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Please Ring Bell For A Server  

:: Thursday, March 04, 2004 ::

Please Ring Bell For Server

Yesterday I thought I would have peaceful evening catching up on a backlog of reading. Not so! Robert Clough happened to mention an ebook I wrote, with the help of my friend from Cre8asiteForums Bill Slawski (bragadocchio), called "Please Ring Bell For Service: A Usability/User Interface Checklist for Ecommerce Websites".

Firstly, I would like thank Robert for his kind words about Ring Bell.
     "I've read it and it is worth every cent. If it helps you spot one problem area, it will be worth many, many times the $12.99 Kim charges for it."

Incidently, while Robert has an affiliate link to Ring Bell tucked into his website, he chose to purposely not use it because "You are a great encourager" and other truly sweet things he wrote to me which I'd love to blab about but that would be tacky. If you love Robert, and are interested in purchasing Ring Bell, this page has the link that will give him a little something for it. He certainly deserves it for all devotion he has had to us over the years.

Secondly, I'd like to apologize to the few folks who tried to download Ring Bell at the same time 105 others were also trying to. It appears as though the two third party payment systems I use aren't used to something selling like hotcakes. Makes one wonder what kind of performance testing was done. In any case, I had another download URL from my server to send to people who had trouble with Digibuy and Paypal.

It's funny what happens when something you have is promoted to a wide audience. I heard from a company just down the road from me, for example. Another person wrote wanting more information on my qualifications, which seemed strange since I have this information on the Cre8pc site (but in lieu of her comments, I added a visible link to the Ring Bell page to find the information quickly.) Months ago someone told me it was hard to figure out how to purchase Ring Bell, so I took the information that was on the page, on the right side, viewable above the page "fold" and placed it in a wide angle view taking up nearly the whole top half of the page. This way, I figured, nobody could miss the information. So what happens? Someone else writes to say they need more information before laying out the $12.99.

For the record, of that $12.99, the first $4 of each sale goes to the affiliate who referred it, and another roughly $3 goes to the third party payment system. When you subtract the monthly Payloadz fee and annual Digibuy fee...plus my hosting fee for Cre8pc which has the Ring Bell order/info page on it, it does makes one wonder why people go to the trouble to write for online sales.

I'm not done pondering the past 24 hours yet though. Sometime before noon my time (EST) my ISP must have had a problem because for about 45 minutes the Cre8pc site, this blog and my email were all unaccessible. I no longer worry about bad hair days because I work from home and nobody cares what I look like. I DO have to sweat over bad server days though.

The NYC SES Conference is winding down today. It's been a real exciting week, even for those of us following the stories coming out from the kind folks who are reporting from there everyday. Kudos to Barry Swartz (RustyBrick) of the Search Engine RoundTable for pounding his keyboard every day to keep us up to date on what's happening there.

While still figuring out the new Yahoo! Site Match offer, I found out it's not going to be offered outside the USA yet. Odd. And, inquiring minds like Search Engine Blog's Peter DaVanzo are demanding some real working facts such as "If you pay, but then stop paying, will you still be included given that your site has been crawled by the free crawler in that time? Or doesn't the free crawler visit paid pages?"

Congratulations:

To Andy Beal and cohorts at WebSourced and KeywordRanking.com on their good news.
     "record growth in the fourth quarter of 2004." (I somehow missed that Christmas Andy!? )

Their news is buried this week by Andy's tremendous reporting from the SES Conference via his SearchEngineLowDown Blog.

And lastly, there's Kalena's news. She and her husband delivered a lovely baby boy a few weeks back. I look forward to her return to the SEO blog reporting family when she's ready to get back in the computer saddle again. I must admit it was fun sharing email birthing stories with a peer and friend across the planet.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 3/04/2004 02:17:08 PM

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