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Didn't mean to hurt your feelings.....
Also a forum is a place for people to express their opinion. If all you want is for people to be nice to you, the internet is probably not the place.
Got My Site Launched
- Thread starter lhkorn99
- Start date
Didn't mean to hurt your feelings.....
Also a forum is a place for people to express their opinion. If all you want is for people to be nice to you, the internet is probably not the place.
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I respectfully disagree. Just because this is an internet forum and just because you are allowed to be nasty and not be found out by posting from the shadows, I don't believe you have an entitlement to be hurtful.
Years ago a young guy came on this board and said "Anyone who is an insurance agent and calls themselves a 'financial advisor' is a joke."
He was roundly criticized, ridiculed, and he left the community.
I don't know who you are or anything about you, but I hope you are mature enough to know that running down someone's occupation is not productive to your own.
You might want to learn how to be critical without being insulting, and how to be judgmental but still remain civil. You will do well in the insurance business and in life in general if you can master both.
So far you've shown little understanding of either. You are probably young... and as those of us who are a bit longer in the tooth know... good judgement often comes from experience and experience often comes from bad judgement.
I'm done with this discussion. I wish you well.
Al
499WordPressDesign
Fair Oaks, CA
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But common Al $500 for a WordPress set up and I gotta write my own content....
http://www.paddsolutions.com/wordpress-setup-packages/
http://www.paddsolutions.com/wordpress-setup-packages/
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Those Filipino's do cheap work!
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That's a fair question. And the answer is yes.
There are people who will do WordPress sites for less and there are people who will do them for far more.
I don't know anyone who will set up and write your site for $500... who are any good at either. My guess is you can find some off-shore people from eLance that you can hire who will do both... and I wish you a good outcome with that paradigm.
We do very few insurance agents. They simply don't value what we bring to the table. I won't go into what those are as I don't want to sound like I'm soliciting.
While my partner Maya and our tech-gal Virginia head up the author/publisher sector, I work with a lot of small-biz, one/two/three person service firms... consultants, lawyers, Realtors, psychologists, authors, etc. But insurance people are just a different breed of cat.
Compared to so many of the service people we work with insurance agents are probably in a setting where they get more rejection than the others. That makes many of them rather agressive... and just plain "tough." Also, unlike consulting engineers or software programmers or medical or legal people, or even beauticians and massage therapists, insurance is about the easiest of businesses to start and so many agents we run across basically have no money... how many businesses can you start with virtually no money? They think $500 is a king's ransom!
You basic hair dresser has 1500 hours of class and has has spent $20,000 (in my state) to get a license. The software people we work with have college degrees (and a ton of debt.) Same with the legal beagles and the private tutors and vets, docs, etc.
And unlike other biz people, insurance agents are a DIY kind of folk... sometimes out of poverty, sometimes it is just their demeanor. They have sort of a "mountain man" self-sufficiency mentality and they don't hire others to do what they can (or think they can) do for themselves... even if they can afford it. And insurance agents are deeply conservative which often means very frugal (or just plain cheap!
)Take a look at the websites of most agents and you will find them to be mostly the same... the same trite pix of the "happy family" or the "robust seniors" and good luck finding a black or an oriental or a gay person in their graphics. (Ooops, just gave away a little design secret there.)
Agents see a site by another agent who looks or sounds or is successful and they just copy it. We know that most agents fail in this biz, but the culture of "I know best" or "I'll just do what he/she does" remains dominent and so agents don't come to business entities like ours... because they don't see the value... or they don't want to see the value that those who study this stuff might bring them. They KNOW what is best for themselves, case closed, done and done.
Trying to convince insurance agents on our value proposition and the efficacy of our design philosophy is a very difficult endeavor. Most believe that putting up a pix of two white people and a golden retriever above an essay on the difference between term life and whole life followed by a quote engine... is a good site and no matter how much I've tried over the years, I've never been able to convince most of them... that it isn't.
In my early years there was a saying on Wall Street, "Don't fight the tape." Every once in a while we get an agent who "gets it" and it is always a fun project for me to work on. But it doesn't happen often. Most agents simply believe that $500 is way too much for what we offer. All Maya, Virginia, and I can say is "Bless their hearts."
Al
www. 499WordPressDesign.com
www.ancins.com
Wire the money and we'll figure out the details later!
Ralph,
With all due respect, I don't think you have ever run a business. What Al is offering for $500 is more than fair. If you want to try to outsource your business for $60, well good luck to you.
- 11,280
BenS said:
There use to be someone doing WP sites for $99....
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My partner Maya, who has 25 years of experience as a graphic designer in the book biz has some contacts in India for formatting of Word or In Design text into e-Pub (Apple) or Mobi-Pocket (Kindle) formats. They will do it very cheaply and she can mark it up a bit for her time and trouble.
But often on complex manuscripts there are basic language/communication issues, written and spoken. There lots of ways to format even basic text for your basic novel... how the running heads are to be done, page number placement etc. And if you get into formatting a non-fiction book... say one on programming or cooking with tons of what are termed "call outs" (indentations, boxes, margin notes, etc.) the problems are compounded.
About a year ago we looked into outsourcing WordPress sites. The number of problems other design outfits we are friendly with had convinced us not to do it.
BTW, if you want a bit of insight into the web biz, web design firms are very much like book publishers... we don't see ourselves so much as competitors as we do colleagues.
No one knows "everything," the technology changes so quickly, and the basic way we learn is from each other on chat boards or just making a call and asking "how did you do that light box" or "where is the javascript for an image magnifier?"
We even send each other biz. Our little firm has a certain paradigm with hard limits and a design philosophy (I won't explain as i don't want to be accused of solicitation.) When clients want more or different than we can deliver, we happily send them off to those who can.
And we get referrals from places like authorsontheweb.com who charge $3800 for a site... very, very nice sites obviously... but many authors can't afford much more than a 1/10th of that.
The insurance biz is far different than any biz that sells 'creativity.' For one, most insurance products are pretty much the same from the standpoint of the buyer. Second for the most part, prices are fixed. And finally, the agents "profit" (commission) is the same for most agents no matter where they are. Much is set in stone.
If you ever ever run a business where YOU get to control the quality of the product/service as well as the price of it, you will get a quick education on how many moving parts there are (more than Lady Gaga!)... to even simple operations like baking cupcakes or fixing a leaky pipe.
Insurance agents like to brag that they are in biz for themselves. Well, they are... and they are not -- depends on your POV. Most are classified by the IRS as statutory employees where they get a 1099-Misc each year They don't create the products they sell, have no control on the quality of them, can't make changes to them, can't set the price of them, and can't adjust their profit (commission) except within rather narrow limits.
If you sell apples you can buy from where ever you want, you can set the price of them, and if you want, you can change your biz to make applesauce or apple pie or apple juice. Not so with insurance products for the most part.
So yeah... Ben has a point when he implied that running a web biz business is different than running an insurance agency. There are supplier issues (we buy our themes for our sites,) there are employee/contractor issues, there are pricing issues, there are partner-profit issues, and of course there is the never-ending task of keeping up with the "competition."
Everyone should run a lemonade stand at a framers market for a few months... and learn about buying the raw materials, manufacturing the juice, determining the "quality" (how sweet/sour,) packaging it, transporting it, hawking it, and dealing with customer complaints... and you will see why we don't do web sites for $60 like the page that Rap pointed to.
And like I said in an earlier post. If you can get good work done for $70, well as my (age 60+) "Southern-girl" partner Maya says in her North Carolina/Virginia accent... "Bless your little heart."
Al
499WordPressDesign
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