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Website makers, talkers, and shakers
We are very excited to announce our new partnership with Orange Soda, the local internet marketing provider. Among other things, Orange Soda provides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to small businesses at prices our customers are used to.
After creating a website, our customers first question is usually, "Why am I not showing up on Google?". Unfortunately the answer to this is not an easy formula we can apply to everyone. Orange Soda does the dirty work by putting their expertise to work on your website.
Orange Soda will among other things...
- Submit you to search engines
- Submit you to business directories
- Perform keyword optimization
This is a perfect match for our existing SEO tools.
In addition, very soon we will be releasing extended SEO tools for more finely grained control of keywords and other information. This will allow you to add keywords, descriptions and titles to individual pages.
And this is just the beginning folks, stay tuned for more exciting developments.
Two years ago Doodlekit Online Free Website Builder was nothing more than a vague idea in the back of our minds. Ben and I had just started our own web development company (Doodlebit Web Solutions) a few months earlier, and we were selling small custom websites on the side when we had the time.
As more and more of our clients started requesting the same tools, we started to develop a custom, reusable framework. We immediately saw an opportunity – why not just sell this framework to the masses? The currently accepted philosophy at the time (a.k.a. Business 2.0) stated that in order to be a successful internet startup you had to have several millions of dollars in venture capitalist funds, resources, and business connections. The assumption back then was that software and web companies should break even after $20 million in investment. Not to mention you would need to move out to Silicon Valley (*see How To Build A Bulletproof Startup).
Then one day we came across a blog post from a small internet startup company called 37Signals that changed everything. The blog post, How To Shoot A Bullet Through Your Startup, railed against Business 2.0. It defied Corporate America’s view on how to run a web company. It denounced the waste, bureaucracy, and mindset of these entities that limited others from pursuing their dreams.
We loved it.
37Signals explained that you could start your own Web 2.0 company with hardly anything down and just one or two people. They had done all this themselves and had great success. Ben and I raced out to their website and purchased their online book, Getting Real, that explained in more detail how to achieve this type of success. We sat down and read the whole thing in one night.
 | Heath: "It's gonna take a few years to get Doodlekit up and running. We got 2 clients, $600, a refurbished PC, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses." Ben: "Hit it." |
The next day we started Doodlekit. We scrounged up $300 each, grabbed an old refurbished PC from Ben’s basement, slapped in some extra memory from my old computer, and we were off ‘getting real’!
A year and a half later (just 4 months ago) we had our first major release of Doodlekit. Since that time our membership base has increased to over 15,000 and our revenues have gone up 10 fold. We have zero debt.
Most of our competitors are multi-million dollar startups from the Business 2.0 way of doing things. Many of them still have yet to break even. We compete head-to-head with these companies and hold our own. How? Because Doodlekit is a much better product than what they offer. I find it rather humorous that a small company of two employees can successfully compete against so many multi-million dollar startups. If you put what we offer next to what they offer and let a consumer pick which one they want, they will pick Doodlekit. The only thing Doodlekit lacks right now is the budget that these larger corporations have for marketing. That’s all going to be changing very soon.
We aren’t out to be the next MySpace or YouTube. We aren’t measuring our success based on millions of dollars. We just want to make a decent living doing what we love doing – building websites! Doodlekit and 37Signals has given us both this opportunity, and for that, we are very grateful.
If your interested in helping us get the word out, please feel free to promote Doodlekit via a banner on your website. Ben and I would really appreciate it!
On a side note, I just wanted to let everyone know that 37Signals will soon be coming out with Getting Real (Second Edition). Ben and I will be the first in line to buy a copy!
I have had several request to make the forums that come with Doodlekit look more like regular forums – basically make them a little more ‘compact’ and easier to read. I am looking into redoing the forums for ALL the layouts – so this will affect all our users that use our forums.
I would like to simplify them even more and make them easier to follow. Any suggestions from the community are appreciated and will be considered.
For those of you who already have registered your domain name, setting that up with Doodlekit just got a whole lot easier. All you have to do now is setup your Nameservers to point to our new DNS servers, and you're done. This will automatically setup your website and email DNS.
I recommend that anyone who has already setup your existing domain name using a CNAME take the time to change to this new method.
The detailed instructions are in the forums.
Our network provider has just completed their network upgrade. This upgrade will mean better performance and uptime for all Doodlekit Websites.
Thank you for your patience.