Reducing Risk

The checkthetrades team had our weekly meeting today, and as always, once we got through the agenda we had some discussion about the "big picture".  The discussion led to one of our key objectives: helping consumers reduce risk when selecting businesses to deal with. 
We are all consumers and when we have a project to get done we want it done right, with no hassles and feel like we got value for our money.  The best way ensure this is to do the homework.  Ask questions, investigate qualifications, look for insured businesses, read reviews etc.  We spend a lot of time doing this with our potential members on behalf of the cosumers who use our site.  We visit with them, get to know their business, gather their information and have them sign off that it is accurate and then they sign a Code of Conduct.  Sometimes people look oddly at us  as if to say "you don't really do all that do you?".  Yes we do! We really do!  Out intergrity is important to us and a service like http://www.checkthetrades.com/ has to have intergrity to survive.

View your website (and your business) through the eyes of your visitors

Last week a group of us had a chance to attend an excellent seminar by the Wizard of Ads http://www.wizardofads.com/.  Some of the discussions focussed on websites and how to make them more effective.  The number one point is to always look at your site through the eyes of your visitors.  People are visiting your site for a reason and you want to be able to address that reason in a way that is most effective for the visitor.  You also need to keep in mind that people are still people when they are on the web and they have different personalities and want to access information in different ways.  At http://www.checkthetrades.com/ we also develop websites for our members and are always happy to discuss website effectiveness and optimization and techniques to make your website work well for all your visitors.