Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Oh boy do some people just make me want to explode and reach down the Intertubes and choke the living daylights out of them. And that was at 5am this morning.

As with most things that really get under your skin there was a lesson to be learned there. And the lesson for web designers, graphic designers and very other form of content provider both here and in mainstream was ... don't feel sorry for other businesses and reduce your prices just to help them out. Sure, some business owners will appreciate what you're doing for them but most will complain about everything.

The reduced cost will still be too much ... they'll ask you to justify your costs ... they'll expect to go to the top of your work queue and then expect you to drop everything any time they want something done and will expect you to do it for nothing.

And when they don't put any effort into promoting the pet project they had you work on the inevitable failure of said project will be all your fault.

Bottom line? Don't do favours for anyone ... if they can't pay your reasonable charges then that's just too bad.

Now to those useful links that I promised you in the title.

Responsive design and advertising
Over the past month or two I've been talking a lot about responsive web design and right now ... on one of the other screens on my desk here at the office ... there's a Zencart powered shopping site that I'm building with a responsive template.

It's really interesting to see it on the big screen and then look at it on my iPad and cell phone and still be able to easily read most of it without needing to squint or enlarge the screen. One bit that I can't read so easily on the small screen is some text that appears at the foot of an image and that's an issue for everyone who wants to build sites that look good on PCs and mobile devices.

So much of the advertising that we use here in adult ... the banners etc. ... have text that just becomes unreadable when the size of the viewport becomes smaller and that means that we're less likely to make a sale.

So what can we do about it? I'm not sure what the answer is yet but there are already a number of people who are looking at the options and this link ... impressivewebs.com/link-dump-on-responsive-ads/ ... is fairly self-explanatory and definitely worth looking at.

Another website you should be looking at on a regular basis is Responsive Design Weekly and you can find that at responsivedesignweekly.com. Just give yourself plenty of time when you visit that site because it gives you plenty of links to articles and posts that you will want to read.

That's one website I'll probably save for the weekend ... oh and don't forget to sign up for their newsletter while you're there.

And if you need some responsive design tools then here's a website that offers you 50 of them - hongkiat.com/blog/rwd-tools/. Most of them are grid and framework tools and if you haven't used them before it might be to do a crash course on grids and frameworks.

Go big or go home
Another link that I could share with you ... but I won't ... is to a story on our local newspaper's website where a local small business has just lost a huge slice of its business to a much larger one in another part of the State.

It's a sad story but one that is happening everywhere as economies of scale allow big businesses to pass on savings to their old and new customers ... savings that far outweigh the personalised service a customer might get from a small local business.

And this 'big trumps small' phenomena is not something that's restricted to bricks and mortar businesses in Small Town USA or whatever country you happen to live with. It's happening here on the Net too and reaching right down to small-time affiliate marketers right here in adult.

While affiliates aren't governed by the same economies of scale that might have an impact on retail businesses there are economies of scale here too. The more marketing sites you can churn out in a day the more sales you're going to get and the more traffic you're going to control.

The big affiliate marketers can negotiate their own terms with the sponsors simply because they can guarantee sales. The big affiliate marketers get the first chance to promote new sites ... the big affiliate marketers can weather economic downturns better than affiliates who are just a one-man-band.

So if you want to survive you've got to go big as soon as you possibly can or the industry is going to send you home.