Site Suggestions

[doodledandy]

I have finally gotten my website up and running. I am open to suggestions on improvement, etc.

http://www.hillebran.com

[Serra]

This may sound harsh, but your site is boring. If I were comparing it to another company that did the same thing, I'd like read a more interesting site first.

Compare your site to this site:

http://www.ryandesignstudio.com


Your ONLY payment source is Paypal, that isn't a good thing. You need to spend the money and get a full featured merchant account and gateway.

I can't get back to the main site from the Faq (It opens a new window, but gives the user no feedback to get back to the main site).

Overall, judging from the design of your own site and from the two you have on your portfolio, you seriously need to learn a little photoshop and learn how to put graphics into the desing of your sites.

I also suggest that you review http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/

It is fairly light hearted, but they discuss some serious topics that would be of interest to you.

[Surf-Hut]

I agree with Serra, on all points except:

Originally Posted by Serra

Your ONLY payment source is Paypal, that isn't a good thing. You need to spend the money and get a full featured merchant account and gateway.

Now that paypal doesn't require you to create an account to pay by credit card (except for subscriptions), this is an uneccessary expense, I'd agree to have more than one payment method, but to have a full featured merchant account is overkill, unless of course you have alot of daily transactions. Personally if it's not a top tier site, I'm more apprehensive about giving credit card information, I'd rather go through paypal, a recognizable name and service, especially for a subscription, I have control over it rather than having to rely on the merchant to cancel it, when the time comes.

That being said, we can agree to disagree on this point.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by Surf-Hut

I agree with Serra, on all points except:

Now that paypal doesn't require you to create an account to pay by credit card (except for subscriptions), this is an uneccessary expense, I'd agree to have more than one payment method, but to have a full featured merchant account is overkill, unless of course you have alot of daily transactions. Personally if it's not a top tier site, I'm more apprehensive about giving credit card information, I'd rather go through paypal, a recognizable name and service, especially for a subscription, I have control over it rather than having to rely on the merchant to cancel it, when the time comes.

That being said, we can agree to disagree on this point.

Nice idea, but you are totally wrong about that. The TOS for Paypal limits your chargeback rights as a consumer, so you are actually taking a larger risk by using a Paypal only site than you are going with a site that uses a full featured merchant account. Many people are aware of this and avoid Paypal for that reason.

The solution is NOT to use Paypal if you are a merchant who markets to anyone but the eBay crowd. I myself prefer to use a full featured merchant account because it gives my site more credibility. You can't actually tell how big I am, but if I was a Paypal only site, you'd know.

A good alternative to Paypal is a service like 2CO. They are a third party company, like Paypal, but don't have the stigma of Paypal. I've actually had some problems with merchants using both Paypal and 2CO and I'd have to say from the consumer side of things, 2CO did a much better job of handling my problem than Paypal.

If you look at the overhead of a full service merchant account and weight it against the possible losses, it acutally does save the merchant money. In fact, when I was applying for my merchant account my bank declined me because hosting was such a high fraud risk. Having a full service merchant account will really help sheild you from a lot of fraud, for a small monthly fee.

I do agree that the subscription model that Paypal uses is wonderful, but I've met some stiff resistance from my customers when I suggested Paypal subscriptions. They would much perfer I use an authorize.net batch feed than get involved with Paypal. Authorize.net batch feeds are very easy to control for the merchant and are not automatic, so they are easy to turn off. Because they are on credit cards, the consumer is protected because they can get chargebacks for unauthorized payments.

[MichaelA]

I think I would dump Dotster and go with GoDaddy or another for domains. Domains are getting cheaper to buy lately, so why would anyone pay $14.95 and more when they can pay $8.95? And if you are buying them for your clients and tacking on a percentage, there is a bigger margin with GoDaddy or Enom.