On Feb 8, 2009, at 3:57 PM, Mike Meiser wrote: > To use your car analogy most people simply take it to the dealer for > maintence.
Hey Meiserman! We had a discussion about "Planning your next social media site" at the Super Happy Vlog House yesterday. The people in the room ranged from professional web developers to website newbies. A few points may be of interest here in the VB group: 1. One of the questions that came up was 'how many copies of your site do you maintain?" The pros generally said "at least two", staging and the live site. Most also have dev sandboxes (throwaway copies of site,files and database). More than a backup, this is a place to test all upgrades and changes before applying to (or swapping with) live site. More work and complexity, but less risk (so maybe not more work after all ;) ) Like David said, you gotta do it (or get a pro), otherwise you are working without a net. 2. Two of the people who attended SHVH have recently started a biz service providing complete video site solutions by offering WP-based "packages". I think we will see a lot more of this. Wordpress and Drupal based "products" and services. New customer fills out a form for what they want. Pick from $999, $1299 or $1999 packages and options. Then work directly with the a desginer on look within very well defined limits imposed by a specific WP theme framework. Sites turned around quickly (e.g., less than a day). Packages for monthly hosting and services in the $19-$49/month range. These guys will even supply aggregated content feeds for your site to add to your content. Backups, SEO (including posts to major sites like Facebook), newsletter, press release, the works. Not for everyone here, but I suspect they will be very successful, especially with small businesses with little or no tech resources and budgets. Also a question for everyone: Someone mentioned Episodic at the meetup. Has anyone used it since they were just a flash to ipod transcoding startup service? There were a few posts here last summer about the service (Noam are you still here?). Looks like it's grown up quite a bit. I'm waiting for a beta account. Looks like a competitor to Brightcove, Ooyala, thePlatform, etc., but with more features and nice looking UI. Perhaps this is another way to go? http://episodic.com Markus [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
