durangod Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 (edited) We have spent alot of time tweeking the site to integrate features where people need them. We are still tweeking alittle but its getting closer. If you think the site looks 1970 ish thats great thats what im going for. I hate cookie cutter templates and try to stay as original to my own vision and design as possible, and to a more old day's design which tries to stay away from eye candy but still looks professional and serves the purpose. Just thought i would post here and show what we have so far. http://www.durangodaveshosting.com Edited June 17, 2014 by durangod Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Troy Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 "Safari can't find the server" is a very fresh and unique approach to web design (You have a double dd in your link which should be a single.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted June 17, 2014 Author Share Posted June 17, 2014 lmao... ooops fixed thanks for the heads up.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 We have spent alot of time tweeking the site to integrate features where people need them. We are still tweeking alittle but its getting closer. If you think the site looks 1970 ish thats great thats what im going for. I hate cookie cutter templates and try to stay as original to my own vision and design as possible, and to a more old day's design which tries to stay away from eye candy but still looks professional and serves the purpose. Just thought i would post here and show what we have so far. http://www.durangodaveshosting.com Honestly ? I would run a mile if I came to your site. I can't read it, I wouldn't be bothered reading it - it just looks like mess. I don't think it looks 1970's (I was never on the web in the 1970's ) but thank God we've moved on. But if you say this was your intention, you must know your customer, so hope it works for you. It wouldn't attract me at all - not to spend time, and definitely not to spend money either. Sorry. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted June 17, 2014 Author Share Posted June 17, 2014 (edited) its ok appreciate the constructive crit.. its different from all the other themes they all seem to look alike to me. So its my own style. Actually i dont know what it looks like on safari, i dont code for safari, who does really lol.... I code for FF, IE, Chrome. I guess maybe i should check it just in case lol.. Edited June 17, 2014 by durangod Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malfunction Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 Holy FrontPage 98, Batman! Why not add a hit counter, some animated gif images and a scrolling marquee or two, while you are at it? While the design approach is certainly original in 2014, the result is unfortunately a bit of a horror show. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mlew2 Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 I looks good for the theme you were trying to hit but WE that were around then can't see the red on blue info buttons LOL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted June 17, 2014 Author Share Posted June 17, 2014 lol sorry its not frontpage either lol... halarious hit counter and marquee lmao... funny funny man... although im not sure what makes it a horror show, its segmented, well ordered, and menu driven.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malfunction Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 lol sorry its not frontpage either lol... halarious hit counter and marquee lmao... funny funny man... although im not sure what makes it a horror show, its segmented, well ordered, and menu driven.. Well I think your basic problem is you have a cluttered, unattractive, overly busy site that looks like something from Geocities in the 90s. Retro may be cool in some niches, but if you are trying to market a technology product with a site that looks 20 years old it's not going to work in my view. I do sympathize with your dislike of cookie cutter sites of the type that are frequently offered by vendors around these parts, but I really don't think this is the answer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted June 18, 2014 Author Share Posted June 18, 2014 @mlew2 If you mean the three square images I will work on that color. @malfunction thanks i will work on the clutter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted June 18, 2014 Author Share Posted June 18, 2014 ok i redid some buttons, cleaned up some images and reorganized a bit.. Better? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mlew2 Posted June 18, 2014 Share Posted June 18, 2014 @mlew2 If you mean the three square images I will work on that color. Yeah the three at the bottom are the ones I meant not as a criticism either just the older you get the tougher to see the red on the blue, or maybe it is JUST ME no worries Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted June 18, 2014 Author Share Posted June 18, 2014 fixed thanks.... i dont mind crit at all your just fine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SBHost Posted June 18, 2014 Share Posted June 18, 2014 Love the design, I think it is a very unique approach to gaining customers. Denied Service Sorry but for some reason you have been denied access to this website. It is not personal so please do not take it that way. Our security precautions have denied your access for some reason. We ask that you find other sources for your needs as you have been denied service here. If you have any questions regarding this matter please contact us a webmaster at durangodaveshosting dot com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted June 18, 2014 Author Share Posted June 18, 2014 lol i have some countries blocked. if you want to pm me the first 6 of your ip i can remove the block. sorry about that Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wdele Posted June 29, 2014 Share Posted June 29, 2014 Sorry, but there's nothing else to say then: your website looks like crap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted June 29, 2014 Author Share Posted June 29, 2014 oh goodie i get his first post... what an honor. OMG now ill have to trash it and start over... NOT! So you decided to register on here just to tell me my website was not to your liking.... hey i got an idea... get a life! if you cant say something constructive then dont say anything... by the way compared to 2.0 i agree im not 2.0 i have no intention of being 2.0.. and i think it looks freaken awesome, and when the door hits you in the rear as your leaving, thats all that matters buddy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DennisHermannsen Posted June 29, 2014 Share Posted June 29, 2014 Sorry, but I'll have to join the other guys. The website looks too messy, the colors are not my taste at all and most of the buttons are images. Indeed, it looks like something that would be from the 70's, but that's not a good thing in my opinion. People want things that are up to date, modern and my guess is that you won't get a lot of clients with that design... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted June 29, 2014 Author Share Posted June 29, 2014 I appreciate your input, its not for everyone. Bottom line is that we all sell the exact same product, just in a dif wrapper. Some wrappers i like better than others. Honestly i would prefer to be one of the few than the many, im not into cookie cutter sites where every one of them looks the same, all they did was change colors. So if it dont work then i guess ill go down in flames.. Good luck to you Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si Posted July 1, 2014 Share Posted July 1, 2014 (edited) durangod, your passion and commitment is admirable, but you shouldn't let it blind you. Let me give you an example of the same passion and a true story: I had a friend who was/is a great sales person. Once he got talking to you and you had a vague interest in what he was selling, he would always get a sale, (well, 90% of the time). Great recipe for success you would think. How could he fail? Well, his passion was art. And he could sell it. He opened an art gallery and filled it with all of HIS favourite artists. He expected everyone to have HIS tastes. Some did, but most? no. His art taste was dated and so people came, but when they didn't like what he had, to the point where they didn't even have a 'vague interest' in HIS taste, they walked out and never came back. He had a good initial foot-fall of people coming to his gallery, but that soon fell away, as people never returned. Friends told him to expand his range. Update his art. Put up what other people wanted, not what he would put in his house. He had the same passion and commitment as you. He wouldn't listen. He is now bankrupt and still struggling to 'do his thing' almost seemingly blinded by the reasons why he failed. Principle is often good durangod, but principle doesn't pay the bills. Only you know how well your site is doing and how many new customers you have per day. We have had bespoke designs, but currently we use one of those 'cookie cutter sites' as you put it. I've been in the hosting business for close to 20 years - the site design has changed at least a dozen times during that period. Always moving with the times - and we keep customers, and average NEW sales of around 4-5 per day. It's always been that way. art goes in circles and fads. Modern, Traditional, Contemporary. People have different tastes. But on the web, if your site looks old fashioned, the obvious conclusion for most will be: Jeez, when was this last updated? If this is the style of their website, their servers are probably just as dated and messy, not to mention the support. No thanks.....not for me. The problem is, the hosting business is too simple to get into - reseller accounts abound. But if you had had to make a significant investment in time and money in your business, my guess is you would not be so 'principled'. In other words, you can afford to be so blinkered because, well, you don't really have anything to lose. Sink a few thousand pounds/dollars into your business and get serious about what you're doing, and I suspect your attitude to this will change. Yet coming on here, expecting others to take you serious and give feedback, when really it's obvious you don't take yourself that serious at all is a waste of people's time. You've been given advice from many, and none are giving you anything positive. Many are offering advice which is valuable to you, yet you have a blind cavalier attitude to that advice and that my friend does not bode well for you in this industry (or any industry for that matter). Others may continue to give advice to you in this thread, but I suspect that will get less and less when they see you are not willing to take any of it on board. Good luck with your passion - you will need it. You decide. Edited July 1, 2014 by Si Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted July 1, 2014 Author Share Posted July 1, 2014 (edited) @Si Great reply, i certainly appreciate the time and effort you made to make your point. Very professional and very intuitive. I know you didn't have to do that and it is appreciated. And i shall volley back with same professionalism and demeanor. However, i too have a story to tell. A story of a friend who is very successful in this business. We both started out in the social site arena and became friends. He decided after a while to get into hosting and i decided to keep coding. When it came time for him to need a programmer for his clients he called me as i was one of the very few who knew this social script top to bottom. I knew it so well i could pretty much tell someone which file and which part of that file they needed to look in without even referring to the file itself. And so that was my income for years, coding just for this one script. Times were good and jobs were coming every day. I have been a programmer since before http. Back in the days of Fortran, Assembly, Cobol, Lotus 123 (remember that one) lol... I worked on IBM mainframes with JCL and all of that. And then the bottom fell out, partly due to the economy, partly due to foreign coders who would do a whole site for 10% of what we had to do it for, partly due to other scripts that offered more features. At the time i thought it was a phase and people would come back when they realized you get what you pay for. Some did and some didn't. It was up and down for years and i kept thinking it would come back to its former glory. In the meantime i ventured into other things, writing mods for other social scripts, helping people on the social forums for which i quickly became a leader on several. Meanwhile my friend doing the hosting was doing quite well, so well that he was able to quit his job and do the hosting full time. It was so good to see him succeeding as i knew he worked hard for it. Neither one of us got much sleep for years but now he was able to do so and relax a bit with his family which was great. Over time i began getting interested in the business and i noticed that he would take business from anyone, anywhere, anyhow regardless of anything, he would beg to keep their business, he would give outrageous stuff for free to keep their business and he let them beat on him all they wanted verbally to keep their business. He also would sell just about anything regardless of what it was to make a buck. One such item is fake profiles for social sites, which bothers me to this day, i think its unethical and just wrong to provide content to people for sale or not, in which will lead to fooling people that a site is more populated than it is. However his social sites were flourishing while mine were failing. I was of course doing the one at a time (no fake profiles) deal. I invested years of my life and tons of money into that social site, sponsoring national motorcycle events and other events. We were around before Match, before Plenty of Fish, before FB and before eHarmony. While i was doing one free account after another, he was selling packages for his (fake profile packed) social site. However i still refused to go down that road. I'm not knocking him, he did what he had to do to survive and took advantage of a market opportunity that existed and profited from it. He is a really nice guy and he knows how to make money. Eventually after 10 years i gave up on the social site, it was just not going to work without some big capital to do national advertising which i was not going to get. Although Honda Motor Sports wrote me back saying how awesome the site was and how much the appreciated what i was doing, they were not able to invest or advertise as that was all done via bids and third party companies. So i closed the doors on that deal.. I decided to get into hosting because i felt it was a nice opportunity, i was paying for hosting anyway, why not be able to make some money in the process. But i didn't want to deal with what my friend did. I spent many years of my life working in customer service jobs and had no choice but to let people verbally abuse me. Even as a manager of many i still wanted to do my own deal to not have to deal with those kinds of people anymore. One of those jobs was AOL, i left because i could not look at myself in the mirror every day anymore having to dish out the outright lies they made us tell customers. Anyway so with programming slowing down i got into the hosting deal. If i had known how expensive it was going to be i may not have. Seems the only people that make money are the registrars, SSL Cert, Fraud check companies and every other vender which provides the features and services you need to just be in business every year. When i started this business i made myself 5 promises of how i would do this, they are: 1. Have fun, help people with a solution not just a product. Focus on what they need not the eye candy. 2. Be human and be honorable, don't try to fake what you don't know, be honest about it. 3. Never sell anyone something they don't need or anything that has no value to their solution. 4. Provide the best interest and dedication to their success not mine. One will solve the other. 5. Never allow a customer abuse me verbally. I have lived up to that, this will be my 4th year in this business and im still learning. Some of your assumptions are not quite correct. I have invested lots of money into this business and i do take it seriously, i have more to lose than just money here. I have my pride and dignity as well my rules of life that i live by. Which those are much more important to me than any ledger or balance sheet. There is success and there is success if you understand what im talking about. A great man and one i respect very much Mr. John Wayne once said something to the effect of - Everyone has an opinion, if i had listened to all of those that told me i was not doing it right i would probably not be sitting here giving this interview. He also said something to the effect of, be a good friend and nice to those that deserve it, and the meanest S _ _ to them that don't. lol The bottom line is the more people tell me im doing this wrong, the more i know im doing it right. And by right i mean my way. Come fail, success, or somewhere in between i will do this my way. Because in the end i cant sit and blame a theme, or a style, or anything but myself whatever happens. There are plenty of examples out there of sites that do very well with no eye candy or style at all. Its about the solution you provide for the person on the other end of the line. I offer my basic hosting which is exactly the same product that others offer for $8 a month for $3 a month. You say that people look at a website like mine and think well they must be behind the times or their servers must be old. They can also say to themselves looking at other sites (like the 2.0 sites that everyone says i should convert to), why am i paying for such eye candy, no wonder their rates are so high, they paid a fortune for a theme that does nothing and offers no benefit at all to my business. And that is the truth of it, styles and themes and shiny things do nothing and offer NO benefit of any kind to the client. They don't help secure the site, they don't stop spammers, they don't reduce latency, they don't do anything at all but glorify how much money those people are profiting off hosting. I would much rather put my money toward what helps my clients, keeps their cost down, provide some benefit than a shiny bobble that does nothing. When i originally ask for feedback i guess i was asking more for a layout traffic path sort of feedback. Does the site flow good, is the information where clients can find it, where visitors can get the info they need, does it direct them into the sales process by giving them the path to follow, do i have all the required registrar notices on the font of the site, those kinds of things. I still welcome that kind of feedback for sure... Edited July 1, 2014 by durangod Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wdele Posted July 1, 2014 Share Posted July 1, 2014 oh goodie i get his first post... what an honor. OMG now ill have to trash it and start over... NOT! So you decided to register on here just to tell me my website was not to your liking.... hey i got an idea... get a life! if you cant say something constructive then dont say anything... by the way compared to 2.0 i agree im not 2.0 i have no intention of being 2.0.. and i think it looks freaken awesome, and when the door hits you in the rear as your leaving, thats all that matters buddy. It's not meant negative. I'm sorry, it indeed looks offensive. You are trying to make a website that looks like what a website looked like in the 70's. You've done a great job doing that, but you are going to attract 1% of every internet user with your website. It looks way too outdated. I can't concentrate, and there are too many options. People want something modern these days. If I, and I think 100% of other internet users, would choose for something that attracts them immediately? For example, take a look at the website I'm working on: and compare it to yours. I think that my website (not offensive of course ) will attract more customers than yours will, because I can concentrate and the design is very modern and up-to-date. Just one question, why do you want a website that looks like a website in the 70's? - - - Updated - - - So in our opinion what your really paying for is to pad some CEO's Pocket. http://www.durangodaveshosting.com/comparison.html I suggest you remove that .. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted July 2, 2014 Author Share Posted July 2, 2014 not feeling well today so ill reply and get you your answers i hope tomorrow.. For what its worth just so everyone knows, i didnt choose the title of this post, it was chosen for me by a mod that didnt like my domain name as the title, thats ok, i did not do that to spam, it was just the subject of the post.. Anyway... ill reply asap.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si Posted July 2, 2014 Share Posted July 2, 2014 honestly, I for one have said what I want to say and I've come to the conclusion that this guy is not able to take constructive crit but is on some sort of attention deficit egotistical ride and enjoys 'countering' what anyone else says - just so he can justify his 'I'm gonna do it my way and to hell with the rest of the world cos you all suck and I'm much better' attitude. My status: UNSUBSCRIBED from this thread (can't bear to see any more of his crap in my inbox) some people just don't want help or guidance. This is one of those people. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durangod Posted July 3, 2014 Author Share Posted July 3, 2014 Well Si, sir you could not be more wrong, but thats ok... You replied and i replied back as to why. Why you are getting so upset i dont know, seems it is you with the issue. But Si its ok, no big deal, i certainly hope that this will not affect how we team up to help clients on here. I will just say we agree to disagree and leave it at that sir. Have a great 4th of july if you celebrate that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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