BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

There is this phrase that I use like it’s a word parasite - “generally speaking”. I use it quite often when I need to point to a big picture. Get on a same page. Explain something in general or layman terms. Simplify things.

Interesting enough, most clients don’t quite get that big picture. Like for example this guy who wanted a six-page web site to sell about 2000 items of merchandise. Not a biggie. Or another group of partners who calculated the industry’s average price per page, then rearranged the information on the site so it would fit into their budget. Then started calling web design studios (us included) to ask for a quote on few pages worth of web site. Turned out they were trying to get a system the size of a Amazon into those few pages.

If you look at any advertising - you can also see what I mean. For example, look at any shampoo ad. You can see a bottle of product, the hair (that most likely belongs to an attractive woman), the zoomed animation that shows how hair is restored by use of shampoo, and all the other stuff. But you are not being sold the bottle of shampoo. Ad doesn’t even try to sell you that bottle, rather it sells you the ability to be attractive, to get that sex appeal. In other words - it sells you happiness, achievable easier than ever by purchasing just that one bottle. If you buy two - there’s a discount available, so it comes with even more happiness. Generally speaking - by buying a bottle of shampoo you are buying happiness. There, now you have it.

Ability to be “generally speaking” is quite rare, as I have found out. Most of the times when I hear someone “generally speaking” I tend to get very quiet and listen. It’s about the big picture, so it must be important.

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To read the first part of the article - click here.

Since the client is in some sort of the rush before his niche shopping season starts he needs a solution ASAP. The newly acquired web site generates orders that he unable to fulfill given the outdated inventory and pricing.

We’ve offered to create an offline database (MS Access would be a good choice for this case) that will keep the current inventory and extract in into three different importable packages for each web site.

Why Access? Because it exists on almost every computer, and if not - it’s very easy to create a distributable package for Access database. One more serious advantage is that Access doesn’t require any additional licenses to sell end products based on Access. Built-in tools allow very easy importing and exporting data, creating reports and developing forms thus decreasing development time. More under the cut… Read more »

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The long delay in posting was caused, as some of you might have guessed, by the fact that we got ourselves a busy client (at least for now). We’ll see how it all go, but so far I was faced with an interesting dilemma. Or, rather, was sort of presented with the task to solve.

Our newly signed up client owns couple of web sites that are being fed from the same database. Administering these two sites is a breeze, since any product that has been entered in one immediately shows up on another. The administrator’s interface combines both web sites, so there are no surprises so far.

On his next step this businessman decides to create another web site. This one is fed from a different database, since it was a new team of developers who created this store for him. Additionally, the admin interface is not as friendly as the first one, although the feature set is the same. It’s worth to say that all three web sites are developed on PHP/mySQL platform. The story unfolds under the cut… Read more »

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