EkaBlog - Site Blog for Ekaweeka the Small Business Community

Reputation Apparel had a couple suggestions for us mainly that people should be able to buy stuff without registering. This was my hope for the shopping cart system from the beginning. But for some reason I didn't think it was possible like the payment process wouldn't be secure if the buyer wasn't logged in.

Anyways I decided to try and see if I could fix it... low an behold after trying a few different fixes I got it to work. So there you go Eksters what else can we do to make your day :-D

PS on a different note we are taking Ekaweeka 100% green. Keep your eyes open for our global warming awareness page. Until then get your green on! Unplug your appliances, turn down your heater and go to www.climatecrisis.net to see what else you can do.

I added a new piece to the puzzle last night: User and Page views! Take a peek in your profile page in the "about" section. Unfortunately there was no obvious way to start the counter with everybody's actual page view count so I hope nobody's feelings get hurt cause everyone started at zero around 6pm last night! We also added this feature to the photo gallery, items, blog main page, and blog entries. Photo counters are coming shortly.

For such a tiny little piece of data this will be a huge service to all of us. Once those counters have been active for a couple of weeks everyone will get an idea of who's stuff is getting more hits then others, and what profiles are most popular. Without having "favorites" or "bookmarks" features this counter alone will allow us to create all sorts of data filters which people can then explore to get a better understanding of what types of traffic they are getting.

Rest assured this is the beginning of yet another thing that will be huge!

PS I know the picture is random (it's West Hollywood, Sunset Strip is in that photo) but in our short attention span culture sometimes pictures seem to be the only way to keep people around and happy. And just so you don't think I'm totally full of $h!7; I chose this pic because it's a view from my office and I felt the visibility and peek into my own life was similar to the visibility views counters will give to everyone on Ekaweeka. See I did go to an arts college!

Development was slowed for the past few weeks. We've had a number of things in the works but most were stalled until we nailed the item image issue.

This morning the issue was isolated and hopefully (cross your fingers) this time it's fixed permanently. Now that it is fixed we're extremely excited about installing the improved browse system where users and items will be kept separate. And we have an event hosting system similar to evite that will be unveiled shortly. Once the browse and event updates are in place we'll be able to do some serious browsing filters and we'll add some more types of content to browse like blogs, photos, events and more.

This is all very exciting, and perhaps timely considering that we're all just around the corner from Spring!

Today we officially dropped in the new browsing system, and pulled out the old one. Previously, in order to browse items, you would have to go to browse and click on a radio button to specify whether you wanted to browse items or users. This was counter intuitive and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only person bothered by it. The new system separates items and users completely and either can be navigated to via the navigation bar by going to the items page or the users page. Each page lists only the categories for the browse content and should keep things simple and user friendly.

Our philosophy has been very much about implementing what we need, then shaving off any excess functionality or features that complicate the process. Sometimes the complications come with too much simplicity, either way we go through the site and slowly note anything that doesn't make sense. The more resistance and confusion we clean out of the maze the easier it is for everyone to get where they're going!

We started tracking some of Ekaweeka's more tell tale keywords shortly after we launched. By tracking where we stood in Google's search results for terms like "small business community", "ekaweeka" and various user's search terms like "lullabee robe" we've been able to see how big of an impact we're making on the rest of the web.

Some of our most popular search strings happen to be some of the users and/or their items ex: Tina Spaic (you always were the center of attention Tina!).

Here are some more: peter gurnz, www.miloandmilk.com, briana love, lullabee bathrobe, artist healer teacher, convikt clothing, green arrow tee shirts, rightcart review, dirtbag.com, dirtgirl clothing, heart pasties, hip hop cartoon shoes/custom made, it takes money to make money lyrics, kataka reiki, katie dodd, love briana

Don't ask me why, those just happen to be some of the top 20 search terms that found us on any search engine out there.

Anyhow, today was special because we jumped up to the top 20 search results on Google for "small business community". Just a few days ago we were in the top 30, and before that the top 50 and so on and so on. I don't know about the rest of you but when I look at all the results for "small business community" it all looks like gibberish. Yes all the results have something to do with small businesses, but they fit in to the broad category of any business smaller then 500 employees. There isn't anything directly related to the OG of small biz i.e. 1 dude in his living-room making calls for his contracting service. When Ekaweeka hits #1 we will have single handedly (by means of thousands of hands of course) redefined what a small business is. Now that is big!

We got a suggestion from one of the gang yesterday. The user noted that many new members have been loading personal photos of themselves where a business photo would have been more appropriate. At first I defended the decision to use a personal photo for their profiles but the more I looked into it the more I agreed. Using a personal photo while not wrong gives potential customers and other peers the wrong idea about your business. Having a profile photo for your business (even if you consider yourself a person who runs a business) gives people an idea about what you do, what your style is. By loading a personal photo people see who is running the business but the relevance drops a little. Even if you don't have a logo for your business, displaying a photo that relates to your business such as dogs for a dog walker, or an art gallery for a painter - gives people a visual idea of what you do. Don't forget we're in a short attention span culture, some people may not even get around to reading your profile type. If they don't read what you do, they may just look at your picture and move on to the next.