Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Going offline for a week
Sadly, I will be offline for the week. My father-in-law is on life support after another problem that left him unable to breathe. My mother-in-law is adjusting to the nursing home, being unable to take care of herself. So my wife Joanne and I are going there for what will likely be the last time she sees her father and a visit with a mother who no longer recognizes anyone.

I won't have access to the Internet while we're there, but plan to get back to this blog sometime over the weekend, after we have done what we can there. I look forward to sharing my thoughts about starting a business online with you after I get back, but right now, family responsibilities take precedence. Have a good week!
Jeff

Favorite free tools
It's time for the second installment of my Sunday feature on favorite free web tools. This time we turn to tools for evaluating your writing.

We-We Monitor
You've got to love a company with a sense of humor, and Future Now, Inc., certainly has one. Their Customer Focus Calculator (or We-We Monitor, as they affectionately call it) scans your page to evaluate how well your writing focuses on your customers and not on yourself.

It's easy to fall into the trap of writing about our products and our experience and our philosophy—and it's about as effective of a way to make a sale as dumping a bucket of lukewarm water on each customer would be. People don't come to your site to hear about you. They come to see if you solve their problems. And you don't do that by focusing on yourself.

The We-We Monitor lets you enter any URL into it and then spits back a report that lets you know whether your page is acceptably customer-focused or ineffectively self-focused.

It's a great check on your writing and always puts a smile on my face when I use it.

The Bullfighter
Another playfully named tool is The Bullfighter. It works a little differently from the We-We Monitor in that it doesn't go out to your website to read your writing; you bring the writing to it. This means you can use it also for non-web writing, too.

Just copy and paste up to 20,000 characters into the box and it will give you a report on your writing's readability. It flags verbosity, prolixity and formalistic grammatical constructions. (In other words, it tells you when you use the kind of formal mumbo-jumbo like the previous sentence that can easily sedate your reader into a coma.)

Run an occasional bit of your writing through The Bullfighter and see where you can improve. (Just for fun, I ran this blog entry through it. It gave me a high grade, but warned me of the presence of some unnecessarily long words in it. Hmmm. There must have been some verbosity, prolixity and formalistic grammatical constructions in it somewhere.)

At any rate, I recommend both of these free tools to help you improve your writing.
Jeff

What would you do with a website?
I got word today that one of the online businesses I've greatly admired is offering a summer sale on their flagship product. I've long been intrigued by this product. From what contact I've had with it, it seems to pull together A LOT of web marketing tools all in one interface.

Over the years, I've picked up a lot of specialized tools to create, evaluate, and market websites and auctions. And I've always wished it was possible to have all those tools communicate with each other. It's such a drag creating interfaces that allow me to combine information I need to pull together from multiple tools. A little programming skills would serve me well there, but, alas, programming is neither my forte nor my interest.

So a web building tool that has all these tools, or some semblance thereof, built in... VERY intriguing to me—if nothing more than to see how effectively each module stacks up against the standalone tool it emulates and how well everything meshes together.

So news of the sale (buy one website and get a second at a fraction of the price) has me salivating. Not that I don't have enough to do. Far from it! Especially with a trip all next week to help my wife Joanne's parents break up their housekeeping of 60 years as they enter a nursing home.

But the thought is intriguing—what would I do with two additional sites if I went ahead with this? Build more of a feeder site to bring traffic into One Stop Web Support? Expand my eBay store into a broader gift and decor site outside of eBay? Go for more of a niche market on something like food, that Joanne could feel more a part of than the foreign language of computers and web marketing that I speak in when she asks how work is going? Set my son Joel up with a soccer website that he can use to pay for his college education?

With one day before we leave for Jo's parents' house and plenty to do in that day, I doubt that I'll make any move before we leave, but it sure will be on my mind—and in Joanne's and my conversations throughout the week.

This is one opportunity that may be too intriguing to pass up.

Incidentally, if you're looking for a good way to build a website or two of your own, you may want to check this offer out while it's available. Just click on the "Summer Sandals" banner a little way down the page.
Jeff