Name of your website?Able Courier
Your name?
Anton Treuenfels
Your Location (city, etc)
Fridley
When did you start your website and why?
Started developing maybe three months ago; up and running for about a month. One reason was business was a bit slow and the time was available. Another was one of the local yellow page books - a recent invader promising lower rates - called to say their price was going up. I decided to use that advertising money elsewhere.
Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc
The website is fairly plain vanilla. It's a kind of super yellow page ad that lets me provide all kinds of information about Able Courier's delivery service that won't fit in a phsyical book. It's designed to load fast - I hate huge graphics that add no value whatsoever to a site. I don't anticipate it becoming highly interactive in the near future, although there are a couple of cute ideas that might be fun to implement in Javascript.
What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?
Deciding when to stop developing and start publishing. As development went on, and in surveying evil competitor sites, it became clear it was fairly easy to do all kinds of things. Eventually it came to a point of, hey, find a host already.
Who maintains your website and why?
Me. I'm cheap, know what I want and am capable of doing it.
Tell us how your business has benefitted from your website?
Hasn't yet. Too new. Except when people ask questions I can direct them there for more detailed answers than I have time to provide.
What are your views on ecommerce and the future of the internet?
The number of a card I used just for internet purchases was recently stolen. 'Course all the sites I bought from claimed extra-super-duper security, so obviously none of them lost it. Somebody snuck into my home and copped the number, more likely :)
Anway the big problem with internet purchase of physical goods is how problems get handled - what if the item arrives broken or otherwise defective? How does the merchant handle that?
What are your views on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Lots of efforts in that direction seem to be wasted. The importance of meta-tag keywords, for instance. I tried to make Able Courier's website easy for people to use while only subtly emphasizing what I want the search engines to notice.
What are your views on Search Engines? Have they helped or hindered your website?
None of the big ones have indexed the site yet, although the URL has been submitted. But Google's webmaster tools shows that it thinks the most important keyword on the site is "township". Not quite what I had in mind!
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Don't know about successful, but so far the most common method is to find sites that will list the URL for free (thanks a bunch!). I hope that eventually the big search engines will notice these links when crawling the web.
That said, there are some "directory" sites that require you to accept their e-mail ads in exhchange for a listing. I don't try to list with them.
What method has been least successful for promoting your website?
Haven't tried the ad-words credit I got from the host company yet; I'm waiting for the search engines to find the site first.
And I don't plan to try paid listings in on-line yellow page directories, as the cost/benefit seems way out of whack. Beyond that, I wouldn't even use them myself because they take FOREVER to load what should be 50-100 words of information. I don't really care to see their fancy graphcis - SHOW ME THE INFORMATION I NEED!
But many on-line yellow pages offer simple free listings as well. Even if nobody ever sees them, search engines might.
And having said that, it turns out to be really really hard to change wrong information in on-line yellow page directories. Things like being listed in the wrong category (superpages.com) or adding an extra "http://" to an address that already has one (yellowpages.com). But these are idiot companies run by idiots. What can one expect?
What would you like to see change with respect to the internet?
Cheaper broadband. Like they have in them there furrin countries.
What is your website address?
Able Courier
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