

Ten paying clients later. - noeltock
http://www.noeltock.com/startups/ten-paying-clients-later/

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tnorthcutt
Thanks for the behind the scenes look at what you're doing. Restaurant
websites are nearly universally bad - perhaps one of the worst industries on
the web in proportion to how much people visit their sites, so it's great to
see some good stuff going on.

I like how you're personally contacting clients. Obviously that won't scale
once you've got dozens or hundreds of clients (and I believe you'll have that,
soon), but for now that's a fantastic way to get great feedback and make those
first clients feel very special.

You say you don't have a good way of explaining the importance/benefit of
microdata to clients - why not? What have you tried, and what do they not
understand about it? I'm curious as to what reactions you've gotten - I think
that could/should be a fairly big selling point if you're able to execute on
it well, but obviously it's not much of a selling point if the prospect (or
client) doesn't understand the value.

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vbtemp
Right. Website restaurants are usually overloaded with annoying flash and --
_gasp_ \-- music and/or other noises that tends to blare out loud when it's
least convenient and most embarrassing. It's a case of poor taste gone even
more horribly wrong.

Looks like the OP should have plenty of business - but one thing I've noticed
is that many people who otherwise have a good sense of taste and decency for
interior-decorating have none of that when it comes to web design, so they
might not even notice how bad their websites are...

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noeltock
Definitely on the money there. We have users that try to push neon colors or
wildly crazy background images, and usually I just try to talk to them
directly. It's definitely a case of them trying to reflect their
establishments atmosphere though (i.e. interior design as you point out,
music, mood, lighting, etc.). We'll keep fighting it though :)

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tnorthcutt
Sounds like you could benefit from some (carefully thought out) blog
posts/knowledgebase docs on how to build a successful website.

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noeltock
Here's my start to that :) better-restaurant-websites.com

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TamDenholm
Noel, nice article and good luck with your venture, one tiny pet peeve of mine
i'd like to bring up with you is the slider on your homepage, when you click
the left/right buttons it has that ugly focus outline (at least on my linux
FF) and you can easily get rid of it with:

    
    
        onlick="this.blur()"
    

or perhaps a more elegant jquery solution

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noeltock
Thanks Tam, appreciate that. Wasn't aware of that focus on FF/Linux, I really
hate those outlines :/ We have a new webby, but will definitely fix for now.
Cheers again!

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psylence519
Fatal error: Call to a member function set_defaults() on a non-object in
/home/noeltock/public_html/wp-content/plugins/google-analytics-for-
wordpress/googleanalytics.php on line 1517

Hope they're not paying for WordPress consulting.

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noeltock
Should be working again, analytics plug-in couldn't deal with the heat ;)

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easymode
Thanks for sharing. I'm in a similar journey and this was very helpful and
insipring to me. Wishing you success :)

