Basically no one wants to touch the site, so were stuck with them for now.

They have come back to me with £100 for an hours work of testing the script, because they do not know what it contains.

How long does it take to install on server and do what you have to do to test it?

They are ripping us off, I know they are.

Cheers

Hi, thanks for that. The reason I do not want to go with the company is because I think they are taking me for a ride. The website they designed is a rip off, over paid and under delivered. Something like this should have been included when it was set up, they quoted me £1200 to install PayPal as a checkout option, whereas a highly respected e-commerce designer firm quoted me £250.

It is not 2 hours work for them, no way. I would be happy with just using my defined update schedule, maybe every 3 days would be sufficient, even once a week is fine.

I have asked them can they upload etc.. so I will see what they say. I am more than likely to buy the software, generate myself and then they can upload it.

I mean, what harm can doing it myself do? It will work, it will deliver, just the same as it would if the web firm done it. As I see the only benefit of using the firm is so can put in fancy update features.

Thanks for your input.

Cheers

Will

They said they would be writing a script so the £200 is 2 hours work for them.

They will not provide me with FTP details, so all edits go through them. Only if I take the site away from their hosting will I have access to FTP.

What would you advise? Is the XML completely fine with that software and all the web design company would need to do is have it refreshed every week?

What refresh frequency would I be best having, daily, weekly? We have new products more than likely 1 or 2 times a week.

T

Hi, the server is owned by the people who designed the site, so they host it. So I would need to get them to put it up.

How would XML-Sitemaps handle the installation if it is on the web companies server? Would they be able to?

If I can get the XML file ready, then I am sure the web company would upload it for free or maybe a small charge.

Let me ask you this to see if I am reading you correctly.

If I buy that software (of which I used the free version to generate 500 lines), it will create a sitemap for me, then once hosted on the server, will update everytime a new product/page is added to the site? Once updated it pings Google etc...?

Would it be worth including the images in the sitemap, as we have over 1000 images on the site, maybe 3-5 images per product. Would that then enable us to get our images into google images a lot easier?

Do you know what the difference between me using this and uploading it to server and paying a web design company £200 to do everything? Is there any?

Cheers

Will

Hi,

I have a sitemap on my site, that updates but it isn't a XML sitemap. See here: http://www.designerboutique-online.com/sitemap/

I have used some free software to crawl the site and create a sitemap of pages, however I think that if I were to upload the sitemap, it would be out of date as soon as I listed new products on the site, so would need to rerun it.

Does anyone know how I can get this to refresh daily or weekly?

Or any software that can do it?

I have a web firm that are willing to do one, but our relationship is at an all time low and I don't want to hand over £200 for them to do one.

Anyone with any ideas or advice?

Thanks

Will

Hi Anthony,

When you say top quality content, what do you mean?

I run a designer menswear e-commerce site, currently have 2700+ friends on the page, yesterday I started a LIKE page about the company as well, only 20 likes so far.

What can I produce on these sites to get the LIKEs etc..? Is it just a case of posting good posts and including links to my site or a mixture of good posts and good linking posts?

I find that we put up 1-2 posts a day with a link to a maybe the new stock arrivals etc... but no text to follow it.

What would be the best way of getting the most out of facebook/twitter?

Also could you define social bookmarking?

Thanks

Will