mistake.
Then they kept coming every couple of days. “Our Bad” or “Sorry for this or that”.
It didn’t take me long to realize that these were lies and I wasn’t even reading the newsletters.
I don’t think this is good marketing and I’m sure I’m not alone. Today I saw this on email insider
