Flutterby™! : Good Idea, Proor Implementation 2007-11-11 15:43:24.691569+00

Good Idea, Proor Implementation

2007-11-11 15:43:24.691569+00 by ebradway 3 comments

I was hired about nine months ago to write regular blog entries for a website. The site is mainly a portal for advertising - the blog content was to be the draw. I wasn't being paid a huge sum but I thought the concept was good and it a topic I find easy to write about. Well, it took their "site administrator" about three months to get WordPress running. And when they did, I was given a username and password (that I couldn't change) and told to go at it. I had signed a "contract" saying I would write three entries every week for six months. After the first entry, I realized that I couldn't add my own categories, so I stopped tagging my entries. I had an email exchange with the guy who was my contact over that but it never changed.

I was also supposed to respond to comments. To make sure, I setup an RSS feed in my RSS reader so I could quickly reply. Of course, over the six months the only comments were from blog-spammers - clearly automated responses like "Dude, I agree with "TITLE OF THE POST". Check out my site <link TO PORN SITE>." Which I dutifully cleaned out every few weeks.

I just tried to log on and found that my password no longer works. I pulled up the original email to make sure I was entering it correctly and saw that the date of the original email was exactly six months ago. So I guess my term is up.

Oh yeah, it took them two months to finally mail a check to me for the first half of my pay. Since I only managed an average of 1.5 posts a week over the six months, I somehow suspect they won't pay me the pay the other half. It's kind of hard to maintain enthusiasm when the site owners aren't really making any effort to direct traffic. I checked the blogs of the other two people they hired and they have exactly two posts each - the initial bio that we emailed in and one post, I guess, to test that the password worked. So I guess I was the star writer...

There's a blog on that site? If there is, they've done a good job at keeping people from finding it.

I think I ducked over there to check out the one or two of your entries that you linked to, but nothing grabbed me over there.

And in going there now it seems like they expect that all of their traffic will come from adults looking for a school to go back to. Seems like that's 6 weeks worth of traffic per person, from people wanting to go back to school as adults who don't have any better way to narrow down their potential schools.

I see a number of sites like this, where there's a high concept of "let's build a site that's for people wanting to go back to school as adults" that doesn't think through what that means at any deeper level.

Yep. The irony is that if they had asked me, I could have given them some pointers. But alas, they weren't interested in what I actually thought.

If you go through one of those "Free $500 gift certificate" sites, you'll find a plethora of online degree programs from Walden, ITU, Phoenix University, etc. It's really disconcerting. I clicked on several of these site links to see if they were interesting in hiring faculty. I got several phone calls from "admissions counselors" but not much beyond that.

Adults returning to school tend to focus on local programs. And they tend to get into programs that they've heard about from colleagues.