Bigpacific Media

Adventures in Hosting

November 12th, 2010 No Comments

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I've used two companies pretty much exclusively in 10 years of business, and am exploring expanding into reselling hosting direct to my customers rather than simply referring them as I currently do. It would eliminate one particularly annoying delay in new account setups and give me global access to help customers instantly, rather than having to retrieve individual login info. Here's what happened.

VERY, VERY VERIO

I was very excited by Verio's announcement of their new Linux Virtual Private Server 2 C Panel systems, with the promise that any end customers I sold Verio hosting to could choose at any time to bypass me for direct-from-host support. It's a critical piece for any boutique design & hosting firm, since we do not have the resources to offer 24/7 support - or even come close.

I've used Verio since 1997 for my own hosting but over the last six or seven years the momentum of once being The Biggest Hosting Company in the World hoisted them on their own petards. Their hosting was increasingly looking cumbersome and programmer/sysadmin oriented and after 13 years of working with Unix I wanted easy. The new WHM (Web Hosting Manager) system looked like a dream come true and I immediately signed up.

Alas, the experience sucked a week out of my life, with two failed attempts requiring much forwarding through the gopher holes of tech support at Verio to get me to a 'trained Cpanel team member'. You'll pardon me for saying so, but hosting ain't the Navy Seals, though it did feel like hand to hand combat at times.

The Reseller process was brutal - what should have been a paint-by-the-numbers sequence of steps resulting in the successful activation of the account with the 30 day free trial my account rep offered ended up dragging out over 4 long business days, with multiple case numbers, and a lot of churn without much to show for it and plenty of messy charges on my credit card for me to pay someone to deal with at year end.

At one point a submitted support ticket only generated a response 22 hours later... with the news that my request had been passed on to the intrepid Cpanel Tech Team. I ended up having to call in to cut this water drop torture short.

Fast forward to late Thursday afternoon and my account is finally up and running.... and I discover the suite of tools I expressly stated why I was getting the new Cpanel account - the extremely easy to use 'Fantastico DeLuxe' script set - was not an available add on.

Instead of 49 commonly used scripts for installs ranging from blogging platforms to content management systems to image galleries and support ticket systems, I had a narrow range of 10. Instead of easy to use install tools for popular suites like WordPress and Joomla, my users would have to navigate much more bureaucratic, overly technical, and much more intimidating steps. It was like the old PC vs MAC commercials, only in hosting.

Read: A Colossal Waste of Time, putting two clients behind by a week. Verio - you've been good to me for nearly 13 years for my own complex hosting needs for Bigpacific.com. But you just aren't there for resellers, yet.

HOSTGATOR TO THE RESCUE... sort of.

I do love Hostgator.com. Mostly. From an end user perspective, they have GREAT support. I've never waited more than about 4 minutes for help in the chat system, and under 2 minutes on the phones. They've got great little plans for small businesses (less than $100 a year) and the excellent easy to use Fantastico panel is bulletproof. I've even got a system built for workarounds when my customers aren't ready to point a domain to a site 'in progress' and now that the steps are in place, it's pretty easy to follow.

The only problem is, Hostgator suffers from a conspiracy theory complex. As a result they have built so many failsafes into the system that there are now delays and extra steps introduced into what should be an easy process.

Want to register two different domains and administer them from one email address and can't remember your billing password from the first account? Bzzzt. Stop, and wait for an email to come with the password in it, login to a totally different area, and follow a new process.

Want to set up a customer with a Hostgator account and manage the entire process for them, including design and install? Bzzt. See previous topic. Hostgator does not provide a global email account for managing users, won't send a copy of the welcome email to the designer, even if it's in the instructions and the designer's address is posted in the 'alternate address' field... and gives the end client just 24 hours to complete a telephone verification process. Don't make the call in time? Bzzt. The entire account is terminated and the payment refunded and the game starts all over.

WHAT THE SMALL BUSINESS WORLD WANTS

Reliable hosting that can be managed on their behalf by whomever they delegate for the task.
Affordability.
Easy to use tools, with plenty of video tutorials, and yes, good, old-fashioned documentation.
A choice of support options, including the option to bypass Reseller supplied support if it is unavailable or incompetent.
Real, trained people to help them with intimidating technical issues.
Direction to paid resources they can utilize to bypass the learning curve and just GET IT DONE.

If you've had a great experience with just such a mystical being, please write and let me know. Otherwise I live in hope that the continuing evolution of cloud-based services (getting services online only, from anywhere in the world) will spit out the ripe seed of a company with just these offerings.

Like, yesterday.

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Are you wasting money on SEO? Time for a Remix.

November 10th, 2010 No Comments

If the majority of your online marketing dollars (or sweat equity) is going to SEO, you're likely fighting a losing battle due to increased competition as the last of the small businesses finally migrate online. It's time to make a change and consider social media for your business.

The field is getting crowded, knowledge of SEO is very broad, and even most web content systems already have built-in functionality to create a new base level. It's getting harder and harder to climb to the top 10 for even longer, more specific keywords.

If you're like most business owners, you're shaking your heads and saying "I don't have time for Social Media!"

I'll ask you one simple question: Can your business survive online if you don't?

WHAT USED TO WORK

My main site is a regional portal for BC's Sunshine Coast - Bigpacific.com - and has been online since 1997. Just by virtue of being an early site, with tons of keyword-rich, REAL content, it has always done well in the search engines. Particularly Google, where it vies for dominance with sunshinecoast.org, the uber-funded destination site for the Sunshine Coast of Australia. In case you don't already know, our BC's Sunshine Coast is a tiny string of communities stretching from Langdale to Lund (about 160km), and the Aussie version is a mammoth 3130 square kilometres. We have about 60,000 people, their Sunshine Coast is Australia's 10th largest area for population, with over 260,000 souls.

The fact that privately owned and managed Bigpacific.com can keep up with a leviathan like the SunshineCoast.org site is a testament to the power of good content created by a person for real people. Sadly, the cold concepts of algorithms, brand density, and the like are making it much more difficult for good sites - and bloggers - to succeed.

Algorithms can change overnight, and what is a minor 'tweak' for Google can mean a reverberation of biblical proportions to a web site owner, sweeping them into the desert like Job, to toil endlessly against incalculable odds to regain what was lost. Big brands can dominate merely by existing; register a url - usually copyrighted and trademarked to the gills - and they are assured of ascendency to the top of Google's rankings.

In the early days of search here was a rush to add an 'A' in front of business names to take advantage of alphabetical ordering of lists. Overnight I had a rash of accommodation providers looking to gain the advantage over each other in the old A-Z paradigm. Rotational scripts brought an end to the silliness, but it nearly prompted brawls and many a business owner retaliated with meta-jacking, misdirection and other deeds of evil-doing.

A decade of acronyms followed, trumped by the mighty 'SEO'. Web site owners spent hundreds of dollars a month to fight for the 'Top 20' in sites like Google and Yahoo. In my regional area, the bare-knuckle wars to get the premium spots in both organic and paid search ended friendships and forged new and unlikely alliances.

Now if you're not in the top 10 in Google, you're invisible. You and the other million + working on that keyword. Brand names, however, with their trademarked names as urls, soar to the top seemingly overnight, even bypassing sites that have been online for years, with more and better content.

Social Media Tips:

Break the dependency on Google. If a changing search algorithm is likely to break you, diversify into other channels.
Try Twitter for one month, tweeting once per day about a new product or service, a customer testimonial, an interesting link to content your customers would find useful or entertaining
Set up a Facebook page. I resisted this one a long time, but face it - Facebook is everywhere, easy to update, and a great place to build a visible fan base that leverages peer relationships to your company's benefit. Never post negative information, ask questions, ask for input on products and services, link to great content, and if you're going to post something personal, it MUST BE OF BENEFIT TO OTHERS.
Video is increasingly effective and widely shared and reposted so invest in an inexpensive camera (flip mini, kodak Z series) and have a conversation with the viewer.
Blogging is effective when you actually have something novel to say. Dry bulletins about open houses don't cut it. Instead, tape a walk through of the property, peppered with real ideas and comments and list the three most powerful points you can make and add a link. Don't be afraid to have an opinion - you may alienate some but you'll attract enough to replace them. It's blandness that kills most blogs.
Link building is no longer as effective due to the proliferation of link farms and sites built purely for adsense, but high-quality reciprocal links with sites that make sense in your niche can help.

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The dream mobile phone

October 5th, 2010 No Comments

I've only had the iPhone 4 for about a month and already I'm wanting to hop over the fence to check out that hyper-green grass, and this baby's still only in idea mode: the Seabird concept phone.

What I like most:

the dongle-as-mouse
the full surface window
the dual pico projectors for overhead display and absolutely sexy virtual keyboard

What I don't like:

It's only a concept!!

Apparently a (fabulous, award-winning) product designer who is also a part of the (large) open source mozilla community, Billy May, came up with a concept of what mobile computing could be using open source and newly developing technologies. So this is basically one user's dream of mobile phone utopia.

Firefox/Mozilla has a disclaimer on the Seabird concept page stating they so far have no intent to come out with a mobile phone.

To which we must roundly respond: WHY NOT?

Someone better snap up Billy's idea.

Check out Billy's site - the Nike Hindsight glasses are scrumptious looking, and Torn Light is sadly not in production yet either but looks to upend lighting concepts for the home and office. Me want!

You can join in the designing the future space by heading over to Mozilla's Concept Series Home and checking out the discussions. I'm off to cradle my militaristic i4 and pine for the days of curves again.

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Slavoj Zizek: ‘Elvis of Cultural Theory’ Rocks

August 16th, 2010 No Comments

Take clips and images of 'realism', run them in front of one of Europe's most well-known philosophical thinkers - and a communist - for an in your face multi-media onslaught of complex thinking. The Elvis parallel is not far off... this is Elvis as a thinker, and the philosophical hips flexing are going to alienate as many as will be attracted.

Can capitalism continue to work in an increasingly global and wildly fluctuating environment that is increasingly controlled by monolithic organizations and megalomaniacs?

"Let's not approach capitalism as a psychological problem... let's not play the easy, moralistic game of how we can change," says Zizek. Indeed, his provocative thinking tells us that the very concept of 'charity', which has made Bill Gates one of the so-called 'greatest humanitarian donors of mankind and so on', now follows the gathering of wealth and acts as a neutralizing agent around the troublesome idea of how it is that a few individuals and organizations can amass such wealth in the first place.

Charitable giving then becomes a tool of capitalism, its own antidote, much like antivenom can save us from the bite of the snake. To parse Zizek, rather than seeking topical salves we should presumably learn to avoid - and avoid abetting - the snake in the first place.

If you enjoyed the piece on Quants from the same VPRO Studio, this one will prove just as engrossing, though the interviewer is not entirely up to the task of forming questions of an equal depth to the speaker's ability.

Perusing the comments on the YouTube originating page is also recommended, there are some interesting points sprinkled among the expected polarity of views expressed.

NOTE: try and load the whole thing before playing it. Nothing spoils watching a Slovenian on a tear in English like the feed pausing.

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Is paid writing dead?

July 28th, 2010 No Comments

As a writer and publisher working primarily online for the past 12 years, I have watched the future of 'free' approaching for a long time. There is some recovery from it now, with payment walls on a number of publications online, but for the most part, the industry of writing in general is changing tremendously.

Organizations like the recording industry association and the newspaper chains have worked hard to maintain old models for revenue and content and look where it has gotten them - they have become either litigation monsters fighting a tsunami one consumer at a time, or they're dinosaurs ignorant of the coming meteorite, ingesting all of the new technologies but not adapting to the new environment.

As an independent, self-employed business owner, I know the challenges of meeting the monthly bills through my own efforts. I toiled at web design as my main money-making enterprise for a number of years, but found workly for an hourly rate hugely deceptive, since about 35-40% of my time was administrative and unbillable. My luxurious $65/hr actually worked out to about $20 an hour when all was said and done... and that's without taxes, benefits, health care and everything else that comes with a 'real' job.

I worked in community newspapers for another dozen years before starting my own business, so knew firsthand the sisyphean work involved in generating a publication each and every week, with supplements and special features thrown in for good measure. Both the writers and production artists worked for paltry pay; as a production manager I had a grand salary of $19,000 a year when other peers were earning in the 30's with a similar educational background. Writers earned even less, counting in all the travel to meetings and events and the constant hacking away at their personal time. After about 10 years I'd had enough and knew traditional writing/publishing was not for me.

20 years later, I thank my lucky stars I adopted new technology and the Internet as early as I did. I was even a slow starter here on the Sunshine Coast, number 176 to get an account from our trailblazing Internet Service Provider, Sunshine.Net, long since defunct and gone.

The lure of self-publishing was heady and exciting. I found the lack of restrictions, the instantaneous nature of web publishing, and the creative freedom to provide sustenance for the long period spent building the portal and magazine side of my business, when funds were non-existent. Everything I did was free, on the publishing/writing side. I just felt there was something to this Internet thing, and if I stuck to it long enough I could make something I would own and control that would provide a decent income, some personal freedom, and a deep satisfaction that comes from answering to no one but oneself.

I now run a portal and magazine in it's 13th year online. I believe it was the first site of its kind on the Internet at the time - an interactive place to learn about the Sunshine Coast through images, music, slideshows, writing, and advertising through a searchable database. Keep in mind this was 1997.

I make a reasonable income from my work, which is also my greatest pleasure... helping people learn about why the Sunshine Coast of BC is so special they'd want to spend their hard-earned and much-anticipated vacation dreams on, or even move here for a quality of life fast disappearing in the western world. I visit every day with amazing people running fascinating businesses, play at being a tourist and have it covered by my company, and be paid for my writing, blogging, networking, and visual creative skills. I own the environment I work in... and that came from turning upside down the old models of 'how writers get paid' and looking at new ways to connect with a vastly larger audience and find a monetary model that rewarded this new way of publishing information.

I sell T-shirts in my store online, resell others' books through an Amazon affiliation, get paid writing gigs for web site content, online articles, and old-fashioned print publications.

Adapting to new realities can be painful, and frightening for those with long-established systems of making a living as a freelancer, but just lifting your head to look around at the changing landscape may give you the impetus to take a new route to a new definition of success. I urge you to try it - as we writers know, it's a big world out there.

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I’m getting out-marketed by a 12 year old

July 12th, 2010 No Comments

Further advancing my argument that the next generation of Internet users have already broken the sound barrier passing us into the stratosphere comes an instructional blog post on WordPress blogging from precocious (there, spell that, kid) Malaysian blogger Gloson Teh, pictured here.

Gloson began blogging at eight years old, since he was already designing web sites (sigh).

His first blog was called 'How to Multiply Your Memory', but in a delightful illustration of irony at work, he only did one meandering post and then promptly forgot about it. Oh, the hubris of being eight.

Now a sage 12, Gloson has just published a series of posts under the banner of "Social Media, Blogging, and Tech Tips from a Kid". I kid you not.

Here's a smattering of examples:

Oh, and tucked into the list is a sleeper of a punch: Meeting the Prime Minister and First Lady of Malaysia. You can see a video of him reciting the poem he wrote for them here:

Cripes, I'm getting eclipsed by a pre-teen with royal connections.

My favorite Gloson post, so far, is "My Former Blog Host Accidentally Deleted My Blog (and How I Fixed It). Beyond the absolutely brilliant strategy for recovering lost blog posts should your site go down without a recent backup on file, this post is a titillating blend of righteous consumer outrage and how he sent his minion father in to the hosting office to determine why his father's payment for the account was not registered, causing an 'accidental deletion' of his blog.

Gloson is going to be heck on wheels when he gets his own credit cards and car! All I could think of by that point was, "who goes to actually visit their hosting provider in person???" Host Commando has got to be ruing the day they ever set up the account, since it's attached to a bonafide media celebrity. Oops.

Just hop on over to Gloson's "Media" page and you'll see what Malaysia already knows... this miniman has chops. Though the Kidz Magazine clips are sure to embarrass him greatly when humility begins to sink in, we can hope: one article is entitled "Great blogger, Fantastic Poet, Magnificent entertainer".

You and me, both, kid.

Turns out I was 4 short of completing his excellent 17 step to-do list for blogs... as I return to them to play catch-up, I ponder the jet smoke trail of his passing with this quotation lingering in my head:

“True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genie” (Puzant Kevork Thomajan)

Indeed.

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People will do anything for five bucks… Really.

July 9th, 2010 No Comments

Check out Fiverr.com, where the concept is you can buy services or products (or offer them) for a straight $5. You can also post an offer to pay $5 for the service or product of your choice.

There are some standard offerings - to get twitter followers, create youtube videos, make a video testimonial for your product (which means we can all have a smarmy TV commercial for our product now), be a business assistant for one hour, create a travel itinerary - that are hohum to scroll through. However, it's those of the 'I can't believe someone would do this' variety that has most likely led to the stratospheric traffic of this current Internet fad.

Some of my favorite oddities are:

Kiks' offer to 'write your name on my nail and send you a picture for $5'. You can select a toe or finger and support a 'starving artist'. Just imagine how much pain Van Gogh would have saved if he'd simply chosen to write the name of his obsession on a body part rather than sending her the ear.
'I will marry you and love you for $5' from vitalis, who is apparently a 29 year old male living in Haifa, Israel and looking for his soul mate. Why that person has to fork over cash to get him is beyond me. Is there a return policy? Probably not if you're Palestinian.
feverrlover says she will 'put realistic, flirtacious Facebook wall comments on your profile to make everyone jealous'. There is no mention of whether her services are only for men, or if she goes both ways, but as I already have a REAL super hot chick in my life I'll have to leave the mystery unsolved.
the rather plainly named 'kathy' offers to interpret dreams for five: "Any dream you have tell me and i will interpret it for you. Even I will give you suggestions on it'. A word to the wise: if she butchers English this badly in the offer stage, nothing good can come of the actual delivery. I'd hate to see what she could come up with between her command of English and my crazy dreams.
Tandliv will 'curse out or yell at anyone you want, by call or voicemail'. This could come in handy: bookmarked! Just don't get me so mad I'll get out the wallet.
This one captured my attention: 'I will write a fictional story about your life as a superhero for $5'. If the kids will give up their Saturday candy money, I might just send this dude a picture of my superpower bowling shoes and see what he comes up with.
Jesus surely would not approve, having thrown the money-lenders out of the temple: 'I will pray in Vatican Square for you for $5'. I wouldn't take that prayer if you sent me $50, after all the coverage the Catholic priests have gotten lately.
Ah, here's the one: 'I will show you how to read your GIRLFRIEND mind (sic) for $5', from the aptly named Lovekey. That one I can use! The bonus material for 'some of the best bar bets so you can earn money from some random people' seems a bit dicey though. Better make sure they're drunk first.

I actually did a test before this post, as I was in need of a novel gift for my best friend, Brodie. She and I have shared a love of words from the instant we met, through reading published poets, her suffering my meagre gifts, and exchanging magnetic poetry kits. I wrote to a fellow who promised to 'write a personalized humorous or serious poem commemorating a person or event in your life for $5', and asked if he could do a quick turnaround for me in time for tea the next day with my dear Brodie and included a few details about her. Here's the response I received:

"Thanks for the invitation but I am just bombed with requests, one of which has me totally perplexed about a last verse. Yours also sounds like a more lofty work with longer words which drain my creative processes. I can crank out the humorous, light-hearted stuff in no time at all; the higher order, however, taxes me terribly."

Poor thing. It seems even my letter taxed him. I guess $5 doesn't go that far these days.

What would YOU do for $5? Please comment for free below.

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Web Culture: the Power of the People

July 4th, 2010 No Comments

OIL BP - OPP

The video above was created and produced by artists on BC's Sunshine Coast, and is a parody of Naughty by Nature's 1991 song, "BPP", and is as clear an example as any that shows how information and reaction travels the Internet - galvanizing artists world wide to comment and add to the push to effect change. My prediction is that this video will go viral within the week, meaning the flutter of the butterfly wings in this tiny Canadian coastal community will be felt around the world.

The credits for the video are a glimpse into one rural community and shine a spotlight on reaction that would otherwise go unregarded in the world:

Rapped by the styling of John Jamin (johnjaminmusic.com), Johanna Renée and back vocals by Caitlyn Turcotte. Duane Burnett (duaneburnett.com) plays Tony Haywire BP's CEO. Lyrics are written by Marc Buzzell and have been recorded by JJ at Straitsound Studio in Robert's Creek -- straitsound.com. Shot and edited by Marc Buzzell on the beautiful Sunshine Coast of BC. Special Thanks to Ray Fulber, Rick from the gas station location, the guy for the classy truck and all the many other people whom helped.

This is an instance reminding us once more of the incredibly powerful shift humanity is moving through; as epic and transformational as the invention of the printing press. Even if you live in a rural community about as far away in North America as one can get from the Gulf of Mexico, your opinion and efforts count. .

Whether we actually have more environmental chaos than in the past - freak weather patterns, garbage islands forming in the Pacific Ocean, deep water drilling going very bad - we certainly now have an almost instant window into the earth and our place in it through the power of the Internet to transmit uncontrolled information. That gives us POWER - to share, to hold accountable, and to CHANGE.

We need to remember that as powerfully destructive as our race can be, we are capable of just as much brilliance and stewardship. We are each responsible for our contribution - or lack thereof, apathy being one of humanity's more prevalent characteristics - and as this video says, it's up to you and me, and our SUV, to be the change we seek from corporations like British Petroleum.

Cost of Oil Comparison

Only when we are willing to pay the ACTUAL cost of our oil consumption are we taking real responsibility ourselves. Until we will agree to pay more for oil than for water or champagne, in recognition of the huge environmental responsibilities that must be undertaken as we remove fossil fuels from the earth from increasingly dangerous and unpredictable environments WE are as much the problem as the oil companies and their shareholders.

So, like the Oil BP video creators have shown us, let's use the power of globalized communication to ask each other the hard questions, have conversations as brutal as seeing a pelican coated in oil, before we're like the fishy skeletons swimming through the sludge of what we have created.

RELATED INFORMATION:

Oil BP Facebook Fan Page

The Real Cost of Oil: Institute for the Analyisis of Global Security

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Google Analytics Basics: installation

June 29th, 2010 No Comments

For the purposes of this post - which is geared to beginner level web marketing - we're going to go right back to the basics with Google Analytics.

In the old days of the frontier, everyone had to install complicated web statistics programs like Urchin or Unix based log files to be pored over to glean information about how many people visited, how long they spent on a site, what they clicked on - and these all took up monstrous amounts of space on hosting accounts. These bloated files - which even I feared to remove after reviewing the data - would crash sites, clog directories, and require overly technical maintenance to manage.

Well, no more. Google Analytics has been around for a number of years now. It is free, comes with great instructions, and arms the web site owner with real, factual data about how visitors are getting to their web site, what they're doing while they're there, where they're leaving the site and other important information that is critical to measuring and refining an Internet marketing strategy.

There is simply no excuse to not be tracking your marketing online if you have your own web site.

Anecdotal information, such as questions like "Where did you find us?" is extremely unreliable. The visitor may say 'the internet'. But what does that mean? Nothing. They may say, 'Google'. A direct search on Google and a click to visit your web site? A direct search on Google and following a link to a directory site where your business is listed? Without being able to get factual answers to these questions, this kind of information is not only ineffective, it's potentially damaging to your business.

If you are making emotional decisions about marketing based on anecdotal information you might as well be throwing spaghetti at the wall or giving those marketing funds to the people you like the best.

HOW TO SET UP GOOGLE ANALYTICS

First, go to Google and sign up for a free account. This can be done using your existing email address; I recommend using the one supplied by your Internet Service Provider.
Then sign up for a free stats account at Google Analytics.
Type your URL on the next screen.
Choose your country of origin and time zone (800 GMT Vancouver for example)
In the next screen add your contact information.
Follow the prompts to accept policies.
Create account.
Copy the block of code on the next screen

ADDING CODE TO YOUR WEB SITE

To insert the Google Analytics code, you will need an editor to get into your html code on the site, and access to an FTP (File transfer protocol) program to upload the changed files. OR, simply get your web designer to do this, or hire a designer to do this for you (about 30 minutes) and provide them with your FTP information.

If you are using a service like WordPress, you'll need to open the footer.php file to place this code OR add a plugin like Google Analytics for WordPress to paste in the UA portion of the code.

Look for the </body> tag at the very bottom, just above the </html> bit of code.
Paste the Google Analytics Javascript immediately above the </body> tag.
If you have templates, insert the code in the same place and make sure all pages are updated with the new template and saved.
Uploaded the pages to your server, overwriting the existing files.
Return to Google Analytics to verify that data is successfully being collected.

For WordPress sites, click on Plug-ins, Add New, search for Google Analytics, select Google Analytics for WordPress, and then enter the UA string where indicated and save.

RELATED INFORMATION:

Video tutorial, setting up Google Analytics

Next post: The Top 3 Google Analytics reports critical to understanding your Internet marketing plan's effectiveness.

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The Argument for Templates vs. Designed from Scratch

June 24th, 2010 No Comments

by Laurie McConnell

Just like you or I can make biscuits that fail to rise, or attempt to use quinoa flour instead of regular to universal disgust, so too can we catastrophically screw up the design and functionality of a specialized web site.

I'm talking today specifically about designing web sites for the Real Estate market, which mostly means for realtors, who follow a broad stereotype of being driven, detail-oriented, competitive, and exacting in their expectations. A good realtor is always looking to stay ahead of the pack, to utilize technology first (even if it means leaping off a cliff to demonstrate that the cliff is there), and to be effective and efficient in everything they do. Duplicative efforts, redundancy, or misuse of technology or people resources is a thorn in the side to any realtor worth their salt.

This is where the template vs. designed proponents start duking it out. Designers - of which I am one - argue that they can make something for the realtor that is customized, tweaked for search engine optimization, and otherwise tooled up to give the most powerful and branded solution to a realtor. Typically these sites cost from $1000 - $10000 depending on what the market will bear - which in itself should cause some consternation to those in bigger centres paying whacking big design fees when their semi-rural counterpart is getting the same deal for a fraction of the cost (though rural designers are often grossly underpaid for their work, which explains the lack of longevity in rural web design companies. Eventually we have to go out and get another 'real' job to sustain our pricing for design).

On the other side of the ring is the templated, out-of-a-box solution. In the old days, these templates were both expensive and buggy, thereby negating any value inherent in using them. However, times have changed, and a quick search on Google for 'wordpress real estate mls templates' brings up a plethora of links for templates, WITH installation and service and an hour of search engine optimization (SEO) thrown in for good measure. The price? Usually under $300, complete for a one time setup, with maybe an extra $90/year for hosting. Or, you can hire an expert, who is used to working with the theme and theme supplier, to do everything for you... basically to take the body and fill it out for that extra competitive edge.

These themes integrate MLS listings and search functions and are attractive and professional in appearance.

Pros & Cons Design:

PROS
customized
more unique appearance
some standalone functionality possible
customized support, usually fast, for new features
CONS
expensive
usually a long launch time, 1-3 months typically depending on designer's workload and client readiness with content
harder to maintain without expert help
realtor can mess up the design and functionality of the site

Pros & Cons Templates:

PROS
inexpensive
standardized, professional appearance, appropriate to industry
custom plugins and functionality developed for volume purchase rather than single purchase design functionality; buyer benefits from features developed at request of other users of the template
highly optimized for SEO
very functional from the end users perspective, which doesn't always happen in custom designed sites, where the realtor can have far too much say or impact on the design and functionality without understanding how it affects the end user
easily maintainable
CONS
a sense of 'sameness' about the look, or lack of originality
occasionally creates a dependence on a specific company for the service
new feature requests must wait for next version release

My recommendation is to go with the templates, unless your business has a very strong and uniquely identifiable brand and innovative ways of interacting with your customers and visitors, in which case the custom route can bring great returns.

Templates mentioned in this article (disclosure: I am an affiliate for some)

AgentPress from StudioPress.com - requires what's called the Genesis Framework, which aside from sounding pretty biblical and lofty, actually means it's a framework vetted by the creator of WordPress.com & .org's code that takes WordPress to the next level. <a href="https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?cl=10214&c=ib&aff=49541" target="ejejcsingle">Pick up the template here.</a>;
Real Estate Themes - more generic wordpress themes, but also one for the ipad/iphone;
WPRealEstate - PLUGIN for wordpress for integrating MLS, which means you can use ANY wordpress template and then just use the plugin for the listings side of things

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