I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Twitter postings from people which essentially mock their customers. Here’s some of the common ones I see from the commercial themer crowd:

• Wow, this clueless customer of mine just posted a total newbie question on my support forum. Check it out! (screenshot link here)
• Haha, someone who used a pirated version of my theme just got hacked and now their entire blog is ruined. Too bad for them.
• This site just switched away from my awesome SEO-optimized theme and now it looks like total crap, say bye-bye to search rankings.

These are somewhat exaggerated examples but if you follow the same group of people I do, you’ll have a good idea of what I’m talking about already.

My point is, your customers read your Twitter stream, so it’s probably not a good idea to insult them (directly or indirectly) for doing something that was probably just an honest mistake.

I’ll admit I’m not a perfect angel about this, but I have been getting better about not posting all the newbie questions I get to Twitter. And trust me, I get a lot of those.

So remember, the next time someone asks you a dumb question, keep in mind that everyone starts out as a noob (that’s right, even you and me) so be patient and don’t be so quick to make fun of them on Twitter.

Even if a lot of your followers would find it amusing, the one person who won’t find it amusing is the one you’re making fun of. Think about it.

I contacted the owner asking if it was for sale, and got the following response:

I still own it. I don’t recall my asking price. Make a reasonable offer, and you can own it.

Fair enough, I made a $50 starting offer, and here’s the response I got.

Obviously no way. What an insulting offer nowhere near my asking price. Good luck finding names that cheap.

Excuse me? First of all, this guy didn’t specify any price range at all, yet claims my offer was nowhere near his asking price.

Second of all, how does he know that was my final offer? I was willing to pay more, but who would want to deal such an abrasive individual? Not me.

There’s no reason for a rude response like that, and it may put off a potential sale. You never know who you might be dealing with, and how much they are actually willing to pay if you abruptly end negotiations like that after a single offer.

Here’s my advice to all you people who receive what you would consider a “lowball” offer. Politely decline and move on. It might even help if you specified an actual price range too.

How would you react in such a situation? From both the lowballer and seller standpoint. I’d be interested in hearing your views.

Who Cares?

To be fair, it seems a lot of people do, but I don’t. Here’s a few questions you should ask yourself before whining about Digg.

Is anyone forcing you to use Digg or their URL shortener? You can use tr.im, TinyURL, bit.ly, and many others for your URL shortening needs.

Did you notice there’s a little “X” button in the top right corner that users can click to remove the frame?

And to all the SEO people out there: do you realize there are other things you can do to improve your rankings besides getting a direct link from Digg?

I wonder what would happen if Digg decided to nofollow all their outgoing links. What a firestorm that would create in the SEO community.

The SitePoint marketplace is (or was) widely regarded as the premiere place to buy and sell websites on the internet. It is frequented by many big buyers, and subsequently, many big sellers.

So why does it seem like they’re shooting themselves in the foot by moving it over to a “brand spanking new” site? I don’t know, but here’s why it’s a bad idea…

1. Already Established Marketplace – Like I mentioned above, the SitePoint marketplace is already very well established. It is mostly known for the website sales sections, and many big sales take place there on a regular basis.
2. Bloated Fee Structure – The new fee structure is bound to scare off many potential site sellers. As it stands, the listing fee is $19, plus a 5% “success fee” which is capped at $499. That means, on top of the $19 listing fee, you also have to fork over 5% of the final sales price (although not exceeding $499).
3. It Is Unorganized – On the current SitePoint marketplace, site sales are separated into three subcategories: Startup, Established, and Premium. There are certain criteria that separates these subcategories, and there are also different listing fees. On Flippa, apparently all these different types of sites are just tossed into a pile.
4. They Ignore Feedback – Upon announcing the site, it seems the feedback has been overwhelmingly negative. People don’t like the design, usability, fee structure, among other things. Not only do SitePoint staff seem to ignore the negative feedback, it seems they are also in denial.

They already moved the design contests over to 99 Designs, which actually appears to be rather successful. Will this success be replicated on Flippa? Only time will tell, but I doubt it.

While I hope they ditch this whole “Flippa” thing and keep everything under one roof at SitePoint, it appears that the moving of website and domain marketplaces over to Flippa is inevitable.

I realize that changes like this can’t please everyone, but seriously SitePoint: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

There is a big difference between toolbar PageRank and “internal” PageRank. Toolbar PageRank is public data, updated once every few months or so. Internal PageRank, used by Google themselves, is constantly updated. This is a floating point number (such as 5.234234). Mere mortals like me can’t see that.

A number from 0 (the worst) to 10 (godly) is assigned to a page according to the quantity and quality of links pointing to that page.

It’s just one of many factors that go into ranking pages in Google. Shouldn’t webmasters be more concerned about the daily fluctuations of Google’s search results than a (mostly) meaningless number that’s pushed out every 3-4 months?