BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

It has just occured to me that I don’t know any single small web development suite (from UltraEdit all the way to Dreamweaver) that would have a simple version or revision control. Of course, there are SVN, CVS, Visual SourceSafe and that monstrous Team Foundation Server, but they are not the solution.

But what a small business owner to do? Or a freelancer? Or a team of less then ten-twelve people? All these creatures seem a bit… overpowered. It’s like purchasing a freight truck instead of a van. For a team of ten hardcore programmers - it’s a great tool. For web designer, couple of coders, technical writer and their project manager - it’s the common pain in their individual necks.

So what I want to see is the tool that can:

• integrate into popular HTML editors, like Dreamweaver, UltraEdit or others
• act as a standalone application
• take “snapshots” of selected folders
• produce list of new/altered/deleted files between any two snapshots or current files
• export full or partial set of files based on selected snapshot and provided criteria
• produce delta between various file revisions (at least plain text files and documents)
• produce various simple reports based on criteria selected
• work on both Windows and Mac OS X platforms
• be integrated into client-server environment

This, the way I see it, is a huge potential niche for someone who can throw such software into it. Traditionally, small businesses or freelancers relied either on multiple copies of files or backups. Another culprit is that most of version control systems designed by programmers and for programmers, so average person would have a hard time figuring things out (which is why it isn’t worth it).

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We get to deal with many leads. However, not all the leads become clients. Part of that non-converting crowd are people who choose hosted shopping cart software. The reasons why we like those people are numerous, but I am going to list just one of them.

Reason 1: Even if they didn’t accept our services, they can still spread the word. People have very different needs. One person could be happy with hosted shopping cart; another would need a full-featured web store front. So even if we suggest some third-party off-the shelf e-commerce solution - we still on good terms with our lead.

Reason 2: Even with the third-party solution customer may need unique design. This one is too obvious to complain about, so I won’t. No matter how sophisticated the solution is - people will have natural urge to tweak it to their heart’s content. While a customer is able to upload inventory from Excel file and couple of images, tweaking style sheets and design may get too complicated and boring.

Reason 3: Off-the-shelf (or hosted) e-commerce solution does have its limitations. While being useful and user-friendly your hosted solution falls short when you really need to grow. If you host plenty of pictures, sample images (or if you are electronically delivering your products, like eBooks or downloads) server load and bandwidth become issues with your hosted solution provider. You come back to people who can build a custom-fit solution for your business.

Reason 4: No matter which software you are using - there is a steep learning curve at the beginning of it. When you just starting - everything seems unusual and complicated. Once you familiarize yourself with it - you’re the king of the hill. Good thing is - when you come to someone to design and develop your custom-fit business solution - you already know what you want! We, the design and development guys, spend tremendous time determining what is it that client wants. People with experience are a great gift, like a second free customer. What could be better?

Overall, the idea of hosted shopping cart or online web page creation tool or whatever else is there is very productive for consumers, solution providers and web design guys. Consumers acquire knowledge and understanding of what they want. Solution providers acquire a stream of customers. Web design guys acquire educated customers. Everybody wins!

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At the earliest convenience registered myself at some other paying services such as ReviewMe, Smorty, Zookoda, TNX. Research shows that you have to have established blog with good pagerank if you really want to get any real money off of paid posts. However, links in those posts matter much more then actual content. The real problem, of course, is that Google doesn’t like paid links. So, there is a real dilemma - how to get good writing gigs without damaging your Google score (that is PageRank).

Some interesting ideas have been flowing through recently. We’re designing a software utility that will automate certain things in blog management, as well as create some unique opportunities in Search Engine Optimization. More on that later.

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