About Dan Scherer Expertise I specialize in off-line editing of content-heavy websites with particular emphasis on formats for easy reading, effective language and avoidance of common mistakes in presenting text.
Experience As a writer/editor in broadcasting, association and corporate communcations, I have now taken this experience to the Internet as a private consultant. My career resume includes professional and management roles with the Voice of America, American Broadcasting Company, the Atomic Industrial Forum and 27 years with IBM.
Education/Credentials A.B.in Economics from New York University
Question We are desperate for some advice from someone who knows about the technology associated with the Internet.
Last year I became a partner in a training company that specialises in selling distance learning courses associated with technical and business writing. The website that we had then was 12 years old and it did not work properly, so I designed a new website and had it created so that potential customers could contact us and order courses from our website.
During the first year we increased the prices of our courses and sold more courses than the company had done for many years. However, because there are two of us we needed to sell even more. So, after trying to optimise our website ourselves due to lack of funds (we did increase our Google ranking from 3 to 4) and advertising using conventional magazine, newspaper and web directory advertisements, we decided as a last ditch effort to try Google's AdWords programme.
While our first campaign was running, and we were supposedly getting hundreds of additional visitors to our website, we did not even get one enquiry about our courses let alone sell anything. So, we stopped the campaign and asked Google for some advice.
Within 24 hours of stopping our first Google campaign, we started to get the average number of contacts from our website and we sold two courses.
Google offered to optimise our campaign for us and although they did not change our Ads very much, they added 800 keywords associated with our business. So, hoping for better results, we started our second campaign.
However, after about two weeks during which we again got many expensive visitors to our website, we received no requests for information or orders, so we stopped the second campaign.
The scary thing is that since staring our first AdWords campaign 8 weeks ago (apart from the time between the first and second campaigns) we have not had a single contact from our website.
We have checked our website from six different computers at various geographical locations and it works fine. We have asked Google for advice and we have asked several people for advice and generally they suggest that our prices are too high.
However, if we had never sold any courses since we created our new website I might believe that, but we have sold courses at the prices we set over a year ago. Anyway, in an attempt to get some response we dropped our prices by a third, but so far it has made no difference - we still have not had a single contact from our site.
Can you tell me if it is possible for a competitor, someone with a grudge or a hacker to do something to interfere with our website and kill our business? We do not know enough about the technology to know if it is even possible but everyone we have asked including Google say that it is not possible.
However, the really important question is - if our site had been knobbled, how can we find out what has been done and how can we fix it?
Kindest regards,
Stan McKerron
Answer This sounds like a horror story, Stan, and I can see how frustrated you feel. If knobbled means hacked, I don't think that is the problem. I have knowledge of a particular "service" website that's been up for four years with only modest response from clients. I attribute it to the breadth of the internet -- getting lost in the cosmos no matter how many tweaks you put on the site. I know this does not lend any immediate encouragment but let me offer an idea: let me look at the site. Send me an e-mail and I will respond in confidence. Note that my own site (www.copyhawk.com) specifies that we guarantee non-disclosure. We'll take a quick look (no charge) and get back to you with our opinion. Hope to hear from you. Dan
