Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

I attended two sessions where panelists took sites from members of the audience and critiqued sites of individuals in the audience. I was fortunate enough to get Ancient Standard up on the screen and in front of a room full of eyes at both sessions. Even if the panelists had nothing constructive to say (which was not the case, I got several great ideas from both panels), getting my site looked at by a two rooms full of people was great! I didn’t actually realize the Purple Cow Quotient session was going to be “look at sites” so that was a pleasant surprise. I’d like to compare the two sessions and make a few observations. The sessions were as follows:

Site Clinic:

Jake Baillie, Managing Director, STN Labs (Moderator)
Tamera Kremer, Founder, Wildfire Strategic Marketing
Jeff Quipp, President & CE, Search Engine People
Jane Motz Hayes, Information Designer, WebFeat

What’s Your Purple Cow Quotient? Differentiation & Positioning Workshop:

Rand Fishkin, CEO, SeoMoz.org
Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief, The Clickz Network
Ian McAnerin CEO, McAnerin Networks Inc.
Raja Bhatia, CTO, HomeStars.com
Peter Mosley, President, Peter Mosley & Associates

First off, one of the biggest differences between the two sessions was the moderatation. Rand kept things under control and directed for the whole session. In the Site Clinic, it seemed like some of the individuals (not all) just wanted to get their site up on the big screen to talk about how much traffic and money their company makes. In some cases, the impression I got was that the panelists had trouble getting a word in edgewise, since the company representative kept on talking… and talking…  I do feel that this sort of thing is a moderator’s responsibility to take control of, but I can empathize with Jake’s position. How do you tactfully tell someone to shut up?

When it comes to the review and feedback given on my site, obviously I can’t talk about all the lousy advice I got from Tamera, cause she’ll be reading this… ha ha, just kidding, she was on the ball like most of the other panelists. There are some issues that definately need to be addressed: both panels complained about the lack of interaction with the reader, so the comment functionality obviously needs to be made more visible, and both panels also suggested using flickr for the photos, so I’m going to have to learn more about flickr as I’m only vaguely familiar with it.  The lack of a blogroll was another complaint, but I have been looking for other ancient history blogs, and the ones that I’ve found have been unresponsive to my requests. I’ve had more luck building link backs by finding ancient history sites and asking to be added to their resources.

The only real problems or disagreements I had with the advice I received was  the suggestion that I buy a private island in Second Life and build replicas of ancient wonders (I looked into the costs of doing this, and there are promotional avenues that could be much more effective if I had that kind of money to promote my site). Also, Jane Motz Hayes thought the inline text links to other websites needed to be set apart from regular links.

There was a company that was critiqued before my site, and they had top level navigation that linked to another webpage and she raised the same issue there. In that situation, I totally agree with her. However, blogs… at least all the blogs I read link out in posts in this manner regularly. Maybe I’m way off base here, but in my experience to date, this is standard blog practice.

I should also mention that Kathryn Katz from TenGoldenRules.com emailed me after the conference with some very good ideas and she even dugg one of our articles, so thanks for that Kathryn!

Finally, one more gripe…sort of. In her presentation during the Purple Cow session, Rebecca Lieb demo’d two “purple cow” websites. One was Woot.com, which is definately an example of a truly different business. However, her hosting website example did not strike me personally as very unique at all - especially when you have hosting companies like HTTPMe.com.

HTTPMe built their business on a community, not a website. If you visit their url, all you will see is a vbulletin forum. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll discover a community of clients who communicate with each other and even handle a large portion of the support load by answering small, simple questions for each other.  Not only is it a “Purple Cow” in the over-crowded industry, but it’s an extremely effective marketing tool. When you are looking for a potential hosting company to handle your hosting requirements, not much more will set you at ease than a vibrant happy and active community of clients.

Good Profits.