Category: Website work

Entrepreneur: Best Value Guide, circa 2003

After the layoffs in 2002, I figured I’d land a new job pretty quickly, as I had always been able to do. What I hadn’t counted on was the massive number of people looking for work after the economic downturn post 9-11. Although I applied to lots of places, there were dozens of applicants for every job, and many were young, lower-paid yet skilled people. I found out pretty quickly that a 50-year old former VP who had been earning 6-figures was not in demand when companies could get someone in their 30’s who would work for way less. Even my long-time headhunter told me to forget it — at least for a few years.

After trying hard to find something for a few months, I figured I’d try some other avenues on my own, while I waited to find “real” work. Luckily I had a decent settlement from IRI, and also a chunk of IRI share options that I was able to exercise (I flipped them when the stock price was at about $12; less than a year later their stock was under $2)

I had an idea to create a site oriented around the rather new concept of “affiliate links” (common today) in which you got a commission on sales companies made by customers who got to them via links on your web page. There were a few such sites already, but they were unabashedly just tons of links — basically advertising. I wanted to create something that people could have some trust in.

I purchased the URL “BestValueGuide.com”, and proceeded to design my site. Since my concept was trusted referrals only, I created a set of criteria that I could use to rate vendor sites. These included things like how easy it was to navigate their site, how long it took me to find a support phone number, whether they disclosed their actual address, and a lot more that I no longer remember. I created a survey form, and personally evaluated each potential site before I would list their link. Further, I would write a brief paragraph about what I felt were the vendor’s strengths or best products. And if a site failed my evaluation threshold, I did not list it even if it paid good commissions. I wanted to have the only “honest” affiliate link web site out there.

For its time, I think I did a good job of the design and presentation of the site. Where I failed was in actually marketing MY site. So although I did make some money through the links, it was not much, and I slowly lost interest. Too bad I didn’t pursue it harder, because it could have become big. Once again, I was a bit ahead of the times.

I found a few site snapshots on an internet archive site. Just before I abandoned the effort, I had added a parallel “layer” that I intended to be targeted to professionals rather than consumers. So I planned that my Best Value Guide would have a consumer face, and a B2B/Professional face.

Here are the few screenshots I found, including a sample page of actual store listings…

Photographer: Hershel Belkin Photography (take one: kids), 2001-2006

While I was dabbling with web-based income possibilities, I decided to try to go back to one of my main passions — photography. I had been going out and doing landscape photography for my own enjoyment for a few years, but in order to make money I had to change my focus (pardon the pun!)

Combining my passion for photography with my love of kids, I decided to try my hand at kids portraiture. Starting with word-of-mouth, I got a couple of bites, and was immediately successful — my first client spent several hundred dollars on portraits of their kids!

I created a very simply web site, then over the next few years, re-invented to website a few times to improve on it. I found a few screen shots on an Internet archive site, included below. Although I called myself “Hershel Belkin Photography”, I took the URL “belkinder.com”, which I thought was cute, combining “belkin” and “kinder”.

I posted the first few business cards that I created (starting with a really horrible one!), and I found a few sample of my early work, posted here as well.

On the first web page I actually had a GIF that demonstrated the merging of “belkin” and “kinder”:

Gif

Found this archive of my very first photography web site. Featured image is missing…


Next generation site:


A few early samples:

Entrepreneur: Search Engine Optimization, circa 2009

As I developed and marketed my photography website, I dug deep into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, and even purchased some tools to help with those efforts. Over a short time, I seemed to get quite proficient, at least with terms that were fairly well focused.

Having achieved first page organic listings for myself on most major search engines, I though that maybe I could do the same for others… so I purchase the URL SEOmaven.com, and build a simple web site.

My first client was someone I knew in Chicago, and within a few weeks his site was getting MUCH better listings in Goode, etc. and he was seeing increased sales. He was thrilled!

I did a bit of SEO work for a few places, but decided it was more work than I was really interested in doing — not that the SEO itself was that complicated, but dealing with clients who really didn’t understand my requests for various simple changes to their sites was annoying.

Searching web archives, I found a few samples of my old SEOmaven site…

I.T. Manager: Jewish Educational Toys, Chicago, circa 2004-2017

A friend of mine in Chicago owned a small manufacturing and wholesale business that was one of the first Jewish Toy companies. It was a very small business: He ran the Chicago office (2-3 people) responsible for product creation, art, sourcing manufacturing from China, and sales. His twin brother ran the warehouse in Pittsburgh (1-2 people) responsible for receiving and warehousing product, and packing and shipping all orders.

It was actually quite remarkable that they manages to build this business basically just the two of them, with a few other mainly part-time or seasonal employees.

Knowing that I had been out of work for a while, they asked if I’d be interested in helping them in the office during the upcoming busy Chanukah season. Figuring that I had nothing better to do at the time, I agreed.

As a former IT manager, and someone who had been involved with computer systems for many years, I was appalled at what I found — they were using an inventory and sales system that looked to me like it was from 1980! Let me note a few examples:

** Each person’s desktop computer had a COPY of the company database. They were not interconnected or synchronized in any way. Ever morning they would get a copy of the database MAILED to them from Pittsburgh on a CD, and they would each have to update their local database. At best that put them a day or two out-of-date. If one person made a sale, none of the others could see it until the next synchronization!

** Order fulfillment in Pittsburgh (remember these were wholesale orders only) was done by printing out the orders, the using them to pick the products and package them. Once the order was printed, the only way to check status or progress was to find that piece of paper in a huge stack. If a wholesale customer called in for status, or to make a change, we would have to call Pittsburgh, and they would have to rummage through the pile to find the order. Something as simple as getting a delivery date would typically take two days!

In order to run the business, Chicago and Pittsburgh had to be constantly on the phone!I was amazed that they were actually able to keep the business going in such an inefficient manner.

So I quickly embarked on a search for a good inventory and sales fulfillment software package. This wasn’t something that they had even considered — having been convinced (duped) by a sales person at a trade show some years earlier that their system was the best out there for wholesale.

After some investigation I settled on a package called Acctivate (by Alterity). Not only was it very comprehensive, it seamlessly integrated with Quickbooks, which is what they were already using for accounting.

It did take some convincing to get them to agree to purchase both a new server, and this not-cheap software. They were afraid of the change, and neither brother was very technical (to say the least). But I did manage to convince them, and worked quickly to adapt Acctivate to their particular manufacturing and wholesale business needs.

After the slight learning curve, they began to see huge advantages. Tasks that used to take 2-3 days were now 2-3 minutes. Everyone had instant access to all the data in real time, and became much more productive. It was funny — after some months using the new system, they were afraid that their business was failing because they used to have 4 phone lines ringing off the hook and now it was mostly quiet. But the reality was sales and inquiries were being handled so quickly that they were doing more business with much less “busy” work.

So… what began as a simple “come help us do some phone sales during the busy season” progressed into a role as IT manager, as well as sales associate. Normally this would have been very boring to me, but I found ways to make it interesting — like creating valuable reports in Acctivate to help them understand and grow their business, building them a functional wholesales web site and creating the processes to keep it synchronized with their back-end inventory system, and eventually convincing them to abandon their error-prone manual catalog creation in favor of a catalog that I programmed as a report. The catalog creation time went from a couple of months to a few minutes, with all data, images, etc. coming directly from the inventory system, ensuring 100% accuracy. For the first time they had a catalog, website, and back end inventor4y system that were all precisely in sync.

I stayed at that job probably way too long, being that I was getting paid much less than ever before, but I combined it with many of the other activities that are listed in this blog — my photography, teaching in the girls’ high school, and various online business attempts. I take pride in the fact that rather than letting this simple job get me down, I constantly found ways to create interesting and useful projects.

I actually found on the Acctivate web site, an excerpt from a product testimonial that I gave them at some point (although the wording doesn’t sound like what I would have said — someone wrote it after phone interview)

A couple of sample pages from the automatically-generated catalog…

A few snapshots of the JET web site:

Entrepreneur: Jewish Stock Photos, circa 2011-2012

Still looking for other possible streams of income, I decided to try creating a site for Jewish stock photos. Although there were a lot of big stock photo sites, finding good Jewish-content images was difficult — and, as my graphic designer son told me, there are designers working for Jewish organizations that need such images.

My concept was not just to try to shoot tons of Jewish content photos, but to invite other photographers to submit their stock images to the site and to take a small percentage of their sales as well.

So I built the site, shot a bunch of images, and actually got about a dozen photographers to contribute images. I didn’t charge much, and sales were very slow. Don’t remember why, but after about a year or so I lost interest and eventually shut it down.

Searching the web archives, I found some site snapshots (mostly missing the images)… just to give an idea of what it looked like.

Entrepreneur: My-Headshots, circa 2013

Again looking for other sources of income, I had the idea to create a site specifically for models and actors to market their professional headshots. The concept was that each subscribed model would get a dedicated page containing their favorite pro headshots and some basic personal information. Their page would actually contain their name, as in myname.my-headhsots.com, becoming what would have been the first electronic “comp-card”. In fact, the site was designed so it could not be “browsed” — you could only get to specific pages by having the named model page link.

Then they would create things like email signatures that would include a link to their personal my-headhsots page. My idea was to get photographers who specialized in shooting headshots to pay a small fee per clients and offer the my-headshots page as an added value of their service over another headshots photographer.

Well… although I still like the concept to this day, I quickly discovered that most photographers are more into their art than their business, and thus fail to see the advantages of this. (Each headshots page also offered a link back to the model’s photographer, so this would have been good advertising for the photographer as well as for the model!)

Without getting a bunch of photographers to sign up, this was dead in the water pretty quickly. Too bad, because I think it could have been a great service –although I don’t think it would have generated much income for me!

Once again, I found a few snapshots of the site pages…