| LED Digest 1514: Ecommerce is Rising |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest ................................................. February 10, 2003 Issue #1514 ................................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Web Design Pricing ==-- ~ Eric Pederson "Ecommerce is rising. Is your priority saving a few pennies on your website?" ~ Jonathan Webb "...never build a business website without a straight forward email address." --== Outsourcing Web Development ==-- ~ Steve Pronger "My advise to business owners is to not just rely on resumes but to contact previous clients..." ~ Marty R. Milette "Due dilligence is the key! Check references..." ===== GEEK TIPS ================== --== Site Search ==-- ~ Carlos Martinho ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Domain Registration Encore ==-- ~ Charles Oertel ~ Rod Aries ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Eric Pederson Subject: Outsourcing Web Development I understand price frustration. I have been getting tired of paying $1.99 for a two liter bottle of Coke so I thought I'd try and save some money. Coke is largely sugar and water, and I figured that I could approximate it well enough in my own kitchen for pennies. Finally I was ready to let my kids do a taste test. If they liked my home grown Koke I could save a few bucks every week. Before my kids came in the room I switched the drinks - the Pepsi I poured into the no wrapper bottle, Coke I put in the Pepsi bottle, and my Koke I put in the Coke bottle. They tasted all three, squeenching up their faces, they are real discerning consumers, afficianados of the soft drink. Finally they rendered their judgment: the "Coke" (actually my Koke) was by far the best, the "Pepsi" (really Coke) was just OK, and the "Koke" (actually Coke) was gross. They knew that the stuff that comes in a Coke bottle was the best, regardless of what it's made of. When a company puts up a web site they are bottling their business for display to the public. It's important you put it in the right bottle if you want it to sell. I have been a part of an offshore sourcing company and also a US based web design company, and have project managed large implementation projects in U.S. corporations. There are some real potential advantages to outsourcing a development, such as the ability to accelerate deployment, and to get fresh marketing ideas, but what you get depends on where you go. Offshore companies have about a 4x cost advantage, sometimes more, but it is not uncommon for them to spend 2x as many hours on the project due to lower efficiency and possibly talent, skill, and project management shortcomings. Communications are always more difficult, a problem if the work is not very clear and simply-defined. They do offer a cost savings in terms on what you will put on your purchase order, but in my experience they tend to be slower than US firms and are out of touch with the U.S. market. U.S. outsource services vary, however the right firm can help you brand your company and fuel sales, the difference between Koke and Coke. The differences go beyond the HTML and Javascript and Flash and MySQL. Your web team should be a marketing team that can bring your customers to you. Web sites are a store front whether or not they are ecommerce enabled. Nearly anyone can write a website, tutorials abound, but the real issue with your website and mine is not getting them up on the web, but getting traffic, no, business from them. There is a booming trade in re-designing websites, turning websites that generate zero sales into websites that generate ~$100K per month of sales. I have examples. 100+ million US citizens will be on the internet this weekend, 20 million with broadband. They have stopped "surfing" the web and are hunting for sites and brands by name. Ecommerce is rising.* Is your priority saving a few pennies on your website? Nobody is buying Koke. [* see Google 2002 Zeitgeist and eMarketeer] Eric Pederson http://www.morphoses.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Jonathan C.K.Webb Subject: Pricing > I've found that instead of having prospects send an > e-mail requesting a quote, setting up a "form" with > detailed questions works far better. - Ivan Jimenez, LED 1512 I hate forms. They never have the right boxes. They often fail. The usual thing is you get an error message so you hit the back button and then you find all your enquiry has been wiped out and you have to start again, often repeating this cycle several times before giving up. Unlike an email, you have no automatic record of what you've written. If you really must ignore this and use a form, include an email as well, never never never build a business website without a straight forward email address. Regards, Jonathan Webb www.webbaviation.co.uk ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: Outsourcing > How is it that offshore developers have the skills > and the experience and US ones don't? How believable > is it that these offshore developers gained those skills > when... the only "clients" these consultants have are > US based? - Nandini Pandya, LED 1512 That would be to suggest there is no market for web development outside the US. I can't speak for other countries but here in Australia our indigenous market is doing just fine. I'm a web designer essentially creating sites for Australian small businesses, but as my portfolio expands I am taking on more and more US based and other international clients. Sure, there is a cost benefit given the state of our dollar, but what really matters to my clients is not where I live but whether I deliver an effective web site. Nandini's example of a designer taking 6 months to complete a project is indeed extremely poor service and unprofessional. But such examples can be found in any country by service providers big and small. My advise to business owners is to not just rely on resumes but to contact previous clients for their assessment. Was the service professional? Was the project completed in a reasonable amount of time? Was the service provided up to expectations and the end result effective? Web professionals should be happy to have their service scrutinised in this way. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Marty R. Milette Subject: Outsourcing Many readers who have never tried outsourcing, may not be aware of the process. In terms of being 'nickel-and-dimed' -- this statement is quite untrue. Virtually ALL of our contracts are either fixed-price, or 'time and materials' with a fixed ceiling. Before you spend a cent, you get a detailed proposal and project plan (including dates of deliverables). We (URL below) normally work on a 'progress-based' payment system -- 25% up front -- 50% distributed across milestones -- and the final 25%, 30 days AFTER final delivery. The most you ever risk is the 25% up front -- after that, if you aren't satisfied with the deliverables -- you don't pay. (If a contractor asks for 100% up-front -- run away!) As for 'accessible and able to collaborate' -- what year is this? Yes folks, even in Russia we've got telephone, fax, email, instant messenger, desktop sharing, audio and video conferencing, terminal services, staging servers, shared project management software -- what more do you want? Virtually every employee in our company (100+ people) has a GSM cell phone with SMS messaging. I've taken international calls and replied via SMS and WAP while in the bath at midnight on a Sunday! :) Most 'white collar' crimes are 'inside jobs'. "sensitive information won't be passed along to competitors" is NO MORE of a risk with a trusted foreign partner than an employee. Copyright, trade secrets and source code rights are also retained by our clients. We begin all projects with an NDA with the client -- and have individual NDAs with ALL developers. Now nobody said that US contractors were not as GOOD as abroad -- but let's face it -- the gravy train is derailed. North American developers are going to have to wake up and realize that they are in a GLOBAL MARKET where it IS possible to get the same quality and work done abroad for MUCH less money. It's also faster and easier to do a short 'test' project with a new technology by outsourcing than by hiring. The comments about 'many foreigners' lying on resumes isn't even worth responding to. If they do, they're caught fast because every developer we hire goes through an extensive screening process including a three month company indoctrination and training program before they touch one line of client code. Education standards here are MUCH higher -- 96% of our staff hold degrees -- many at the PhD level. (What US company can claim similar standards?) What may be surprising to most people is that the US is NOT our primary market these days. Europe escaped the 'dot-bomb' largely unscathed and shows steady growth, tremendous opportunities and innovation far beyond what I've seen in the US in many years. The fantasy of offshore developers working with outdated equipment or not being able to 'innovate' or 'invent' is just that -- pure fantasy. DUE DILLIGENCE is the key! CHECK REFERENCES AND WORK for everyone. Marty R. Milette http://www.offshore-soft.com ===== GEEK TIPS =================================== From: Carlos Martinho Subject: Site search > I have been trying to find a good site search > engine for a large web site... Does anyone > have any suggestions? - Niki Mcelroy, LED 1508 Hi Niki, Check this: http://www.google.com/services/free.html . It's the SiteSearch free service from Google that allows a search on your site. There's a note there that it says: ------------------ "The free SiteSearch option is a sub-index of Google's main index. Updates are determined by Google and there is no guarantee of pages crawled". ------------------ This might be a drawback but who knows if by using the SiteSearch, Google will index all your site? I'm not using yet the SiteSearch, but I'm going to do an experience next month to see the results. They have also other paid options for site search: http://www.google.com/services/ Carlos Martinho awesomereports.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Charles Oertel Subject: Domain registration > Our domain is up for renewal at Network Solutions... > To whom should we go for registration that is fast, > accurate and competitively priced? - Don Johnson, LED 1512 DirectNIC.com -- %15, easy transfers, other services, no nonsense. I moved all my registrations there - all it costs is to pay in advance for another year. Charles Oertel ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Rod Aries Subject: Domain registration Greetings, Saw the post re Domain Registration Encore and saw Will Bontrager's response (issue 1513): > Not TotalNIC... I found TotalNIC had locked [our] > domain, requiring a notarized statement postal > mailed to their headquarters in Australia... We own about 10,000 domains, of which about 100 are with TotalNic. We have used at least 10 different registrars over the years. In my personal opinion, based upon my personal experience with them, they are the most unresponsive, non-customer oriented and absolutely the worst registrar we have ever come across. On a brighter note... here are a few factors to consider when selecting a registrar; Price: you should easily be able to find a competent sub $10 registrar Control panel: possibly more important than price if you frequently change hosting or own a large number of domains. At a minimum the panel should allow you to change the whois or DNS on the fly. Free web hosting and email forwarding are a bonus when you can find it. Registrar lock: the ability to prevent unauthorized transactions. In example I just transferred a domain from my account at namebay.com and they sent an automated reply that went like this - pay attention to the last line: ------------------ "We have received a request to transfer the domain name [domainname.com] from [NAMEBAY] to [my preferred registrar]. "You may confirm or refuse this transfer request through the following address www.namebay.com/manage/Edit_Transfer_Out_Dom.asp?contact_id=x "If you don't reply to this e-mail, this transfer request will be automatically accepted." ------------------ Hmm, "transfer request will be automatically accepted" if I DON'T respond. Assume for a minute that someone was trying to hijack my domain because they know that namebay automatically transfers domains, they figure that they find someone who has an email address that changed and is no longer valid or the transfer request gets filtered as spam or, as in my recent case, I was on vacation for 2 weeks out of the country. I come back and find my domain transferred, WITHOUT my permission. Anyways, there are more factors, but those are foremost. At your service, Rod Aries How To Internet Your Business http://www.howtointernet.com ------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1995-2003 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I have to laugh, because I've out-finessed myself." - Carl Spagler |
