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Let me see your site and, how much should I charge

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Let me see your site and, how much should I charge
I am interested to see what other people are doing with Gossamer Mail, especially those who have done a lot of custom work on the templates. Maybe people could post URLs to their sites here? I'd love to take a look.

Is anyone charging for their Gossamer Mail service? I'm trying to work out how much I could get away with if charging for the service. I'd thought $10 a year was reasonable, maybe $20? Does anyone remember how much mail.com were charging for their domains a year or so ago? They're all free now, but the trade off is, in the wake of the dot com disaster, that you drive users away with multiple popups and banners. I noted 7 or 8 banners on one page alone on one free service.

Regards

Jason



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Re: Let me see your site and, how much should I charge In reply to
This is a hard issue. I'm just getting back up to speed on redesign in the wake of the .com shake out, and the massive amounts of code changes, etc... etc.

The most effective system is _NOT_ a pop up. I close them automatically, and don't even know what's in most of them. I could have been a sweepstakes winner, but I doubt it. Pop ups are the quickest way to kill off your traffic. Quite possibly the most hated "feature" of the net, or at least tied for most hated with the exit-blocks.

The most effective (from the spread) is a main top banner, integrated into a header, with 120x60-240 banners going down the right side (most people look right) and/or short text "teasers" or links going down the left side (people start to read on the left - English).

Put your content in the main window. This takes off about 150 pixels for a right banner, and 300 pixels for a left/right banner, leaving a "safe" 500 pixel content window.

Use the "confirmation" and "success" pages effectively, to sell, lead people to a paid content area, or into an advertiser.

Check out the main free mail systems, yahoo, netscape, etc. Save copies of the designs, over time, and refer back to them. It's not "one" idea that works, but keeping a good pool of ideas, and taking the parts that work best on your site.

I'm an old newspaper layout person -- from the glue wax to line tape. We used to spend a lot of timea arguing about layout, and CWS (creative white space). In a newspaper, CWS can be effective on an 11x17 or 17x22 page, but on-line, the most information you can cram into a visually organized area is what counts.

How much depends on your overall layout, your graphic themes, color schemes, etc. Every site/layout will allow for a different amount of "density".

You might have to adjust your graphics and colors to accomodate your desired content density, rather than try to squeeze it in to the existing ones.

This will be one of the biggest issues for the future, now that the "hype" and "hyperness" have started to settle down, and the market matures. Old rules still apply -- just have to be modified to on-line display, with limited pixel sizes, and smaller window of view.

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