Site Review: eDirectory.com

Building a simple directory from scratch can be a daunting task. Having a custom built database can be expensive and can take a long time to design and code, not to mention working out all the bugs and troubleshooting. Unless you’re a programmer, you may want to look for a pre-built database or application to build upon.

eDirectory offers directory services which can be customized to suit a wide range of needs. Aside from the search able directory, they offer payment processing and account maintenance, which makes it ideal for e-commerce sites. Generally, revenue would come from selling ad space and premiere listings. There are 3 packages to choose from, depending on what you may need. It you just need a simple directory and don’t need to collect any revenue, then the basic package is for you. For anything where you may need to collect money and have some more control, the E-Commerce or Owned License (where you own the actual source code) would be a better option.

The company offers professional-grade hosting, which is essential for any e-commerce site and is search engine optimized. The back-end of the site has an easy-to-use graphical user interface and has a separate site for the administrator and advertisers. It is also accessible via mobile platforms and optimized even for WAP. Prices range from $69 to $99 per month for the Basic and E-commerce sites or a one-time $1499 fee for the Owned License. For each level, there are different customization  packages, such as “Style Customization” (where they re-design the basic directory to match your pre-existing website) for a flat fee of $599.

Over-all, eDirectory can be a great alternative to building your directory from scratch.

Review: Template Monster

For most start-ups and small businesses, having a custom designed website is not practical. With designers and coders charging $50 or more per hour, a basic website can easily cost $1,000 and up. An alternative for these companies would be to purchase a a pre-designed website template. Many companies on the net provide these templates, with prices ranging from dirt cheap to pricey (depending on your needs).

Template Monster is the leading website template provider on the web. They have the largest selection of templates on the market, with over 20,000 designs in their library and they claim to add about 500 new templates per month. Because of its popularity, the sit has expanded into offering music and corporate identity packages as well.

The templates offered come in many formats, including html, xml, flash, css and php. The websites can be customized to your needs and installed on any compatible server.

Navigating the site itself can be unwieldy, because of the wide range of designs to choose from. A wide range of categories on the right side of the page can guide you depending on what kind of website you have. You can also do a search (easily found near the top of the page) by entering  categories, styles, authors and even a price range. When you get the results, mousing over the choices gives you a larger preview of the available templates.  Clicking on a template brings up further information on the design (such as requirements, formats available). They also tell you how many times a certain template has been, so you can determine how popular a design is. If you have e-commerce needs, there are also templates available with built-in shopping carts and payments systems.

Aside from templates, other useful products such as turnkey websites and corporate design packages are available. The turnkey websites offer more than just eh templates – they also have domains, hosting, emails and even website support (up to 3 hours per months). This package is for people who would like some extra help, and do not want to worry about finding their own host and domain. Their latest offering is corporate design products, such as logo templates, powerpoint templates, as well as complete identity packages that include logo, letterhead, business cards and envelopes.

Over-all the site delivers some great design at a good price. The prices range from $50 to $150, although exclusive rights to any website template can cost up to $3000. Even at the most basic level, they offer some good extras like access to a stock image and clipart library, fonts and even a merchant account from PayQuake. With all these, plus great customer support and a 100% guarantee, it’s easy to see why Template Monster is one of the most popular template sites on the Internet.

Hosting Review: Host Gator

One of the key decisions you’ll have to make when building your website is choosing a hosting company. A hosting company owns the (physical) servers where your website is located, allowin people on the Internet to access it. There are a wide range of hosting companies these days, with a varying features and costs.

One such company is Host Gator. The Dallas-based company was founded in 2002 (in founder Brent Oxley’s dorm room) and today offers shared, reseller and dedicated hosting services to over 150,000 customers. Currently, the only offer linux hosting, but their website promises they will be offering windows hosting soon.

For shared services, there are three different levels of hosting – hatchling ($ 4.95/month), baby ($ 7.95/month) and business ($ 12.95/month). They offer unlimited diskspace and bandwidth and pop3 accounts at all 3 levels, and unlimited domains at the baby and business levels. They support (unlimited) mySQL databases, Wordpress, Ruby on Rails, SSH, CGI, Perl and a host of other programs.

For those in need of more features and security, Host Gator provides dedicated servers as well, which come with up to 8GB Ram and 2 500GB hard drive and several programs pre-installed. If you ever wanted to build your own web hosting company, the Host Gator offers reseller accounts.

If you plan to put up and e-commerce site, then Host Gator has the tools you’ll need. They offer 4 different shopping cart programs (Agora, ZenCart, OsCommerce and Cubecart) and the Shared SSL will assure that all sensitive information (like credit card numbers) will be kept safe and secure. The cPanel allows you to have all of the tools at your fingertips, in an easy to navigate interface.

If you don’t know where to begin and don’t have a design for your site, Host Gator has you covered as well. You can use their Website Builder, where you can create and edit different aspects your your site or you can use one of their pre-made web templates.

Another interesting aspect is that Host Gator has recently gone green. They claim that 130% of their servers (shared and reseller) are powered by wind, through purchase of renewable energy credits. While their hosting capabilities are already quite substantial, caring for the environment certainly does give people an added incentive to use their services.

Host Gator does everything they say they do, has industry standard uptimes (99.9% and above) and lots of extra bells and whistles, which is not unusual for any web hosting company. What sets them apart, is the excellent customer service they provide. The company doesn’t spend a lot of time or money marketing their services, probably due to the fact they have a good reputation and word-of-mouth marketing. Customer service is available 24/7 via email, telephone or live chat. Apparently, if you have a problem with their customer service, Brent Oxley will personally see to your problem. If you’re unsatisfied at all with any of their services, they have a 45-day money back guarantee.

Site Review: Crowdsource your company logo with 99designs.com

In the age of Web 2.0, crowdsourcing is the new outsourcing, and 99designs.com is an excellent example of how to profit from this phenomena. The Australian-based firm leverages the power of the masses to help SMEs (Small to Medium Sized Enterprises) who may not have in-house artists with design projects. The website is a spin-off from online media company Sitepoint.com, where users were holding design contests and awarding prizes to winners. The site’s founders realized that this could be an good business model and launched 99designs. In a sort of reverse-auction, a “seller” will put up a design brief detailing what he needs and how much he is willing to pay for it. Next, all registered designers submit their “bid” design and in seven days, the winner will be chosen and awarded the prize.

So, is this service right for you? For many small businesses who needs a logos, identity, stationary, business card or even website done, the 99designs can be a good source and a good investment. For a fee of $39 (plus the cash “prize”), you’ll get to choose from many designs submitted by designers from all over the world. The site currently has 37,000 registered designers and each contest has an average of 50 entries. Within the 7 day period, you are allowed to contact the designers and make suggestions and changes before deciding on the final design. Of course, there are some disadvantages with this model. First, to attract the best designers, you should offer a big enough prize to tempt the best of the best to join you. Next, if you end up not liking any of the designs, you’ll still have to pick a winner and hand out the prize.

Over-all, the pros outweigh the cons. While there’s not substitute to having an in-house designer whom you can work side-by-side with, 99designs can be  great way to get design project done at a fraction on the costs.

Review: Spydermate SEO Analysis and SEO Tools

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for any webpage these days. With over 4 billion websites on the internet, how can you make sure your future customers will be able to find your site? Making your site search engine friendly can be easy, with the right tools.

Spydermate is free, web-based SEO analysis tool. Created by Mentormate, Spydermate assesses your website’s SEO “health”, allowing you to see an overview of your site’s search engine rankings. The tool is free, and even if you don’t register, you get up to 6 “free” analyses. Registered users, however, can take advantage of more searches and tools such as the compare tab, which allows you to compare the SEO of 2 different websites and the history tab, which stores information about your past searches.

The tool itself is easy enough to use – after registering, simply type in your website’s URL and wait for the results. For SEO novices, the “Site Analysis” is fairly useful, especially if you haven’t used any SEO techniques for your site. It gives you an over-all “Spyder Ranking”, which evaluates your marlketing efforts (based on their standards). If you’re haven’t checked your Google or Alexa ranking, then this page gives this as well. However, except for the broken links, all the information on this page is probably nothing new if you’ve had your site assesed previously.

The next tab, link equity, gives you a more detailed analysis of each page on your site, such as h1 tags, meta descriptions and any broken links. In addition, it also gives you a targeted keyword analysis tool (based on SEOBook’s Keyword Suggestion Tool), giving you suggestions on which keywords you should be targeting for your pages, based on what people are searching for.

After you’ve done more than 2 searches, then you can use the compare tool, where you can see the rankings of two websites side-by-side. While this would seem like a useless tool, it’s actually an easy way of seeing how your website measures up to your competition, and give you ideas on how to outrank your competitors. Spydermate also saves the different searches individually on the history tab, so you can also compare the same site from two different days, allowing you to see the improvements made on a particular site.

Over-all, Spydermate is a good, free all-around SEO tool. For beginners or casual users, it’s a great way of learning more about your site or blog. Having all the information in one place is much more convenient than using several tools and trying to piece together the information. It’s simple and easy to use, even for the most basic users. SEO professionals may want to invest something that will give more in-depth information, or use Spydermate in conjunction with other tools.

Could this be a good way to get links?

Since it is a pain in the ass to find small local events to sponsor we thought we would build a database and share it with everyone. Sign up and get free access and let us know what you think. We are holding off on adding more events until we get some feedback from our users.

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