Why Buy The Cow, When You Can Get Your Website For Free?

small business tips

Offering Website Tips: Many many many…years back, I worked in retail.  Levi’s 1850 in fact.  Fairview mall in Pointe Claire, Montreal.  It was awesome.  Because we were an actual Levi’s store, the price of our jeans were always slights higher than the anchor/department stores.  However our shop, because it was boutique, had friendly and knowledgeable staff.  We knew everything about … Read More

Setting Your Price

Finding your place in the market is not an easy task. Charge too much, people will walk. Charge too little, people won’t take you seriously. The latter, is a tough one to learn. I, naively used to think, if I undercut everyone, I’ll do well for myself. Offer the cheapest rates and everyone will come to me. Let me tell … Read More

How To Find And Work With A Good Designer/Developer

A couple of weeks back I wrote about dysfunctional web designers/developers. Today we’ll discuss how to actually find a and work with agood one. I guess first, you can start out by not calling them dysfunctional. I’ve been managing projects and designers for 13+ years and it’s tough for me to find a good worker, so imagine what it’s like … Read More

Responding To Emails: The Bueller Effect

Last week we discussed managing dysfunctional employees. Not so much how to deal with them because  you don’t. You fire them and move on. It was more about how to spot one, how we all have had to deal with one and their negative impact on your business. This week, we discuss the “Bueller effect”. You send an email to … Read More

Managing Your Employees

managing employees

I was told that unless you are paying for a guy to physically come into an office and work, you, as the employer, have no control over them.  In other words, you can’t expect freelancers to be accountable.  This statement of course was made by an unaccountable freelancer.  And by unaccountable I mean, having little to no communication in the … Read More

How Long Do I Wait To Call?

Remember when the biggest stress in your life was trying to figure out how long before you call her?  A day, 2 days… that night?  Fast forward 20 years later.  You’re now a small business owner (sucker).  You get a lead.  Either in the form of an email, a voice message, text, whatever.  Do you call back right away?  You … Read More

The Disgruntled Employee

disgruntled employee

Safe to say that if you’re about to fire someone or “let them go” they’ll have some sour feelings towards you.  The extent to which they will take those feelings of course depends on the content of that person’s character.  But even if you think you know them, they might end up surprising you anyway.  And by “surprsing you” I … Read More

And You Run And You Run To Catch Up With The Sun But It’s Sinking…

Social Media is a time consuming investment that involves networking with a human touch. Much like attending a networking party, we initiate conversation with others with the goal of leaving a healthy impression and a business card. When we arrive at a networking mingle, we search for conversations to engage in, then from one person to the next we are … Read More

Web Site Design with Conversion Rates in Mind

First of all, what is conversion?  A website’s conversion rate is the number of visitors versus the number of sales or inquiries the site receives each month.  There are many simple tips and tricks to implement that will help streamline a site and aide clientele in finding the product or service they seek.Here are a few elements to consider when … Read More

Browser Compatibility

It may seem obvious enough, but you need to make sure your website is compatible on “every” browser.  This means your website looks and functions the way it’s supposed to, the way you intended.  I put “” around the word, every, because we only test a few generations back.  We go as far back as IE7.  Any browser further than … Read More

Writing for Search Engines

Here’s a great article written by my close associate, Dave Davies from Beanstalk-inc.com:Some believe that the world of search engine optimization (SEO) is changing in the post-Panda world. A belief that content has suddenly appeared on the radar as the end-all, be-all of ranking highly on the search engines is discussed on virtually every relevant site I’ve been to.Here’s the … Read More