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Chatting with website visitors

I always wanted to interact with visitors, to exchange knowledge, make new friends with similar interests and get feedback about my works and products. For long time I did not know who visit my website and what they think about my projects, because I could not interact with visitors unless they were emailing me. I was not aware that knew that this is possible to chat directly with visitors, until January 2012 when I discovered SnapEngage. Since May 2012 I moved to Zopim Chat and made first sale.

How to NOT address to a business partner

During 2 days I got 4 chats from SAME IP located in Australia, first time gave me a BAD impression of a child making PRANKS claiming that is a diplomat and his parents are living North Korea. Next day said that is from a construction company and want to do business with me, and yesterday person was “a colleague”. Would you take this in serious?

Kids, please DON’T disturb me with dumb questions!

Most visitors of this website are ADULTS, some of them businessmen, respectful people that knows to start a chat with me ONLY IF you want to buy something, pay a service, or need a professional consultation.

But a small number of visitors are kids, especially the Housing around the World section seems to be popular among American school children looking for information about other countries for their school paper. This small number of kids cause a huge nuisance.

What this guy wants from me?

Every day, I am contacted by few people from Singapore for info about HDB and chit-chat, I am also contacted by people all around the world for architecture / CAD design services. I differentiate customers by chit-chatters by the way they address me and by what pages they click. Look how THIS guy is addressing me!! Sometimes I mistreat chit-chatters as potential customers, but could be this a potential customer, mistreat as chit-chatter and lost?

How to cite information from my website

I get often questions like “who wrote this?”, “who is the author?”, “when did you published website?” or “how to cite this website?” probably from students who use my articles for their school paper. Author This is one-man website, some people don’t realize that Teoalida is not just a random website name but also a PERSON name. So you can cite “source: (name of cited page) + Teoalida’s Website“, or just Teoalida. Publication date When someone asked me when I published website, in early years I was answering 2009 without knowing scope of question: they were citing information, which in most cases is newer than the initial date of page publication. It would be more logical to indicate today date, last update date, or date of the particular information you are citing, instead of date when website or page was first published. I created my first website in April 2009: teoalida.webs.com (free hosting) and expanded it to 50 pages by 2012. I registered domain name Teoalida.com in 2011 and in August 2012 I recreated website using WordPress platform on paid hosting on Teoalida.com domain. By today, the website grew to few hundreds pages. Artwork from Childhood contains drawings made by… Read More »How to cite information from my website

Bad experience with a web developer customer

I share the terrible experience had with a customer, a Romanian web developer with poor communication skills I am the author of a project never done in Romania, similar with HDB Database previously made for Singapore. Singapore government does provide data on several websites and I only needed to combine them into a single database. Romanian government does not have a consolidated database, but only partial lists of buildings expertised for seismic retrofit, allowing scams on resale market (sellers claim that their building is newer than it actually is). So I decided to research OpenStreetMap and Google Streetview to create myself a database, containing street address, GPS coordinates, number of floors and apartments, year built, floor plans, etc. Like car models facelifted and replaced every few years, the communist government of Romania also launched new apartment building models every few years, once I know year of a building I can assume that all identical buildings are from an interval of +/- 5 years. Not precise, but better than nothing. I started this project in 2018 for Ploiesti city, and since 2019 I am expanding to other cities. Bucharest took me about 500 hours during 2020. Sadly, I haven’t done any… Read More »Bad experience with a web developer customer