Ten paying clients later. | Hacker News Reader

Ten paying clients later.

noeltock.com

11 pointsnoeltock11 comments

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.

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...

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 :)

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

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

Thanks for the feedback! If we do get to the hundreds/thousands of clients, I still want to have a personal touch. Rather pay someone else to do coding and have me talk to clients being the thought behind it.

Regarding the microdata, we have clients that upload their logo as PDF, others try to attach PDF food menus to a food item image, it's basically another league :) Right now, we're focusing on trying to sell mobile as an advantage as many other providers charge disgusting money for that. For microdata specifically, we just say "SEO optimized" (and that needs to be explained too).

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

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!

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.

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

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

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