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Just to give you an idea, stanley steemer is on top with around 45,000 links, while we have about 3,180. Any links you could give would help out.
Greg,
You might think about adding a bit to the right margin on your stylesheet. If you go to about us you can see what I’m talking about probably.
Another thing that might look better is that if you match the color of the gold arrows to gold headings, not sure what that gold would look like on white though. Same for the menu blue vs. the other blues.
All in all though, its looks pretty good!
We’ve looked into this program a little bit. The cost for a single copy is fairly high compared to Quickbooks although we did find it to be pretty flexible. Cody tried it, I’m not sure what conclusions he’s came to about it though.
Greg,
If you haven’t seen them already, Mike Nowlin put together a packet for targeting businesses that can be found on heavensbestads.com. Our previous graphic designer also put together a descent package to do some marketing for commercial accounts. Both of these could be a good starting point for you if you want to get something together.
They are all located under the “Targeted Ads” section. If you are logged in just use this link:
http://www.heavensbestads.com/thumbnails.php?album=24&page=1Hope that helps!
We did some web address rewrites to try and bring our organic listings up on google. I disabled the rewrites for the BB so it should be working as expected in all browsers. Let me know if there is still a problem.
I’ve been reading “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” for a class. I’ve been a critic of books like these, but I’m actually convinced that this book is a worthwhile read.
I must say I’m actually shocked to know that the website has been down on so many occassions. While most of them were in early morning hours, 3 or 4 were at peak times which concerns me.
At this point I’ll digress a little and say that we were aware that some outages were occurring but had no idea it was occurring on that kind of scale. We have several other hosting packages with option to move to bigger hardware as we need it, I’d be interested to see if these are having any similiar issues. These are locations we’re looking at porting the website over to located in Texas.
At any rate, informative post.
I’m going to second Dan on keeping our comments fair and accurate.
*Saying the website goes down once a day is a fairly heavy exaggeration.
*I have no intention of designing 350+ landing pages, but we have offered it as a temporary solution for those chomping at the bit for a place to run their PPC campaigns.
Also, as we discuss separating the functions of the website, it is important to recognize that the website generates about a franchise lead per day. While this wouldn’t be great for carpet cleaning leads, its an excellent number of franchise leads. I believe we need to have a solution performing equally as well if we don’t want franchise sales to suffer as a result.
As a compliment to Nate, I have no doubts about his skills or integrity.
I also want to speak to pricing per population. While this would be nice for our operators, it is a classic example of economies of scale. If we were to implement a website charge of some type, it needs to be a fixed fee for everyone. The service provided would be equal for each operator. I believe almost any area can benefit from this to the point where it will pay for itself. Our local Rexburg franchise reported that he received 5 bids in one weekend which were all legitimate. We currently are sitting right around 18,000 population as a conservative estimate.
Fixed costs like this one are always going to carry a bigger burden for the smaller operators. This is true in almost any industry and is a fact of business. Henry Ford caught onto this (maybe not the best example at the moment) and that’s what allowed him to trump his competitors back when ford wasn’t going bankrupt.
Here is probably one of the best resources in my opinion:
Clarification here:
I renamed the sender to noreply so operators would know not to send the bids back to me. The first line of the bid attempts to explain this a bit:
***CUSTOMER ADDRESS MUST BE USED WHEN REPLYING TO THIS E-MAIL FOR BIDS. PLEASE DELETE THIS LINE, AND SWITCH RECIPIENT’S ADDRESS TO THE E-MAIL ADDRESS PROVIDED IN THE ESTIMATE.***
You need to either change the reply (or to) address to the customer’s or contact them directly by phone. Don’t feel bad though, I usually reply to two or three messages each morning to explain this, so I obviously need to come up with a better idea. If anyone can think of a way to improve this or make it clearer, please post here!
I also appreciate you bringing this up, as I’ve been trying to think of a better way for some time now.
There are modifications available, but I don’t know if we have enough demand to justify the time. I always have some security concerns as well whenever the code base is modified. Anyone else interested in this feature?
Also, remember that we can get the ads camera ready for you here at the corporate office. Send an e-mail to holly@heavensbest.com
Let her know the ad # you are interested in and any special instructions, names of locations you want listed, etc. She’ll send you a proof a proof in a format like PDF, then when its ready just upload it. If you still have questions give me a call!
I was one of the ill-informed on quality scores, but Greg has made me a believer. Google lays it all out here if you are interested in reading more:
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=49174
