I was sent this email and had to share it. It is amazing how creative people can be with the most basic of things!
Check out these photos of amazing staircases:
Amazing Staircases
September 9, 2009
1 Comment | 
Blog, Design, Uncategorized | 
Permalink
Posted by nicoleives
TRY IT NOW!
July 7, 2009HireAHelper is proud to announce the immediate availability of the latest helper website. A couple of the new features include:
| New Features: Dashboard Easier to reply to helper reviews New travel fee settings New calendar Ability to add Non-HireAHelper jobs to schedule |
Visit the dashboard and calendar to see how it is designed to make organizing and scheduling your jobs easier. Check out the audio and visual 
instructions we made for a few different pages.
Login to your account on www.HireAHelper.com and check out what else is new. If you have any questions or comments, please email us at helper-support@hireahelper.com.
1 Comment | Business Development, Design | Permalink
Posted by nicoleives
A Lesson in Free Advertising: BlendTec
June 6, 2007For those of you who haven’t heard the story…
BlendTec developed a great blender and had a hard time getting the word out about it, so they made a bunch of videos of their blenders taking on random household items like rakes, coke cans, and even Tiki Torches.
The videos ended up on YouTube and their sales sky rocketed (Who wouldn’t want to watch someone put all sorts of large objects in an industrial strength blender.
BlendTec vs. Glow Sticks
The guys at PlumberSurplus were attending the Internet Retailer conference and happened to video this:
See the original Video Here.
It’s really great PR for both BlendTec as well as “The Surplus” as both will probably end up getting thousands of hits and brand recognition.
We’ve toyed with the idea of advertising on YouTube doing things like this, the problem is you can’t count on the spastic success of “hit” videos, regardless the instant success of the Will It Blend videos (and similar) will keep people trying for years to come.
1 Comment | Blog, Business Development, Design, Development, Marketing, Startups | Permalink
Posted by mikeglanz
Marketing Via Little Annoyances
June 5, 2007I was just thinkin the other day how 95% of the emales I get in response to a friend of family member loking at HireAHelper is letting me know they found a speling or grammer error.*
Seth posted this: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/06/maybe_not_so_du.html
Same idea I guess…. I’m thinking about spelling something wrong on the site and throwing a “find the error” contest…
* (Grammar errors on purpose)
Leave a Comment » | Blog, Business Development, Design, Development, Marketing, Startups | Permalink
Posted by mikeglanz
How Bad Design Increases Business
May 5, 2007Sorry for you designers who read my blog regularly. Let me explain something though:
Better Design does NOT mean Better Website.
I’ll give you the background:
I’m looking to get HireAHelper designed and I know a guy who does a decent job of that sort of thing, actually he’s pretty much a genius when it comes to CSS/HTML/Photoshop and using the three to make unbelievable sites. He very much subscribes to the methods of building sites that people like the founders of HappyCog preach about. I would dare say that he might be better than people that are working there and better than some best selling authors on standards based web design.
So I’m thinking great, I have the ultimate hookup, I’ll use this guy to get me first class design for a fraction of the cost and it will help us in the long run. Well he flaked. He didn’t hold up his end of the deal he did two things that will deter me from recommending him:
1. He set deadlines and didn’t meet them.
2. He set more deadlines and didn’t meet them.
But you know why he got “fired”? The thing that made me put a stop to his work, decide that it was worth paying him for what he had done, then trashing it, admitting my mistake and starting from scratch with another designer? It’s reason 3.
3. He designed (or started to design) a site that looked great but didn’t accomplish the task at hand. It has the foundation of a site that would win awards for design… but not one that would keep customers. So I trashed it.
Why?
I know HireAHelper needs to “be” a few things in order for people to trust it. It needs to be established… not the website that was thrown together and has been live for 2 weeks. People need to “know” subconsciously seeing the site that it has been around for a while (even if it hasn’t) and that its reputable. Really great design doesn’t mean reputable. Lets look at some examples.
Ask yourself the question “How long has this company been in business?” when looking at the following sites:
DoMyStuff.com
Would you say more than 2 years for any of them? Why not?
Let’s contrast this with the following “Badly” designed sites:
Emove.com
Even if you hadn’t heard of them… would you question that they had been around for a while? Would you know exactly what they do?
Here’s my point. It’s MUCH more important to represent stability/reliability/trustworthiness than to win design contests.
Its even MORE important to get conversions that to focus on “semantic” html/css.
I have heard stories about HTML so bad it didn’t have the <html> tags in it, to be honest I would take the <html> tags out of my entire site, AND do the entire design in frontpage… NO… Claris Homepage even with 15 embedded tables per page and have NOTHING compatible in Firefox or Safari if ONLY TO GET .01% MORE CONVERSIONS.
The web is a marketplace. When people stopped respecting the rules of the market it crashed. They put priority on getting users with no revenue stream. They put priority on fancy trinkets of websites that didn’t produce income or even have a business model. That was Web 1.0 bubble.
This is Web2.0. Whether its a bubble or not is up to us. You can put priority on pretty design, and trendy colors (essentially this). Or you can put priority on getting more conversions, on making your “storefront” (whether you sell advertising, products, or services) more profitable. Even if that means putting an ugly sign up form on your homepage.
After thinking long and hard about HireAHelper‘s home page I have come to this conclusion… it’s worth it to pay for design ONLY if it leads to conversions. Right now I would pay twice as much for the designer (some college intern no doubt) who designed HelpUSell.com, as the “world’s best” design and branding company HappyCog if the resulting site was going to be like Ma.gnolia.com. Why because my target audience (I’m not targetting “web2.0ers”) is a group of people who will associate the “bad” design with a reputable company. They think the site looks “professional” and not “like a college project” (while the exact opposite may actually be true).
So hears my warning to designers. Don’t design yourself out of a job. Put business first. When using your little key terms such as “increased usability”, “softer colors”, and “semantic code” you better have a reason for those things that points to more profit for your employer/client.
Look for “How Bad Design Increases Business Part 2″ in the near future…
For now check out what these people have said about design as well…
14 Comments | Business Development, Design, Development, Marketing | Permalink
Posted by mikeglanz
