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I just ordered one of these harmonicas. Looks way cool. From a business perspective, I think these guys need to work on marketing. I suggested with my order that they try listing on ebay.

TurboHarp

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Found by those I was talking about

I was surprised how quickly this blog was found by the owner of www.environmentaltestchambers.com. He obviously knew who I was. This is what he had to say:

However, I am confused as to why you think print trade magazines at 5 grand a month or a Thomas Register program at ten grand a year is inexpensive compared to our site.

We are getting at least ten times the user sessions than TR!!!

IQS was founded based on the discussions with Envirotronics and their use of the web. They cancelled their sixty thousand dollar program due to their high rankings on search engines. I decided it was time to check out how to capture this usage.

Thus, our first site was www.environmentaltestchambers.com and the rest is history. I resigned my territory contract with Thomas Register and several reps came with me. We had a record sales month in June and on 7/4 the US Patent Office published our patent with its resulting provisional rights.

The advantage over Overture is that we qualify the user twice–by key word search and the preview ad–so your company does not get all 2000 users to your site…..since 70% of the traffic on the Internet are selling not buying!

I hope you reconsider our propostion. Let me know if you have any questions.

Where do I start? I don’t think I said that Thomas Register or trade ads are inexpensive, however since I do use them, I guess that could be implied. My real issue is the long-term value of depending on a web listing thru a third party to drive traffic to my site. There is a stubborn streak in me (and my management) not to use another service that is offering the visitors we feel we should get anyway. By being an industry leader, we have to also consider our actions. If we list there, other major companies maybe compelled to do the same. They, like me, haven’t stepped forward to do this.

I will agree with him that the Register is on its last legs and doesn’t provide much value. Part of my ramblings on this blog is to allow me to consider the value propositions of right now. And where do we go next?

Is the IQS service a value or a crutch? Envirotronics may be very happy with the results. But they have such a slow-loading (and antiquated) website that they can’t generate any value out of the visitors that come to their site unless they are using T1 lines. There is a total package to consider. Not just getting traffic, but being useful to the visitors and satisfying their needs. Ultimately, the value my company’s website provides is head-and-shoulders above the rest (boy I am I modest?), so even with fewer visitors, I am generating more value from the web long-term. Perhaps in the future, IQS will be a tool to consider, but right now I need to make sure the destination is up to snuff.

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What’s related?

Or how to see how you stand on the web in relation to other websites. Neat, although I didn’t find anything I didn’t know about. But if you were looking for something you didn’t know about…TouchGraph GoogleBrowser V1.00

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Get a clue!

Here is a good article about “dis-connection” between the existing community on the web and churches (thanks Dean Peters). Basically, church leaders (i.e. pastors) are still looking for “cool” sites for their churches while their members are looking for community.

This fact goes for more than just Church sites. In two projects I’ve been in where we are trying to increase their business, people start worrying more about what the site looks like than what it does. You need to stay off WPTS, but will green or blue really affect your sales? I think people who don’t know how to build a website start focusing on the parts they do understand. That makes for a lot of work for us christian-geeks (or geeks of any faith).

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Getting rid of that silly “image” bar in IE6

Got this hint to add to your webpages from weekly newsletter from www.sitepoint.com

This week’s tip comes to us courtesy of Richard Hayes, of http://www.tm3design.co.uk .

The latest version of Internet Explorer has an image toolbar that appears whenever the mouse is hovered over an image for more than a few seconds. The toolbar presents options for saving, emailing, and printing pictures.

To stop IE’s annoying image toolbar appearing over your images, place the following code between the head & /head tags on your page:

[meta http-equiv=”imagetoolbar” content=”no”] (use GT and LT symbols, not brackets of course)

The above code will disable the image toolbar for every single image on that page. And if you want to disable the image toolbar only for specific images, use the galleryimg attribute for the IMG tag. For example:

[img src=”myPic.gif” galleryimg=”no”]