| Featured Member SiteKreator: Tell us a bit about yourself and your projects, business or personal. Steve McCardell: Until recently, I worked as a professional writer. But my wife and I have grown more and more interested in holistic living over the years, and in the last year began investigating and investing in different health equipment while also getting trained as holistic practitioners. In the autumn of 2006, we started using our knowledge and equipment with ourselves and other people we knew in order to see how it all worked in the real world. The results amazed us, and continue to every time we work with people now. On June 21, 2007, we had the official Grand Opening for our new holistic practice, the Biophysics Center. SiteKreator: What are the main challenges your work poses? Steve McCardell: Running all aspects of a business, in addition to acting as a holistic consultant. Luckily, I learned a lot about this over the years by running my own writing business. But the new business is even more complex, and accounting, marketing, IT … everything falls into my lap now. SiteKreator: Has SiteKreator helped you solve any of them? How? Steve McCardell: Web apps in general have been a life saver. I use these for accounting, maintaining our contact database, etc. SiteKreator, of course, is our web development solution. And believe me, I have tried as many as I can get my hands on – dozens! None of them have come up with the right balance of design quality, features, and price. In my opinion, SiteKreator has far outrun its competition. We hear very consistently from people who visit our site that they think it’s outstanding. SiteKreator makes it really easy for us to have a professional web presence and to stay in touch with our clients. SiteKreator: Your favorite SiteKreator feature and design? Steve McCardell: Although I’m looking forward to the new business designs, my favorite right now is Aurora. “Features” is a harder question, because I like so many of them. But I think my favorite is the mailing list, if I’m allowed to include the fact that you can lock pages of your website and just give access to those on the mailing list. This is a terrific feature, and one that I use on some other websites built with SiteKreator. Although there are plenty of paid mailing services out there that offer more features, having a built-in mailing list is just plain useful and is a great option for those who want to keep things simple. SiteKreator: What tip related to SiteKreator can you share with people who are just starting out their business websites at SiteKreator? Steve McCardell: Ho boy. There are probably a few. First, take the time to learn about basic search engine optimization techniques. With SiteKreator, you can give keyword names to your images; you can link keywords to pages of content that give more information about those keywords; you can specify your URLs; and much more that help with search engine rankings. Our site has only been around for a few months now, but we already control many of the keywords we’re after. This is a big marketing advantage for us, and every SiteKreator user should make use of this. Second, take the time to play with all the SiteKreator features before developing an entire website. Getting familiar with your options gives you more opportunity to build a high-quality site. And the site, after all, is many people’s first impression of your business. Finally, if you’re serious about succeeding as an online business, you have to not only pay attention to the two tips above, but you also need to make sure that your written content draws people in. Yes, this is coming from a former business writer, but I’m not trying to land anyone’s business here, so this isn’t bias. The fact is, people are wary of flight-by-night websites that will take their money and disappear. We’ve all come across websites that are just a bunch of silly fonts, colors, and typos dumped on a page, and most of us turn tail from those. SiteKreator gives you a serious edge in terms of design, and does a great job in the search engines. I recommend investing in good writing too (unless you can really handle that alone) so that you’ll stand out among the millions of websites out there.
SiteKreator: What new features would you like to see added to SiteKreator? Steve McCardell: Let me answer that by first pointing that you guys have extremely responsive customer service at SiteKreator, and that you listen really well to customers about what they’re looking for. It has always been a pleasure being a customer. I mention this because I know that, when you ask this question, you’re listening. Next, I believe you guys are already working on integration of e-commerce functions, so I won’t mention those. I’ll look forward to seeing what you develop, then start my wish list. A simple feature request: being able to select a default image (including uploaded images) on pages, rather than having to select the same one each time would be useful.
The ability to add html codes to many or all pages at once (not just at the top of the page). This would make it easy for someone to add Google ads, banner ads, or even third party services to their websites if needed. (Perhaps even just develop a single template for content-driven sites, automatically placing ads in one or more locations.) The ability to add coupons that could be printed (and look nice) by the customer. I’ll keep it to that for now. You guys are always coming out with new features. SiteKreator is a great work in continual process, and I’m glad that I’ve got it as part of my business solution.
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It has been a busy first quarter here at SiteKreator and we've got plenty of improvements to share with you. As some of you already know, SiteKreator is getting ready for a major upgrade of the editing interface and will soon sport a simpler, slicker, and friendlier UI. 
