With the end of 2009 rapidly approaching, I can’t help but look back over this last year and see how very far the V7N Webmaster Forums have come over the last year. It has been so exciting to watch the steady growth as our members have come together to become not just another forum, but a true community. So many friendships have developed, along with a true desire to help others.

We have seen some changes that we are pretty happy about, including the addition of a few new forums, improved organization to help you find what you are looking for easily, and new features such as expanded profiles, social networking, and embedded videos. If you haven’t stopped by lately, we miss you. Come on over to check things out and catch up with old friends. We would love to see you! Make sure to visit our 2010 New Year’s Resolutions thread and share your thoughts with us too.

We do want to take this opportunity to thank you for being a part of our lives, and for allowing us to be a part of yours. We are so blessed to have the most incredible members and mentors, along with first class moderators who are absolutely determined to make the V7N the friendliest webmaster community on the net, while continuing to focus on providing quality discussions, tutorials, and answers to your questions. It just keeps on getting better.

Yeah, it’s true. We are not like most forums out there. We think that’s a good thing!

From everyone at the V7 Network, we would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We hope that 2010 will be your best year ever!

As previously promised, when we come across affiliate companies doing a great job, we are going to share them with you!

RevResponse is one that really seems to go above and beyond when it comes to communicating with their affiliate marketers. They offer close to real-time answers to questions with a forum and blog.

They will provide you with someone to help you find the best offer for your sites, and even recommend types of ads, along with the best placement for those ads. They truly WANT you to succeed and make money with their company!

The offer catalog does a beautiful job of laying things out in a simple manner to give you a good idea payout ranges, earning potentials and popularity of the offer. This can make a huge difference in your net results as a marketer.

Additionally, RevResponse provides their affiliates with widgets to help you promote hot offers. The creatives within the Ad Wizard are designed in such a way that should definitely see better conversions.

Why not go ahead and start making some extra money giving away magazines and white papers to your users?

Signup with RevResponse now!

Following are the transcripts from the 1:00 pm session of the V7Network RoundTable chat held on October 7th.

Please note that beyond removing some early chatter before and after that chat, I have made very few corrections, so you will be seeing all of our spelling and typing errors. I hope you are fluent at reading typonese! (grin)

How to Identify Problem Areas on Your Website

<Cricket>     has everyone viewed the preview screencast?

<gissen>       Where do we get it?

<Cricket>     http://screenr.com/mE7

<tumbleweed>       screencast is at http://screenr.com/mE7

<tumbleweed>       hehe

<tumbleweed>       very kewl firefox addons mentioned in the screencast

<Cricket>     Over the coming weeks I will be making a ton of these

<Cricket>     to help with areas that are easier to understand

<Cricket>     thru a screencast

*          tumbleweed thinks the screencast is very innovative. sometimes pictures can say 1000 words

<Cricket>     yeah I agree

<bobnelms>            screencast won’t play for me.

<Cricket>     should play in any browser

<bobnelms>            it’s loading, but it doesn’t show a play button.

<Cricket>     slow connection?

<Cricket>     okay for those who came in late and missed it, save this url for a screencast

<Cricket>     http://screenr.com/mE7

<ewramos>  very god…

<LOZ>         It would be nice if there was a way to re size the screen

<Cricket>     there is a button to full size it

<Cricket>     on the player

<bobnelms>            no, not a slow connection

<atnip>         nice and to the point

<Cricket>     okay for those of you that do not have those tools

<MyPreciousKid>   not working for me either, clicked play, get first screen and nothing

<Cricket>     later (not now) download them thru Firefox

<Groovin>   You’ll need the latest adobe flash player installed in your browser of choice

<gissen>       very nice~

<Cricket>     ?       Web Developer  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

<Cricket>     This is the tool I use the most frequently when I am working on a page. Once you have it downloaded and installed, take the time to play with all different features. The following are the ones that I use the most.

<Texas>       I viewed it.

<Cricket>     ?       Search Status  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321

<Cricket>     I install this one into the foot of the window in the status bar. If you right click on the icon after install, and select options, it will let you select placement of it within the window.

<Cricket>     ?       LinkChecker 0.61  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/532

<Cricket>     This one is a quick and easy way for me to check all the links on a page.

<Cricket>     ?       HTML Validator 0.8.40  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/249

<Cricket>     This one is installed in the footer of my window as an alternative validator, especially for quick checks. For this one, I have the preferences set to use HTML Tidy to double check pages.

<AmySueN>            Cricket – the chat will be available for future reference, right? I’ll want to go through all these one by one as I have time…

<Cricket>     yes, I am logging the chat

*          tumbleweed listens

<psylinx>     How do you feel about people using screen capture software to record this stuff?

<AmySueN>            thx

<Cricket>     not worried as long as it is not published

<psylinx>     Cool

<psylinx>     I’m a good boy

<Cricket>     okay folks now is where we have to determine where your exact troubles are

<psylinx>     …well sorta

<AmySueN>            (pats psylinx’s head)

<Cricket>     soooo many times people are working on seo, when their issue is marketing

<psylinx>     lol

<Cricket>     and visa versa

<Cricket>     the key is knowing exactly what your issue is

<Cricket>     as an example: someone tells me they have a HUGE bounce rate on a specific page

<Cricket>     this tells me a few different things

<Cricket>     (will go back and explain in a minute)

<Cricket>     Is it possible you are in the top 10 for a phrase

<Cricket>     that your page does not specifically address?

<Cricket>     of so, they are gonna bounce fast

<Cindy522>            Or a phrase with more than one meaning – ACK!

<Cricket>     exactly Cindy

<Cricket>     another

<Cricket>     is it possible they you have what they want

<Brandon>   good day everyone

<Cricket>     but the credibility of your site truly sucks?

<Cricket>     and there is no way they will give you their cc number?

<Cricket>     that is why you need a checklist of things to check on every page of your site

<Cricket>     ok lets move on this for a minute

<Cricket>     am I going to fast?

<Texas>       No

<drapersi>   no

<Cindy522>            no

<poetren>    no

*          tumbleweed is keeping up so far

<bobnelms>            no

<MyPreciousKid>   no

<Cricket>     Top placement in the search results is not enough to result in sales. If you are in the top 10 for a key phrase that no one searches for, it will not matter how hard you work on that page, it is not going to bring many visitors from the search engines.

<firecat>       no

*          SubWolf listens in a mo

<Cricket>     This is where you need to sit down and review each title of every page to determine if it is a phrase people are actually searching for.

<Cricket>     Although not perfect, the Google Keywords Tool for AdWords can be an effective tool to add to your research.

<Cricket>     I highly recommend using it

<AmySueN>            I miss the old keyword tool

<Cricket>     If you are not in the top 10 for a phrase, then it may be time to decide if you have selected too broad of a title.  After making certain that, the page is using all of the basic SEO, I then look at selecting a tighter niche, or add a clarifying phrase to the existing title.

<Cricket>     This one can tougher to evaluate because it is so easy to get in a rut of THINKING you have followed all of the steps needed to optimize a page, when quite often multiple pieces of the puzzle missing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, in addition to all the points covered in the Forum Management forum in the topic Do’s and Don’ts, I’m going to add another 5 points that you’ll need to keep in mind while in the process of building a website community.

• First, and this could very well stands as one of the most important things for any solid community, feedback. One of the topics that will pop around from time to time, possibly even frequently, is your site itself. People will mention things regarding the community, be it lack of features, discussing bugs, maybe even discussions regarding rules being broken around the site etc. Well, what better place for all this talk than a feedback section of the site, where the users get to discuss these issues in an organized manner, while also keeping the rest of the community complaint-free. Users want to be heard, and what better way to prove to them your willingness to listen and help and a feedback or support forum?




• It’s important that over time, you build a ‘loyal’ staff base, moderators, admins, support staff. You can’t run a forum of 30,000+ members single handily, that would be impossible. So either invite close friends to help you with moderation/administration. When you’re a dedicated consistent team, the overall work load becomes less to deal with and when a moderator goes offline for a long stretch, the site won’t suffer. Don’t worry, not all of us have friends willing to spend time on a community moderating, but that’s why you need to keep an eye out for regular members that seem like they could handle the position. Find someone unbiased, on good terms with most of the members and is constructive as well as valued in general on the forums.




• Trouble makers exist in the real world, everywhere, they also exist online, on communities. Here’s the thing though, one of the important things to keep in mind is ‘how to deal with trouble makers’ on forums. You have to confront these trouble makers as soon as you can, and you have to be careful when doing so. If you act with an iron fist swinging in the air, raging and being too harsh, you will probably turn that casual trouble maker into one of those driven-to-make-your-life-a-living-hell type of trouble maker. Who knows, they could be a hacker, and causing waves with one of those is never a good thing.Always start by emailing the person or PM’ing them, let them know they’re violating the rules even if it’s obvious, and let them know you don’t want to see them gone but that you would rather they go about things differently on your community. Don’t sound sarcastic, or threatening or angry in these PMs/emails, you should have a friend or fellow staffer review your email/pm, these trouble makers will usually stop when called on it in that manner.
  
  
  If that doesn’t work then it’s penalty time, don’t ban them outright at this point, take away some of their rights, maybe rights to post. Then message them letting them know of what you did and why, and remember to let them know how they can get this partial ban lifted. I can tell you from past experience, after running some of the biggest black hat seo/hacking forums, that trouble makers, when converted, make the most loyal members. Why? Well, they go around causing trouble and admins/site owners, all react the same way, ban, ban, ban. These trouble makers are expecting those actions, but when an calm and collected admin simply stops them and say something to the effect of, “hey, what you’re doing is pretty immature, but I think you could really add value to this community, that’s why I want you to take a time out and come back, add value to this community and become a valued member, because I believe you can be.”
  
  
  Banning, blocking their IP address or removing all their contributions from the forum is always going to spark more trouble than it will initially deflate. No one wins in the end, you lose a potential regular, make an enemy and they are annoyed when they’re banned. Just be nice with these trouble makers, try to convert them and do this as early on as you can.




• Try to highlight the best you community has to over, think of it this way, when someone makes cookies (bare with me here) and they burn them, but still need to serve them, regardless of what they taste like they’re going to serve them with the burnt side down, right? They’re not going to serve something that looks burnt…same thing with a community, put the best up top, in plain view, highlight and feature your most valued members. Wear them like medals, the more medals a forum owner has, the higher up on that rank chain they go. This will do several things; one main thing is it gives new members a sense of the forum standards, and something to aim for. You could even make this a community held event, have everyone pick the most valuable contributor, funniest member, friendliest, most helpful, most annoying just spice it up a bit. Build a sense of community to bring everyone closer together.




• Finally, I can never say this enough, a friendly inviting community that attracts quality users is not going to be easy to achieve. Building something from scratch into to a thriving, friendly, high quality community is immensely rewarding.

Above all, just have fun!

Toni Zova
Personal Site: www.tonizova.com
Twitter: @tonfue

We are always looking for more ways to help you monetize your websites and blogs. When we come across a solid affiliate company that we feel can help increase your income, you can count on the fact that we are going to share it with you.

Browsing through the Tatto Media site and affiliate program, it’s easy to see why they are now the world’s third largest behavioral advertising network (July 2009 comScore ). The quality services they provide for both their advertisers and affiliates are quite simply a cut above the rest.

Why Choose the Tatto Affiliate Network?

I spent quite some time reading the extensive information they offer affiliates in a very straight forward approach and found multiple benefits for choosing to work with this company.

Weekly Payments: With so many companies paying their affiliates either monthly or quarterly, it’s nice to see one offering weekly payments with flexible payment terms paid via check, PayPal or wire. Additionally, affiliates are given access to view and track payment history along with a dedicate account management team for support.

Self Serve System: This makes it so simple to find and choose exclusive offers with top brand name sites to maximize your revenues and provides instant updates with real time reporting tools!

Exclusive Offers: One of the most exciting things I noticed about the Tatto Affiliate Network is that they have such a wide variety of exclusive offers available, including gift cards, cell phones, health, finance, education, entertainment and more. This makes it easy for you to find offers relevant to your existing sites to get you making money quickly.

Advanced Reporting: Track and analyze performance in real time in the user-friendly Affiliates System interface. Use the SOAP interfaces to integrate live reporting in any application.

All in all, I have to admit I am impressed and would recommend to anyone looking for ways to increase their income to check out the Tatto Media Affiliate Network to see if it may be the solution for you!

What: V7Network RoundTable
Where: http://www.v7n.com/chat/
When: Wed Sept 23 at 1:00 pm CST
Discussion: How to identify problem areas on your web site.
Cost: FREE to all V7N members.

I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am to introduce the V7Network RoundTable live training chats to the community. These will be structured interactive text chats covering a wide range of topics for webmasters and small business owners, focused 100% on helping our members build a highly successful online presence. At this time, our plan is to offer this training 2-4 times a month based on the response from the community.

Our first live training chat is scheduled for September 23, 2009 at 1:00 pm CST. We will be discussing ways to evaluate your site (and the tools that I personally use) to determine what types of changes you may need to consider making in terms of SEO and marketing techniques. Afterward, we will be opening things up for questions and answers.

If what you are currently doing is working, please do not consider changing a single thing. In fact, you probably don’t need this type of training. If however you find yourself not getting the results that you have hoped for, then perhaps it is time to think about sitting down and spending some time with us at the V7Network RoundTable and see if maybe we can brainstorm through some ideas for you!

We will open the chat area approximately 30 minutes prior to the start of the training session. If you are not already logged in, you will need to log in using your V7N user name and password. I expect the training session to last 1-2 hours, based on the number of member questions.

Please let us know if you will be able to attend!

Running a busy forum I often hear from webmasters looking for ways to supplement their incomes. With so many affiliate type options out there though it can be difficult to sort through it all so that you can choose one that you can depend on. When I come across what appears to be a legitimate opportunity, especially one that will give you multiple ways to make money, I like being able to share the information with you.

RevResponse is a pay-per lead program with very nice payouts which allows you to select offers from more than 33+ industry categories. Simply put, it is a business focused ad network that offers your visitors free magazines and white papers. Every qualified lead generated will earn you a minimum payout of $1.50 and up to $20.00. Best of all they offer 10 ways for you to make money!

10 Ways To Make Money With RevResponse

1. Monetize Your Blog Posts

2. Cash In On Your Site Content

3. Drive Traffic To Your Co-branded Content Resource Center

4. Promote With E-Newsletter Inclusions

5. Optimize Your Opt-in Mailing List

6. Monetize Your Site Communications

7. Leverage Your Social Networking Sites

8. Create Promotions Using RevResponse RSS Feeds

9. Place An Ad Widget On Your Site

10. Refer New RevResponse Partners

The partner site is set up in a manner to walk you through everything you need step by step, including a simple Ad Wizard that allows you to create contextual, banner, and flash widget offers ready to cut and paste to your blogs and websites.

With a strong support system in place, including a blog and forum keeping you updated on new offers and answering your questions, this is one program that really seems to go out of their way to help their partners succeed.

So what are you waiting for? Get started today!

Every online site has gone through, or will eventually go through three main phases; Design, Development and Marketing. It’s imperative that you study these phases in order to understand what makes or breaks a site and how to avoid common mistakes many webmasters fall victim to.

To better help you visualize parts of these phases we’re going to take a random site and put it under the microscope and use it as an example. For this article, we’re going to use STDHelp.org as our example, a completely random fairly new website with many of the great pointers I want to share with you already implemented into it!

The first stage of building a site once you know the niche and concept is the design phase. Now if you go straight to creating a web site chances are that your site will most likely end up badly structured and looking rather unprofessional. So below are a few tips and things to keep in mind.

A good rule to remember when working on the page design is consistency. You do not want users navigating through different pages to feel as if they’re navigating through 15 different sites, chances of them sticking around after a drastic change in design after the very first click are slim to none!

Now that you have started working on your page design, pay attention to these next few rules on how to build the perfect navigation that wont only make life easier for your users, but also make it easier for Search Engine bots to crawl and index your entire site through the navigation itself. Again, this goes without saying, but the important rule of consistency applies here too so keep the navigation in the same position and make sure it doesn’t change so as not to confuse the users.

Take a look at STDHelp, their navigation is a great example. Not only is it text based, which is always a plus, but it’s prominent and in the same place thought the site. It’s clear and not only is it labeled but each tab is described. Even navigating to the forums keeps the header/navigation the same providing users with a fixed map to easily navigate back and forth within the site.

It’s also important to remember that images should not be used to replace text. While alt tags do help SEO wise later on, it’s best practice to use text over these images for styling rather than embed the text into images, therefor rendering them unreadable by search engine bots. In web design, a picture is not really worth a thousand words if you know what i mean! As is the case with STDHelp’s main home page image, the text over it is not embedded into the image (the title is) but all the main links, with those valuable keywords are text based!

Keep in mind that alt tags for images used to replace text do not make up for the actual text in value!

Next we have the content, it’s really important that you proof read your content to avoid mistakes that leave users feeling the site is a little on the unprofessional side. Don’t swamp your home/index page with too much content, you see visitors will glance over your site so you need to make important parts prominent rather than stuffing it with thousands of words they wont even bother reading.

STDHelp is a great example of this. They have a single paragraph explaining what the site offers, that’s all you need. The rest of the site provides quick tools and services for the users. From a news section, popular links section, quick navigation section, featured articles and conversations. It instantly gives you the sense that it’s a community site and you can scan it right away in seconds to see if it contains what you’re looking for.

They even provide a helpful widget which makes their site seem more alive, and active with an “ask a doctor a question” widget where you can communicate with doctors online. You can use things like this to provide your users with a little interaction to keep them interested and drive them to register or sign up.

Another thing to keep in mind is the link structure of your site but you can learn more about that in the V7N Community

Now that you have designed and built your site to be as Search Engine/User friendly as possible, you can start marketing it. Now I’m not going to point out some of the obvious ways to market your site, you know, things like build backlinks, submit your site to relevant directories, post on forums and comment on blogs dropping your sites link when you can. Let’s face it, that’s not what real marketing is all about.

Things like producing viral social media that can in turn produce interest from bloggers, regular site owners and sometimes even journalists, is something you want to make a note of! This not only creates backlinks to your site, and content about your site for publicity, it also creates hype. providing discounts and coupons, contests like the ones STDHelp holds, offline networking and even guest articles.

Social network sites really do help, take Twitter for example, it’s a perfect way to connect with real targeted users, one on one, and get those potential clients or dedicated loyal members you need for your site. STDHelp for example uses it’s STD help twitter profile to interact with thousands of its followers. They go as far as providing users with free products related to their site of course, like free condoms. This not only shows they care but it also stirs up replies!

When it comes to design, keep it all consistent and clear, for the development side of things, don’t cut corners and be nice to those Search Engine Bots and, in terms of marketing, just get creative and think outside the box, provide your users with free downloads, ways to interact and they’ll come!

Good luck with your site and happy ranking

Toni Zova
Personal Site: www.tonizova.com
Twitter: @tonfue

Why Brandstack is the real silent killer.

Why is Brandstack.com the real silent killer, why is it worse than most of the crowdsourcing sites designers complain with and why it is the real evil Spec Watch should check out, and why it needs to be muted once and for all?

I’m not a fan, but instead of bashing them, which I find great joy in doing so, I’m going to present you all with the facts, in a constructive mature manner, well, sort of. See, Brandstack and I have never seen eye to eye, their entire concept is wrong, besides that the founder/owner Wes Wilson in my opinion is the biggest tool alive. He’s not only a tool, but has no idea how to run a faulty piss poor excuse of a service like Brandstack.

So, what’s wrong with them? Well, let’s take a look at their business model. I’ll break this down and honestly do my best to word it in a way that is not misleading or biased.

Brandstack Business Model:

Ok fellas, here’s what we’re gonna do with the 15% of sales we steal from our designers!

Step 1:  Give those same designers more competition by purchasing a $500/mo designer-targeted ad on Logopond and countless other inspiration sites, thus increasing our userbase and our extraordinary number of low-quality, rip-off designs!

Step 2:  Develop pointless and ridiculous add-ons to my already terrible User Interface, such as an AJAX chatroom that doesn’t even work!

Step 3:   We’re going to encourage our users to give us free adspace on their portfolio sites and spam their twitter followers with shitty Brandstack spam!

Step 4:  Hire incompetent douchebags like Robert McGuire who alienate their own design community!

Why are we going to fail?

1.  We are idiots who know nothing about ecommerce!

2.  We could have used the same $500+ we spent on designer-targeted advertising and targeted buyers with it!  Instead we’ll leave it up to the designer to find buyers for their work (literally says this in the “Promote Yourself” section) but we won’t hesitate to charge them the 15% finders fee!

3.  We know nothing about landing page design or SEO so a user has no clue how to find our site and once they do, well shit, they don’t know where the hell to go next!

4. Those designers we were counting on to promote our site know nothing about SEO either, so the only crowd we are reaching remains designers!  And their twitter following?  It’s all designers, too! (do you see a pattern here?)  This #Brandstack hashtag does absolutely nothing for you and trust me, it never will!

5.  We hire incompetent douchebags such as Robert McGuire!

Brandstack. “Pay us for all your designs.”

Ok, now let’s take a moment to think about this for a second, I wont address issues that have happened in the past, I obviously will but for now, let’s discuss the real issue with Brandsock. Spec work. Here’s the thing, Brandstink designers, the real ones that is, not the ones created by Brandsick itself to sell off their in house designs, well, they’re now cooking up logos just to post up for sale on Brandsack. They cook up these logos faster than you can say SPEC, the quality control is still horrendous.

Now about the quality control, they have a system in which they approve logos, most of us believe it’s one of 3 things. They have either hired a monkey to randomly pick logos to accept, coin tossing or dart throwing. To make matters worse they pretty much give everyone the impression that if you buy a featured spot, your logos, crap or otherwise, will be accepted. Yeah, something wrong there.

So overall, Brandstack is another startup run by completely clueless individuals hoping to rip their designers blind out of their hard earned money for a quick paycheck.

Toni Zova
Personal Site: www.tonizova.com
Twitter: @tonfue

Is Spec Work Evil? An Exclusive Interview with crowdSPRING

With all that’s going on in the design industry these days, whether it be individuals undervaluing their own work or effecting other freelancers and how potential clients approach them, or designers caught stealing other peoples work and passing it off as their own, to showcase or sell, it’s no surprise that freelancers are building up walls, barricading themselves and their clients from anything that may effect their high prices or even reputation.

So when a company like CrowdSPRING comes along and announces to the world that it’ll be holding projects on its site where designers from all over are welcome to compete for the $$$$, it’s not surprising that many of these barricaded freelancers come out of hiding with lit torches and pitch forks.

You see, these freelancers, few in number mind you, have developed a habit, a pretty nasty, unprofessional, ineffective and very unproductive habit, of stomping their feet. That’s about all they do, stomp their feet like spoiled little brats and complain, complain about everything and anything, from the world being round to CrowdSPRING awarding over $2,000,000 in project prize money to thousands of designers all over the world.

That’s right folks, CrowdSPRING has held over 4,800 projects, which have all been completed and awarded the winning designers of all these projects a total of over $2MILLION, yet some freelancers, a couple dozen we could name and point you in the direction of, feel it’s their god given duty to bash CrowdSPRING, to complain and try with all their might to stop this site from helping thousands of designers and thousands of clients.

You might be wondering, why are these freelancers complaining though? Why are they against CrowdSPRING in general? What do they have to gain from bashing this company and why do they claim it’s so evil? Well, they don’t really have an argument, and trying to discuss the issue at hand with any of them always results in name calling, irrational arguments and outrageous accusations.

Some of their most frequent complaints/arguments sound like this: – Designers using CrowdSPRING steal other designers work and use them in contests, be it plain rips or the concepts.

- Many of the Designers on CrowdSPRING work for no money, only one ends up getting awarded the project money.

- CrowdSPRING encourages spec work

- CrowdSPRING does not ban offending designers, they give them three chances, so if they steal the first time it’s ok, second time, it’s still ok, third time and then they get banned.

- Clients on CrowdSPRING are allowed tons of revisions, they should not be allowed these outrageous revisions for the projects budget that is awarded.

To put this all to rest, or at least try to bring clarification on some of these points, I’ve asked my good friend Ross Kimbarovsky; co-founder of crowdSPRING, to answer a few questions and better explain a few points that he has not addressed publicly before.

So Ross, before we start with the serious stuff, tell everyone a little about yourself, what you did before launching CrowdSPRING and what you do now as its proud co-founder?

For thirteen years prior to crowdSPRING, I practiced law (focusing on intellectual property). I represented entrepreneurs, small and midsize businesses, and some of the world’s most successful companies (If you’re wondering – yes, I sometimes worked on spec as an attorney.). I ended up focusing on the Internet by a sheer fluke. When I started in 1995, my law firm offered to pay the $19.95 monthly fee for my dial-up Internet account if I’d put together a website for them. I was a poor student and this seemed like a no-brainer – free Internet! I wasn’t very bright. Over one thousand pages later (and countless hours hand-coding everything in Windows Notepad), my firm had a website and I had a free Internet account. But that experience helped me to learn HTML, and led me to focus on the Internet and online law (I still code using a text editor – now TextEdit – although I rarely code these days).

Start-ups are fun, but are also very demanding. There’s far more work to be done than people to do it, and capacity is always an issue. We’re fortunate to have an awesome team, and I spend a good deal of my time supporting them. On most days, I’m essentially a freelancer. On a typical day, I’m setting/discussing strategy with my business partner (and co-founder), Mike Samson, working with our dev team, discussing new features and ideas with the team, focusing on web analytics and site optimization testing, keeping our production site running smoothly, communicating with our community of nearly 40,000 people, writing, playing with Lucy (a beautiful six month old chocolate lab who spends workdays with us at the office), sharing interesting resources (I maintain my own account on twitter – @rosskimbarovsky and also our company account – @crowdSPRING), and trying to help anywhere I can (other than human resources and accounting – I am fortunate that Mike handles, among other things, those important tasks). I also share kitchen/garbage duties with the rest of the team and importantly, after every lunch (we typically eat together), I clean the lunch table.

We hear so much about Designers stealing work and posting it all as project entries, some just end up ripping concepts and to be honest, even I have spotted several obvious plagiarized pieces. Now, this happens all over the industry, be it on other similar sites, on blogs, forums, showcase galleries or, most recently, these brand sale sites, tell us Ross, what is CrowdSPRING doing to fight these unethical designers?

This is a serious problem offline and online, it happens everywhere, including at the highest levels and involves some of the world’s most famous companies. Such behavior is unlawful and wrong.

crowdSPRING protects intellectual property in five important ways – policies, code of conduct, education, process, and technology.

Policies: Our User Agreement prohibits people from selling, reproducing, modifying, displaying, preparing derivative works from, reposting, or using the content found on our site – without the express written permission from the owner of the work. Our Copyright Policy makes it easy for copyright owners and others to report alleged violations of intellectual property rights. We recognize that some people don’t want to read legal mumbo-jumbo, and so we do much more, as you’ll see below.

Code of Conduct: We modeled our code of conduct on the AIGA’s code of conduct – to make very clear that our community doesn’t tolerate theft. Before we implemented our code of conduct, we spent weeks discussing and debating it with our community (in our forums). We require every designer to clearly and fully disclose their IP rights to every single design they upload to crowdSPRING. And we make them pinky swear that they’ll abide by the code of conduct.

Education: crowdSPRING is committed to helping designers learn – about design and about intellectual property. We rely on education to help us protect intellectual property. Among other things, our community has written outstanding guides for other designers, we’ve published interviews with successful designers from our community focusing on best practices, and we’ve shared helpful resources, such as the free e-book we made available to everyone last week: Contracts For Designers Who Hate Contracts . [Incidentally - I haven't shared this publicly yet, but I'm currently working on a version for web developers, which I plan to release in August].

Process: We’ve designed our site so that it’s easy for anyone to “report a violation” when viewing any detailed image on our site, and we invite our entire community, over 32,000 designers and nearly 40,000 users total, to help us. After a project is over and the winner is selected, we screen the other designs to remove most of the detail and color. We also have an internal process for responding to alleged violations of IP theft. We thoroughly investigate every violation – we give the accused a chance to present their case and/or to withdraw their design. We keep all involved parties informed about the progress of our investigation. If necessary, a three person panel at crowdSPRING votes.

Technology: We’ve built numerous internal tools that allow us to monitor various areas of our site to find “red flags” that merit a further investigation. For obvious reasons, we don’t disclose what those tools do or how they work.

As most people know, rules and policies must be enforced to be effective. Although we haven’t established a rigid system (we look at each case on its own merits), we generally remove people from crowdSPRING permanently after their third violation (not all violations are violations of IP – violations could also be verbal abuse of others, etc.).

Why don’t you automatically BAN offending, unethical designers?

We sometimes do. As you know from your own experience in building communities, a thriving and growing community is a complex “ecosystem”. Rigid rules that help in one area can undermine another, and so we look for a good balance. We’ve removed people after two violations, and sometimes, after a single violation. We also have suspended users for varying periods of time (ranging in time from days to months).

If you listen to some critics, the appropriate punishment would be either decapitation or petrification (or both). But in reality, an automatic ban – as with most “automatic” responses, can be unfair and unreasonable. We’ll leave decapitation to Henry VIII, and while we wouldn’t mind trying petrification as a form of punishment, we’re not particularly skilled and more importantly, deathly afraid of Slytherin’s Basilisk ourselves.

Most reasonable people would agree that there is a difference when a designer outright steals the design of another, and when one unintentionally comes up with a design that’s very similar to another design. This happens, both online and offline. One of my favorite examples is illustrated in a blog post written by designer David Airey – comparing the similarities among several corporate logos.

Both situations could technically be violations of copyright, but it wouldn’t be reasonable or proper to treat them the same. Still, while we don’t like to permanently remove people from our community – we absolutely will take strong and swift action when we see outright theft. We don’t tolerate theft of intellectual property.

How do you plan to improve the current system that’s in place?

We constantly look for ways to improve everything we do. For example, we’re working on a code of conduct for buyers, new educational materials, and additional tools that will help us to protect intellectual property and to enforce our policies. Most importantly, we continue to talk with our community – in our forums and on our blog – about ways that we can do better.

Remember that we’re a very young company, and still have much to learn. And while we’re heard some harsh criticism from some people, we’ve seen the criticism as an opportunity to improve, rather than a challenge to argue. And while some people have watched me vigorously and publicly debate the issue of speculative work with others on Twitter, I’ve invested far more time talking privately with designers and others, via Twitter, email, Skype, in-person, phone, etc. in an effort to better understand their criticisms and to find ways that crowdSPRING could improve. I owe a great deal to these people – some are the harshest and most vocal critics of our business model – for taking the time to educate me.

Spec work; the dreaded word ‘Spec’ has been haunting CrowdSPRING from day one with people accusing you of encouraging it, what’s the deal?

Saying that we encourage speculative work is like saying that companies that build cars encourage car accidents or that food companies encourage obesity. It’s true that our business model is based on speculative work. And we readily admit that speculative work can be risky (most online marketplaces completely ignore those risks). The risks are real, and it is both foolish and irresponsible to ignore them. Back in 2006, we spent a great deal of time thinking about WHY speculative work was risky (among other reasons: buyers could simply walk away, no legal contracts, theft of work, lack of communication, etc.). We talked to hundreds of designers around the world to better understand the risks, what we could do to decrease those risks, and what alternatives were available to those designers and others like them around the world.

We spent one year developing not just our software, but also our policies and procedures, so that we could effectively respond to the risks that speculative work created for both buyers and designers. We introduced innovative features and practices when we launched in May 2008 (even today, these features are unmatched on any other marketplace). To name just a few: we require escrow in every single project, we have no abandoned projects – if a buyer walks away we award the project and pay the designer, we offer free customized legal agreements protecting the purchase of intellectual property (we don’t just give you forms), we’ve created a system of non-disclosure agreements to attract more sophisticated buyers offering much higher awards, and we’ve built full project management tools to help the parties complete their project on our site.

But some in the design community are unhappy with speculative work, regardless of HOW it’s implemented. That’s both OK and fair. While we welcome all, we recognize that crowdSPRING isn’t for everyone. The design industry around the world is huge and we believe that we’re expanding the market for design services – by allowing many new buyers who have limited budgets to get work done by very talented designers who otherwise have difficulty competing in the traditional model. We understand that designers who have paying clients and plenty of work have few reasons to speculate. On the other hand, designers who are looking to improve their skills, find new clients, and learn new techniques, can benefit greatly when they join our community.

Are the thousands of designers on CrowdSPRING unknowingly participating in projects churning out design after design only to not get selected? I mean, it’s my understanding that if a designer is aware of his chances, then he knows the risks he takes of not getting paid for his/her work, correct? Which is why I personally don’t understand why some freelancers protest that CrowdSPRING creative’s don’t get paid, it makes no sense to me, what business is it of theirs if over 30,000 creative’s choose to take part in these projects…Ross, please clarify the above and maybe shed some light on what these people are whining about!

We believe in free will and free markets, and you’re absolutely right that designers who work on crowdSPRING weigh the risks and benefits – as they should. Speculative work is one of many options available to designers (and to photographers, writers, artists, filmmakers, architects, and many other professionals). For some, it’s not a good option. For others, it’s the best way to find new clients. It’s a personal choice for each designer – much like the choice you made to invest time and money in building several outstanding online communities.

We present the risks and the benefits as transparently as we can – and invite designers to choose whether to participate. Our community has grown from zero to over 32,000 designers in just over one year – which perhaps more than anything else, speaks volumes about our business model. And while there are many who don’t receive financial rewards in our marketplace, there are thousands who do. In the past year, we’ve paid approximately $2 million dollars to thousands of designers around the world (we pay 100% of awards posted by buyers and charge buyers a 15% fee in addition to their award amount). About 50% of the projects on crowdSPRING result in follow-on work outside of crowdSPRING.

The revisions, ok…freelancers that do complain about CrowdSPRING have on numerous occasions protested with lit hair wigs that they don’t agree with how you allow clients an unlimited # of revisions on project designs, on submitted work and such, mind putting out the flame and their minds at rest by explaining/clarifying this for us?

This is an excellent question and one I don’t recall ever answering before. Back in 2006, when we interviewed several hundred designers, we learned that many (but certainly not all) designers will work with a client until a client is happy with the design. This surprised us because we initially thought we would limit the number of revisions. When we launched, we decided to let each designer choose how many revisions to provide to a client during a project. After all, that’s precisely what happens in the offline world – some designers will offer unlimited revisions while others will offer a specific number of revisions. This way, people can continue to work in the manner that they prefer. This does mean that some designers will work much harder in a project than other designers, submitting more concepts and revisions. But more concepts and revisions doesn’t necessarily translate to more success. Some of our most successful designers submit one or two revisions.

We’ve continued to evaluate and discuss the issue of revisions with our community. Some have suggested we set limits on the number of concepts during an open project. Others have suggested that we don’t allow revisions at all while the project is open, or that we allow only a limited number of revisions. We’ll continue to keep an open mind and will absolutely make a change in the future if it’s appropriate.

Here are some of my thoughts, Ross, tell me what you think: Why not have a section with a pool of pro designers and the client can look at their ports & choose 5-10 people to work on it, based on say… each designers set base fee (say $100) and the client picks as many designers as they want but have to pay each designer their base fee. Some would have a base fee of $50, the professionals this system may attract will have a base fee of $300, the design chosen is awarded some extra money and everyone’s happy, not to mention the client gets a top notch design.

This is a very interesting idea and one that we’ve been thinking about trying. In fact, we designed our software to easily allow this – we just haven’t yet found the right time to try. We know that there is much room to improve everything we do, including improving the overall financial benefit to each designer who participates on crowdSPRING. And it’s clear that allowing a smaller group of designers to work on a project where each receives some compensation, would accomplish part of that goal. We’ve been talking with our community about doing something like this in the near future, and we’ve informally and quietly run several projects testing elements of this approach.

How about having pre-approved designers in a separate section, one where once they meet certain criteria they’re labeled as professionals.

I certainly see many of the benefits to pre-approving designers. But if we were to do this, we would need to re-define one of our core values as a business – fair access for all. We think that fair access is important, and we believe that the benefits can be achieved by other means.

Calling someone a “professional” doesn’t automatically mean they’re a good designer, and we’ve always had difficulty with the types of criteria that are traditionally used to define someone as a professional – education, experience, full time work as a designer, etc. While those things are not unimportant, we believe that good design is good design, and bad design is bad design. Both non-professionals and professionals create plenty of good and bad design. The label itself is often irrelevant, and it continues to amaze me how many outstanding designers are self-taught.

Having said that, we recognize that some clients might prefer to make preliminary decisions (such as about who will participate in their project) based on traditional criteria. And so we have two types of projects – Standard and Pro. One of the big differences between them (there are many) is that in Pro projects (which have much higher minimums), clients must approve each designer before the designer is allowed to participate in the project. Most clients will look at portfolios in deciding whether to allow someone to participate. By building the tools and procedures that give clients this control, we’ve empowered clients to do precisely what you’ve suggested if that’s how they want to proceed (and some do) – work with a smaller group of designers who meet the client’s defined criteria.

With that, I really don’t have much more to add, if the few designers out there I hoped to educate with this can still find something to protest about in terms of how CrowdSPRING is run, then they’re no longer worth my time or any one else’s for that matter. It’s clear, those that still scream Spec Work every time CrowdSPRING is mentioned, or those that still think the thousands of designers using CrowdSPRING are better off tweeting anti this and anti that like them, are nothing more than a dozen or so wannabe designers with nothing but time to waste, and probably no bills to pay.

As always, I have stuck by designers, and I’m going to stick by a company like CrowdSPRING that gives 100% of the awarded money to thousands of it’s designers, unlike the cesspool BrandStack.com for example that rips their designers out of 15% of their hard earned money on every single logo sale, however… that’s another blog post all together.

I hope you guys have been enlightened, because really, it’s not rocket science. CrowdSPRING is obviously trying to do right by its members and by the design industry in general, they’re huge, not even 2years old and perfecting the service just takes time, not that I know of a bullet proof service online anyway. So for those that have not yet used CrowdSPRING, go check it out, and to the sinkers (you know who you are) find another tree to bark up. There, signed, sealed and delivered

Toni Zova
Personal Site: www.tonizova.com
Twitter: @tonfue