Website Design

I wrote this earlier today and I’m copying it over to here so everyone can see what I’ve been up to all day.

My name is Janeth Duque and I’m the owner of PicoPico.

I’m going to take a moment and try and explain why I created PicoPico. The words in Spanish mean kiss kiss and are normally spoken when speaking to a small child. The idea for the name came from the website BoingBoing, as a matter of fact the idea for the whole site came from BoingBoing.

Let me try and explain.

I was surfing the web one day when I ran across the website BoingBoing who had a link to a website about Ava, a little girl who was diagnosed with cancer. As I was sitting, crying and wishing there was something I could do to help, I decided to try and help out the little kids here in Colombia, that have problems.

I don’t want a website where I try and collect money and put that money to use. I want a website that will make money and use the money it makes to help the kids. PicoPico is a website that will sell merchandise from Colombia, around the world and the money made off this merchandise will go towards helping needy kids here in Colombia.

A website made by Colombians, marketed by Colombians, selling Colombian products, to help Colombian kids.

The problems with making money in Colombia, turns into a gift when selling on the Internet.

Colombia is a poor country and the people here are happy to make $10.00 per day and because it is a poor country they learn how to make unique handmade products that can be sold on the street corners. There are so many people selling items on the street, that in order to make one product outsell the other persons product the quality has to be higher or so unique that there is little or no competition.

Here’s what I did.

I started giving PicoPico 10% of everything we make from each of our businesses including our website design business. This has allowed PicoPico to hire a full time staff and start purchasing merchandise to sell in our shopping carts. Magda Arce will be running PicoPico and the shopping cart here will be gift ideas for kids. I’ve also bought the website Colombia Art that will be used to sell art work from different artist here in Colombia and that website will also be ran by Magda as well.

How serious am I about the business?

I’ve put my name on the site and my baby, niece and nephew in the header, you can bet we will do our best to make sure this business is run to the highest standards and the money is used to help children in need.

I stared a blog a long time ago for a client and he never did anything with it. The blog topic was on lawnmowers, something I know very little about and have a hard time getting interested in. We did make a couple blog post but that was about it. This blog is getting a good bit of traffic each and everyday and is not doing anything.

Some sites you have to work you but of to get to do anything and this one takes off all by itself. I’m not sure rather I should start writing post for a topic I care nothing about or not.

I was originally not going to post about this but I think I will now. When I first heard about PPP (PayPerPost) I thought what a neat idea. But the more I looked at it the more I decided I just didn’t like it.

1. Not enough money. It takes me around $6,000 a month just to break even, $10.00 a post with a limit on 1 or 2 post per day just want make the kind of money I need.

2. It looks to much like selling links, I’ve never been banned or gotten a site banned and I’m not about to start on something like this.

3. It ugly ups your blog with ads about companies I could careless about.

But let’s face it, finding good links are getting harder and harder to find and if you can pay someone to make some blog post for you I’m sure it’s worth the one time fee of $10.00.

I don’t fault John Scott for the idea. And he had a good idea on how to get some cheap links and told the people they could not tell anyone that it was paid advertising.

And John got some attention, as a matter of fact he got the attention of Google.

Now Scott claims that the links are undetectable

Contextual Links @ V7N are undetectable to search engines. Whether it be by human or algorithmic filtering, our links are impossible to detect. Additionally, an enforced non-disclosure agreement prevents both publishers and advertisers from revealing participating publishers and advertisers.

But he’s told everyone that wants to post these ads to let him know by signing up and posting that they have a blog and want to make some post for $10.00 a pop. They are signing up on his forum. Matt Cutts is watching this and some are even posting the blog address that are going to be using.

Hey John, it’s not undetectable anymore.

Guess it goes to show how important Microsoft feels a good article in Wikipedia is worth.

The full story is here and after reading it I don’t really see that Microsoft did anything wrong.

Microsoft felt IBM had written some stuff about them on Wikipedia and asked Rick Jelliffe to edit the article. They had agreed that Microsoft would not see the edits until after they were online.

Another words Microsoft was not trying to tell Jelliffe what to write, they only wanted a third party to correct the article.

This is an improvement and I’m glad to see Yahoo trying to do something right but it sure took a long time to copy someone.

On Monday Feb. 5^th Yahoo will be launching it’s new ranking model for ads. It will now take into account the quality of the ad along with the price being bid. If it sounds like you’ve heard this before it’s because it is the same thing that Google does. Not only can Yahoo not come up with something new but it takes them years to copy someone else’s ideas.