What could Lulu.com do better
I’m working on publishing a book my daughter wrote. It’s called “I’m Not Weird!” I don’t generally talk about my children on this blog but I do talk about my daughters CP on my other blog http://www.myspellingsucks.com. I’ve been using Lulu but there are a few things they could definitely do better.
1) Create your selection boxes to gray out options if there not available. This is simple web design. It’s almost 2010 and the web has been around for nearly 20 years come on people.
2) Put all the information a user needs in one spot and provide definitions. I’ve never published a book before how do I know what cover type x is or what size y is? What’s Global Reach, What’s Extended Reach, Why do I need to print 24 pages? Why the #$*% do you cost so much? How should I know what I want my revenue per book to be? Hmm. I want the price to be market appropriate but you haven’t even told me how much it will cost to print!
3) Why in the world wouldn’t you include 20 books in your package. The author is going to want to send free books to people to review, and help sell the book. If you give them 20 books it will only help the sale of books and increase your revenue. COME ON PEOPLE IT’S ALMOST 2010 GET WITH THE PROGRAM!
PS – I just went and used their price calculators and realized that they are way to expensive to print copies. I’m now looking for another printer.
Welcome to the Future
I’m laying down In bed typing this posts with my thumbs on an iTouch. I can do this because two men had intense competitive spirit and awesome visions for the future that just kept getting better as they challenged each other. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates gave me this future. If not for there competition we would not have the beautiful technology we have today. I wonder where Zuckerburg and Page and Brin will bring us now? I love the future but I can definitely type better on my iMac or PC! I called the computer a typewriter the other day and my six year old look at me and said what’s a typewrite? I wonder if she will tell her kid to Google something and her kid will say what’s Google?
Websites represent your business – What you need to know about building a web site
I randomly dropped into a conversation the other day with someone who had just had a “beautiful” new website built for them. They were very excited about the site and awarded a free Adwords campaign. Being diligent about their business and loving their new “pretty” web site they were excited about taking advantage of the campaign and driving traffic to the site, they have picked excellent key words targeted the correct market and built a strong strategy for driving traffic from the campaign.
unfortunately there are a few, well maybe a bit more than a few details missing. I’m dividing the following information into basic and advanced. Lets start with the basics.
Basics:
1) Make sure that you own the URL.
2) Have the web site hosted on a server that will be accessable to you directly and any other professionals that you might decide to use to replace a previous vendor.
3) Make sure you have a unique user ID and password that you do not have to share with your vendors and if you do have to share the id and password change it after the work is complete.
4) When referring to a web site you’ll often here the term “look and feel.” This means that a web site has to look pretty but also “feel” pretty. You want your web site to be easy to use. The main menu should be accessable from every page on the site.
5) The background on a web site should be flat and bright. If you have white text on a patterned dark colored background you are going to turn people away.
Advanced:
6) There are too many free easy to use content management systems out there to pay someone to build you a static site that you have no control over and can not add content to easily. A content management systems allows you the business owner to easily add or change content on existing pages or even create new pages without much effort and with minimal knowledge.
7) Understand why you are building a web site. The web has changed in the past five years. You can no longer throw up a brochure and expect to get business from it. Actually this type of web site has never really worked period. At a minimum your web site should bring the customer one step closer to making a purchase. That means you need to get the customer to giver you their contact information in a form – Don’t expect the customers to call you just because they visited your web site. They aren’t even lead until they’ve given you some type of information. You can encourage customers to give you their contact information by asking them to fill out a form for a free consult or by offering a free newsletter of some sort. You can even just say if you’d like me to contact you please provide your information here.
measure the success of your site. How long are users staying on your site? What pages do they click on most? Which pages don’t they see? Which pages do they see? Where are your customers coming to your site from? Where do they go when they leave? All these questions can be easily answered by a free program from Google called Google Analytics. There are other web stat tracking programs available as well. The fact is that you need to know this information if you want your site to drive business.
9) Just putting a web site on line does nothing for you. You will not gain any traffic especially if you haven’t created a web site that meets feature 6 above because search engines won’t like your site. Here I’m going to offer a word of caution. You don’t need SEO. It helps buy you don’t need it. As a small business the cost of SEO can be too high. But you obviously still want to drive traffic to your site. This is where paid search, see my article on Adwords, and social media make the big payoff. You can also read my article on Tweet Strategy Conversion and measurement for more detail here.
10) Make sure that whomever creates your web site also goes to the effort of submitting the web site to the search engines. You probably want to be sure they have submitted you on the local search functions as well as the general search.
Never hire someone to build your web site that can’t articulate an understanding of the principles expressed in this blog.
September 18th – Seth Godin just wrote an excellent blog that is well worth reading about building web sites. The questions he posses are of primary importance. You can find his article here here.
I’m So Excited
Many of the readers of this blog may know that I have dyslexia. I write regularly about my dyslexia on the www.myspellingsucks.com web site. The MySpellingSucks web site is unedited to show how I make spelling mistakes if I do not painstakingly review all written material. I’m sure if you are a regular reader of this blog then you probably have picked up on mistakes even though I do edit all my posts here.
The editing process for WordPress has always been difficult since there has not be a great spell checker. Well now there is. It is an incredible plugin called After the Deadline. It is very easy to use and works incredibly well. Also the data source for the spell check is in a central data base that the application accesses with and API key. This allows the application to learn from all users who have installed this plugin. If you blog using Wordpress you need this plugin. You can learn more about it at Mashable in an article written by Adam Ostrow WordPress Maker Acquires a Better Spell Checking Tool.
Yearbooks? Facebook!
I found an old acquaintance yesterday on Facebook. I went to high school with him in Pennsylvania and now he lives a few miles away from me here in Georgia. It was kind of odd and I had faint memories of him so I was talking with my wife and mentioned that I had to check my year book to bring up old memories. At which point my wife told my daughters you’ll always want to keep your year books!???
It struck me exactly how useless yearbooks will become with Facebook and other social networking applications. My kids will have contact with everybody they ever knew connected on Facebook and be able to recall all conversations, pictures, wall posts, and any other meaningless dribble that occurred during their high school years. What a change from the snapshot memories we are able to recall.
Bootstrapping – Minimize your computer Costs
It seems like the new hot topic is bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is starting up a business with minimum cash. Well this can be difficult if you have to buy a computer and all the Microsoft products to get your current. I know many people have heard that there are other products out there that are free but some folks are still hesitant to use them. They fear compatibility issues, or think it will be difficult to learn a new tool. This post will give you a few quick office type tools you can use for free that work just a good if not better than Microsoft Office and are completely compatible with someone who uses MS Office applications. Hey you can even smile politely when someone tells you how great your work is know that you didn’t pay those incredibly high licensing fees for Microsoft.
Google – Google has just evolved tremendously over the last five years so that now you can have an integrated email, calendar, task management list, document producer, spread sheet application, presentation builder and web based form builder. This set of applications is easy to use and pretty much completely integrated. Additionally you can store your documents on Google’s cloud (Google’s servers) and access them from anywhere in the world. On top of that you can actually share your Google docs with select individuals so they can edit from remote locations as well. This function can be very powerful if you work with virtual assistant or even remote employees. I personally believe Google is fairly safe and do use their services which can be found at http://docs.google.com and http://mail.google.com. If you are not comfortable storing your documents on line then you’ll want to go with another free option.
Open Office is the leading provider of alternative office software. Their programs are excellent and they offer document, presentation, graphics, database, and spread sheet applications. This program allows the user work locally on their computer and store documents just like MS Office. Additionally Open Office allows users to store documents as PDF’s without any additional work.
So now you can go out and buy your $300 netbook and not spend another dime to be in business.
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