Thanks for the feedback. Wildalaska, at the end of the six-month trial period, they can choose to keep the shop's free listing, or pay $10 a month which includes the following: a full page on the site where the shop owner can enter as much information as he wants, including photos; unlimited classifed ads; being able to be found by map, city, or by the brands the shops carries.
In a couple of months, I'll be expanding the site so that those who have hard to find models can be found by just clicking "find it" on the product page. For example, let's say you've got an Ed Brown Kobra Carry on your shelves. Visitors who check out the Ed Brown Kobra Carry page will be able to click on the "Find It" button to locate shops who have that hard-to-find model available immediately, instead of waiting for their local shop to bring it in.
Highland Ranger, I've already done the "noindex/nofollow" meta tags, as well as the "disregard" lines in the robots.txt file. I won't let the search engines index the site until there's sufficient content to keep visitors happy. I figure that will probably be about 2 to 2 1/2 months out. As far as a certificate from the site is concerned, I'd certainly entertain the idea of shop owners including that on their webpage. But, from experience with doing just that for shops in my area, the owners didn't like giving away more free stuff just to gauge the effectiveness of their presence on the site. Given that I'll only be charging them $10 a month for all the benefits, I wonder if having coupons, etc would go beyond what the shops are willing to commit to have a web presence. Again, it's their call. Any other ideas are very much welcome. And, yes, the front page is too wordy. I have to figure a way to get all the selling points distilled into a couple of paragraphs.
CB900F, pawn shops are on my list to call as well.
P95Carry, the hard-to-read links at the bottom are just a temporary thing. All they do is duplicate the links shown on the left-side menu. I just have them there to remind myself which links have to be included in what will be the site map that the search engines like to crawl.
It wouldn't be impossible to give each shop an idea of how many visitors they're getting, but I question whether that would translate into actual sales that they could quantify. The example I always point to is Yellow Pages ads. How many new customers walk into a shop saying, "wow, I just saw your Yellow Pages ad and decided to shop here!" Barring the unusual kook, probably not many. But, given that a business-card size Yellow Pages ads runs about $300-$400 a month around here, I just have to believe that having a presence on a high-traffic site for so little cash is something that many shop owners will find attractive. Anecdotally, that's the feedback I've been getting.
I'll certainly give them traffic stats and the ability to look at the web stats. Keep in mind that, after the trial period is over, their cost to subscribe is $10 a month. If they don't want to pay that $10, they still get the shop name, city and phone number listed for free. If they want to pay, then they get the full web page and all the other stuff I described above.
Greg, the software required to locate by zip code is not only expensive, but also less than reliable. I'm hoping that people are sharp enough to be able to find themselves--or where they're going--on a map.
KaceCoyote, the Glock is just there for now on most of the pages. That line drawing icon will rotate from page to page, depending upon manufacturer.
I got to thinking about this site idea back in November, and started calling shops around the country for feedback. By December I decided that the idea had real potential. By January I decided that I'd commit this whole year--and money to keep food on the table--to making it work.
So, please, let the critiques keep coming. And I hope the moderators think that this thread is gun-related enough to keep it open.
