Mind Architecture Happenings

With today’s recession economy, many companies are struggling to survive. Clients still need the services, but sometimes can’t afford it. Companies that can’t keep bringing in new business can’t continue to operate. This is unfortunate, as small business has always been a strength of America. Without small business, our economy will be hurt even more.

Mind Architecture has been in business for over 8 years. We have had a strong base of clients and partner developers. We continue to work with many developers, but have noticed that some have gone out of business. This leaves their clients out in the cold and with a bad taste about designers and web developers.

We’d like to help with this situation. If your business is thinking of closing or you are having a hard time with business, we have several programs that may be of interest. Our main goal is to partner with others so that we both grow and thrive. If that isn’t possible, we are also buying client bases from developers. This way, they are assured that their clients will still receive the same top notch service that they are used to.

Please contact us so that we can discuss what we can do for you and how we can help you and your clients.

There are many Open Source packages available for business and web site owners. At first glance they seem like a great deal: no costs for the app and quite a few features. This may not be as good for most people as it seems at first. Let me talk about a couple apps we have used with some clients and how our SAM system does things differently. Let me state though, that these may have a plug in that changes some of the following functionality.

The first package we’ve used is OS Commerce. This is a free e-commerce package. It is quite robust and does everything you could want. Here are the annoyances we have with it:

1 - Listing of items - in the public area the items list in 1 way and only 20 to a page. This can be limiting for some. Since SAM is customizable, we make the listing fit the website and company that needs it. This can fit different types of products including making some customized options available for products.

2 - Specials - This really drives me crazy. If you want an item to be listed as a special you have to go to a completely separate section to edit this. Then you are given a huge long list of all items in alphabetical order. Not divided by category and no way to filter or sort. Ugh. When you have 2000 products and many with similar names but different categories, this becomes very unwieldy. SAM, on the other hand, saves time and makes it easy as we can allow a special price to be put in right on the edit screen. The system then is smart enough to know which price to use and can be set to use the special for a certain length of time. We can also put a button on the listing screen to easily allow specials to be turned on and off with just a click.

3 - Editing products - speaking of clicks, this also is cumbersome. When looking at a list of items, if you want to edit it you have to find the item in the list and click it. Then click the edit button that appears. SAM has an edit button next to each item so you can easily click it once to edit the product.

4 - Options - some of the options, like sorting and whether something is to be shown or not, aren’t intuitive. They use a number to set options. This can be confusing. SAM makes this easier by ensuring that all checkbox, radio, and drop down lists have easy to read choices that make sense.

5 - Product Attributes - This is the worst. You can set different optional attributes to go with a product. But to associate any attribute you have to go to a separate section and do each one. It is extremely confusing, time consuming and gets very difficult to figure out how to match things up. SAM, again, makes this easier by having the attributes able to be set on the edit screen for each product. BUT, we can also set up a separate section for adding attributes to a single product or even a group of products at once. Very flexible and user friendly.

These are just a few examples of how OS Commerce may not be the best for everyone. Keep these in mind. If using OS Commerce causes your company to spend 30 extra minutes a week updating their website, that is about 25 extra hours per year. We strive to shorten that time so that you make the most of the time running your business and not updating your website. Those extra hours can add up to a lot over time.

The other package we have used is Joomla. Many businesses are using Joomla to control their websites. The problem is that this can be confusing for many people as Joomla has many more features than most people use and it gets confusing and difficult to use. If there are features you don’t need too bad they are still there. Need another feature added and you need to hope there is a plugin or you can try to find someone that can add it. Then you need to hope that they can add it without breaking things and that it works. With our SAM, we have designed it so that we can easily customize it to accomodate each comapnies unique needs. One of the confusing areas is that of the levels of admin access. It can be hard to figure out how to assign different people to different levels so that it is effective. With SAM, we have an easy to use and unique system that allows you to assign each section to a person. This makes it easier to understand the security and who can do what. It is also easily enhanced so that we can customize for unique features like ability to read but not edit a certain section. We also lay out areas of editing so they can be found quickly with minimum time spent working to edit that information.

At Mind Architecture we are constantly working to improve our systems for you. We try to design our functionality so that web designers can design their site any way that is needed and they know that we can get our system to integrate with it.

Have you heard of Early Harvest?
Early Harvest, LLC,
1802 N. Carson St Suite 108-2374
Carson City, NV 89701
www.earlyharvest.com

They offer a service that supposedly will generate contacts and leads for your company to use to generate sales. You pay for their commissions up front but then enjoy the benefit of sales without paying commission later. If they can get you enough sales you agree to a % after an agreed upon point. They are quite expensive with great promises. But they also promise a refund if sales aren’t generated as promised. We recently paid for this service. It was a big mistake.

After we had made the down payment we received some communication from them and a list of companies they were approaching. It was a huge list, but it looked more like it was taken from a phone book than a personalized list of prospects.

Then we had to sign and agree to work with them for another year after the initial contact. After we did that and sent the rest of the payment, we lost all contact with them. We called and emailed and never heard back. Whenever we got an assistant on the phone, our main contacts were too busy to talk with us.

We got absolutely no sales or leads from this, they completely stopped communicating with it after just a few months, and we never got our refund.

So, this is just a word of caution to anyone exploring their ’services’. Be very cautious.

By now, most people have heard of AJAX. It seems to be at the heart of all the Web 2.0 talk. Most people can’t define what web 2.0 is, but will tell you that it is a revolution that is changing not only the web and how we do business. Phooey I say. Just like the new PC technology 30 years ago was supposed to change and did change the world, it really wasn’t until it was used (due to Macs and later Windows) in certain ways that it really started changing things. The technolgy itself did not change things.

The web is the current focus though. Many sites are claiming to be Web 2.0 and many developers will develop a Web 2.0 site for you. The focus is on the technology and creating a site using it. The problem is, the site may not be needed or may not have much to do with your business. If that is the case, who cares. It doesn’t make your site better to use Web 2.0 technologies if they are used just to use them. There are plenty of static web sites out there that are more relevant than most web 2.0 sites.

The phenomenon is the sites that use the web as their main business in confounding ways. Myspace and youtube are great examples. Just about everyone I know has used both of these sites. These types of sites have helped cause almost a gold rush of similar sites clamoring to get a piece of the pie. Even these aren’t really the revolution changing aspect that I am approaching.

For most businesses, creating a YouTube or MySpace type site doesn’t fit their business and business goals. These types of sites aren’t useful to them. But, the next step in site evolution may be. So what am I hinting at? Bingo.

We recently did a portal website that allows Ohio users to find a bingo hall close to them. This site was created and then used for a commercial for a new game show on ABC - National Bingo Night. The actual game show had it’s own website that allowed people to download bingo cards to play, and win, from home. The show itself didn’t do great and got cancelled fairly quickly. The website on the other hand did absolutely wonderful. The number of unique visitors to the abc.com web site more than doubled in May from the same month a year earlier. According to MediaMetrix and Nielsen NetRatings, the site finished as the number one entertainment TV site for May.

Those types of number would make any business happy. That isn’t even the part that I believe is a complete shift in thinking. The interesting part is that they are bringing the TV show back on the air, mostly because of the web traffic. So they are doing a TV show to support their website! That is huge. Essentially, the brick and mortar focus of the business is actually taking a supporting role for the website. The website has now become the main focus of this business and is being used to get visititors and ultimately use that for revenue.

This is such a big concept that it is hard to really appreciate the scope of it. Let’s put it another way by using history. In the early part of the 20th century people could buy a car. They didn’t have many choices and they were expensive. There were no good roads, so it wasn’t the best way to travel. Most people still walked, rode bikes or horses. Then, Ford created the assembly line and suddenly anyone could get a car. That was so significant that we now have major roadways covering our country and most people own at least 1 car. This is the kind of shift that this type of business change can mean.

There are sites already using this type of thinking. Webkinz and Bella Sara cards are the ones I’ve seen. Webkinz are cute stuffed animals and Bella Sara have trading cards with horse pictures on them. Neither of these are outstanding or extremely different products. For each though, there is a website that kids can log onto and enter a code that came with their product. Now they can use their product online playing games and interacting with others. Ah, using the myspace idea but now they have a business (selling some product) that is meant to get you online. By itself, neither the products or the online sites would be spectactular. Together, they are overwhelming. Care to try to find a webkinz or a bella sara card pack on sale? Good luck. They are so extremely popular that stores cannot keep them in stock. It’s all so that the kids can get their card or animal registered on the web. How much in advertising or other products can the millions that are on these sites be worth?

So the shift I see is getting a business to create a web site that is more the focus of business and their current business is the support. Definitely a radical shift in thinking, but this appears to be the next step in the evolution of business and the web and their synergy. Almost every business can open their minds to these types of new ideas and create a truly viable and unique website that can not only enhance their business, but possibly become more of their business than originally thought possible.

These are the types of sites we are currently working on and encouraging clients to pursue. If interested in discussing how your business can take advantage of this new thinking and web climate, contact us.

Ref - Article on the show and site

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Is this a bad thing? Hey, if someone wants to pay others to find security holes that can then be patched thereby saving us all from a lot of grief, great.