Categories
business zealus.com

WordPress or Joomla?

When choosing a Content Management system for your web site it is usually a good idea to ask yourself – what is the problem you are trying to solve?

Most people (as I noticed on several message boards) make same mistake – they try to figure out what software they need to make money online. “I want to create a community, what software do I need?”. First of all – what kind of community is it going to be? Writers? Photographers? Make-up artists? Everyone has a different requirement, and different level of knowledge. Photographers are a little easier to please, as they are used to complicated and cumbersome camera controls, but try to cater same interface to a community of models and make-up artists (same industry, after all) and you will be hit with an outcry for mercy.

Management 101: Before offering a service think – what is the problem the service is going to solve. If you have the answer to this question – you will find tools in no time.

Categories
PR zealus.com

Dating advice blog

(This is a guest post from the DontDateGuy.com – an upcoming blog on dating advice. Zealus Web Design helped DDGuy with hosting and WordPress set up and, if they will not spend all earned money dating,  hopes to help get their web site more useful and pleasant.)

There is hardly anything older then human relationships. From the moment a Neanderthal man killed whatever animal he hunted down and first brought the corpse to the flock of women to impress them instead of just eating out alone – that was the dawn of dating. Little has changed since then, but what did change is the ability of us, men, to find ways of bringing our killed animal in front of as many women as possible. Corpses rot, so we had to go and hunt one more animal. Then one more again. When roaming from one woman to another with dead animal on our hands became too cumbersome – we invented photography and dating web sites. Now we can show off a picture of same animal to numerous women simultaneously, from the comfort of our chairs.

But being as manly as we are, we kept creating as many dating sites as we could possibly do, always thinking about “what if some of the women didn’t like this one”. What it boiled down to is that now we have drag ourselves to almost all the dating sites out there, just like we did in Neanderthal era, but with added comfort of our chairs and photography. So we decided to get up, stretch a little and take the woman who’s picture we like to the dinner out there. Little did we know about the wild wild world of dating that was awaiting outside. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve been sloppy. We’ve been ignorant. In responce women never told us what went wrong, it was always “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse.

Our goal at DontDateGuy.com is to shed some light on what is going on behind the scene. What is she thinking about you? What are you doing wrong? How to capture the attention of the lady you are interested in. And, ultimately, how to create and maintain a respectful and romantic relationship. We are no cure for every problem out there, but we hope that we can help you avoid certain mistakes and pitfalls. We want to give you that little extra edge, a competitive advantage, if you will, to get what you want.

Subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed or navigate to web site itself and don’t forget to answer the tag line question: would there be dates if everyone wasn’t dating material?

Categories
sales zealus.com

Small business survival – 5 DON’Ts

During the course of creating e-Commerce web sites we get a lot of similar questions. This post contains five major DON’Ts for starting E-commerce entrepreneur. This is not, by any means, a concise guide, just answers to most commonly asked questions.

Don’t be afraid of Google, Yahoo and anyone else. It has been said numerous times – don’t think about search engines, think of your target audience. If you are in the business of selling widgets – write couple of good reviews on latest widgets, provide decent photos, build a reputation of a vendor who knows its widgets and not just sells stuff. Google likes good content as do your customers. One reason why I prefer to shop at Amazon and NewEgg – is because I can read reviews (including those of customers) and see lots of pictures.

Don’t be afraid of competition. Whatever you do (or decide to do) – there always will be a competition. Think of the ways you can do better then competition. Target niches, provide more information, stand out. If you sell what everyone else sells (like knock-offs, replicas and such) – be one step ahead, write a review, describe why people buy knock-offs, why yours are better then a shop next door.

Don’t forget to follow-up. This way your customer will know that you are serious seller, even if you sell one dollar widgets. Sending e-mail is as inexpensive as it could be. Even follow-up e-mails can be automated (schedule sending of an e-mail in your e-commerce system to your customers, 7 days upon successful finalizing of the order).

Don’t force your customer to register in order to check-out. Always offer a no-registration check-out option. You still be able to collect all the information about a customer you need, but you will save them a minute or two during checkout process and (this is more important) save them a hassle of remembering their password next time they are at your virtual door. They will register once they realize they return often enough.

Don’t overwhelm  your customers with all the current promotions and e-mails. Maintain a database of how many times you have e-mailed each customer. Try this trick: if you have sent out around seven promotions and a certain customer never visited any links from those e-mails – generate another e-mail that will ask the customer if he/she wants to unsubscribe from future e-mails. Unsubscribe automatically if no responce is given. Chances are hight that all your promotional correspondence ends up in Spam bin, so there is no reason to overload your servers or pay for e-mail delivery for this customer. On the other hand – it may alert customer and enact him/her to actually confirm subscription and look closer to your deals.