jono.me

Doing Business online = Getting ripped off

// January 13th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

How frustrating is it doing business online?!

Although it was a couple of months ago now I had a really bad experience getting some work done for australianwebmaster.com.

The design of australianwebmaster.com is looking a tad old and I struggled finding an existing vBulletin template which fitted the site. Webmaster forums are common and I really wanted australianwebmaster.com to stand out – if I used a generic template then that wouldn’t happen.

Anyway, I set about finding someone do design and code for vBulletin.

To cut a long story short, I finally found someone who had an impressive portfolio, mentioned vBulletin and was very reasonably priced.

After a few e-mails back in forth I was impressed by the professionalism of designer and he was quite accommodating to my ideas. His portfolio didn’t contain designs in the same style I wanted however they were quite good so I decided to give him a go anyway and hoped he could adapt to the style I was after.

We agreed on a payment plan which was 3 payments. One to start, an other one once the design was complete and then a final one on completion. I thought it was a good compromise and if he couldn’t come up with a design I liked I wouldn’t be too bad off.

So I made the first payment and within a week or so I got a design back – it was a basic mock up (which was supplied as a watermarked JPEG). Although it wasn’t quite what I was after it did grow on me and decided to proceed.

I sent the second payment so he could proceed with the coding of the template – on the condition that we may tweak the design a little as he hadn’t mocked up all screens as such.

Once I made the second payment the designer disappeared completely!

I tried numerous e-mails and he never responded. I also noticed that on the forum I found him on he hadn’t logged on for a while either so it wasn’t obvious that he was ignoring me but was still very unprofessional not to communicate with me at all.

I decided to put a PayPal claim hoping that he had simply lost internet access or something and I might be able to get my money back. As part of the PayPal claim process I had to wait for them to attempt to get a response from the designer – which they never did. In the end PayPal awarded in my favour and refunded a massive 41 cents! At this point I was really shattered.

I decided to publish some negative feedback on him where ever I had the chance. I even found my design in his online portfolio(!), so I put a comment on there too.

Finally he e-mailed me the PSD and basically said that he couldn’t code the template, apologised and I haven’t heard from him again.

The total of the 2 third-payments was more than his quoted “design only” price so I still lost money but at least I have something from the exercise rather than a useless watermarked JPEG.

I did ask for a refund of at least the difference but haven’t heard any more from him – which didn’t surprise me. My PayPal claim remains open so they should recover any future funds from him – it’s doubtful but maybe I will get lucky someday down the track.

The whole experience was a really big lesson for me but it was also very disappointing that I was ripped off. In hindsight I should have known better. I now see that there were warning signs but I guess I chose to ignore them as I was desperate for a good vBulletin designer who didn’t charge over the top.

The drama in getting a template still continues though, but will save that story for another day.

Please come again

// October 13th, 2008 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

AustralianWebmaster.com is still slowly building. A comparison between August and September (ie. the previous 2 full months) shows there was a 20% increase in unique visitors and a 45% increase in page views so it all sounds good statistically.

Activity wise it doesn’t appear to be building though. It appears that new members are enthusiastic in the beginning but then disappear. I’m guessing that the forums don’t have the volume of posts to come back daily, and without coming back every day people forget(?). Something I’m going to have to address… somehow…

In the last two weeks the activity has defintely dropped off so it will be interesting to see how the rest of the month builds.

Update, 25 August

// August 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com, freeblogtemplates.net

I missed the update last week.

AustralianWebmaster.com is getting frustrating as it seems to be hovering around much the same traffic level, however it’s probably to be expected as I haven’t done much marketing lately. Something I need to address.

It’s coming up to my three month anniversary of running the site so I want to send out another e-mail newsletter to all members. There are a few new options I want to add before I do that so got plenty to do.

I have also been working on another site the past few weeks, it’s freeblogtemplates.net. I bought this domain a while back and uploaded some templates and left it. It was a very keyword rich domain name which I was surprised hadsn’t been bought – I don’t normally go for a .net but I thought it was too good to pass up.

Only recently have I started to update the content. About once a week I go around and find some really good quality WordPress themes and then schedule them to post every couple of days.

I am getting some really good search engine traffic. Google seems a bit up and down – the site generally comes in part way through page 2 for the search “free blog templates” but the listing dissappears every now and again though. Yahoo is a lot kinder and sending through some really good traffic, I’m in position 3 on the first page at Yahoo.com.

I don’t advertise on the site yet, I am concentrating on building it for a little while before I do. It’s probably coming close to that time now.

I also want to add Blogger templates. Most WordPress users would use the term “theme” rather than templates, unlike Blogger users who do use “templates”. I think supporting both platforms would really help.

Other than that, I will keep adding content and see how it goes.

I also bought another site this week but it’s going to have to wait a few weeks before I get to it. It’s setup on Joomla so it’s a bit daunting at the moment. I will just keep an eye on it’s traffic and adsense revenue to understand it a bit more.

Update, 11 August

// August 11th, 2008 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

I continue to concentrate on AustralianWebmaster.com.

I have decided to add a resource directory to the site – still unsure whether it should be on a seperate domain. It will contain links to all sorts of different sites that a webmaster may need – from graphic sources, to domain name registrars and hosting companies.

For the resource directory I have downloaded and installed the PHPDirectory script – starting out with the free version for now. I also found a template and customised it so it kind of fits in with the existing forum theme. I now have to decide on categories and start populating it – I have a whole heap of personal links in my Google Bookmark accounts already.

For marketing I have located a bloggers forum at AussieBloggers Forum - appears to have more non-technical users so perhaps not an ideal market but it is an active forum with lots of interesting topics going on. At the very least it helps me understand the Australian market. I’m certainly not intending on spamming the forum by blatently advertising my site however I hope to contribute and increase the awareness of my site.

I have also entered the site on to Admin Fusions Forum of The Month for August 2008. The submission will probably only lead to some other forum owners coming to the site so it’s probably not going to have any long term benefit however should I win it will be a good news story for me. Submisssions closed 08/August/2008 but no result yet.

I also recently partnered with Domain Trading Post which has led to some new traffic however so far their visitors don’t look around too much – only looking a few pages and leaving. NameSeek who I partnered with not long after purchasing the forum continues to provide the best visitors that look around the most.

Introducing AustralianWebmaster.com

// August 4th, 2008 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

My main project at the moment is AustralianWebmaster.com, a webmaster forum dedicated to the Australian market.

I originally stumbled across the forum in December 2006 and kept an eye on it for quite some time. I felt that there was a great market for it but it was lacking attention from the owner. It was frequently spammed which is a sure fire way of showing that no-one is looking after the place.

At the end of 2007 I became a moderator and kept the spam away however the owner still wasn’t doing much with the site. To cut a long story short, I purchased the site at the beginning of June 2008.

I’ve been the owner of the forum for two months now and the traffic has improved extremely well.

In the first month I managed to double the number of unique visitors compared to the previous month. I also got about 60% more visits so I was quite happy with that.

The second month was disappointing in that the unique visitors remained roughly the same to the previous month BUT the number of visitors went up almost 3 times, which for a forum is probably more important than unique visitors.

This basically tells me that the activity on the site is attracting the members to return, but my next challenge is to attract new members.

So my goal is trying to find new places to market the site. Any ideas? I’ll keep you posted!