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Google Adwords is a force to be reckoned with in the online advertising space. According to IAB Internet Advertising Report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the year 2009, search advertising is 47% of all online advertising efforts, and of this Google has the lion’s share. So when it comes to advertising your startup by being in front of the most people, many agree that Google is your best bet.
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Back when I did my first startup, we were pretty hardcore about data privacy. We had an overpriced SSL certificate, we encrypted credit cards and other customer data, encoded our PHP code with Zend Encoder, and disallowed SSH connections except from specific IPs. We were in charge of security.
Nowadays, PCI Compliance is the boss. If you store or transmit credit card information in your organization or site, you will have to conform to the PCI DSS rules in order to do business.
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Back when my startups were under the radar, I wanted to display a mailing address on my contact pages, but not my home address, of course. My assumption is that a mailing address gives customers the impression that you have an office somewhere, even though you’re actually working from a folding table in your living room.
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I mentioned yesterday about a service that will record a professional voicemail greeting and phone directory for you. Today I’ll go over a service that offers professional voice recordings exclusively.
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When I went through 99Designs to get the logo for Startup Next Door, in my proposal I requested that the designers either provide a vector image or a layered PSD with a large DPI (at least 300). By requesting one fo these formats, I can be assured that I can use the image on large-format printing like banners and t-shirts.
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In my last post, I explained how 99Designs works. Now I’ll tell you a little more about how it worked for me, some advice on getting good results, and some of the controversy about using such a service.
I had heard about 99Designs a while back, and wanted to try it out. When I first researched 99designs, I found a competitor called CrowdSpring. With a little more digging, I found the logo contest for CrowdSpring that was done on 99Designs. CrowdSpring still uses the logo from that contest. Looking around at the current contests, there was even a contest for a new logo for TweetPhoto.
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When I came up with the concept of this site in early 2009, I was coming across many services that effectively outsourced tasks that you would normally hire someone to do. One of these tasks is logo design.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of logo design sites out there. They work in much the same way a web design firm would. You give an idea of the type of design or concept or feeling you want your site to express, and they’ll create one or more designs for you to approve/improve upon. Not bad, but you’re limited to the designs they offer you and the skill of their set of designers.
