Weekly Web Tools » Weekly Web Tools

Easily Create an Education Site with Multiple Instructors

Dave Jackson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:34:04 +0000

Today I want to thank Marcus Couch of the Scene Zine Podcast at www.thescenezine.com for sending in this link. It’s kind of a membership site tool, but its really designed for people looking to educate.

The site is www.prfessor.com (that’s not a typo) and for $49 bucks a month you get a hosted, turn-key solution for anyone looking to create courses, and charge money (or not ) for them. You can literally create your University, training center, or certification program in about a half hour.

Set up unlimited courses, for unlimited students and create tests and exams for the course. Set up payments easily with paypal or use your authorize.net account. You can set up multiple “programs” (kind of like different school in colleges).

You can be the dean and the teacher, or recruit professors and give them a whatever percent of the classes they teach. You can create intelligent quizzes in a snap.

You have 1 gig of file storage, and 30 gigs of transfer per month. If you have a bunch of videos, I’m not sure if 1 gig would last. I wonder if using something like the S3 Media player would allow you to copy and paste code so storage wouldn’t be a concern.

So what’s the catch? Well if I had one thing to complain it’s that the default theme of the site is kind of plain. It’s not ugly, but it’s not “wow.” Are you stuck? No. You can upload your logo to help. If you need more help to update the look of the website you are going to put out some cash to have the look customized (to the tune of about $1000). My thought is I will build the site and once I get some students I will pay to have it customized.

It really looks easy as the tools automatically create your course catalog, FAQ page, contact us page, and instructor recruiter page and you can drop in a logo and brand your site in seconds. It’s only $49 bucks a month.

Check it out at prfessor.com

Paypal's Virtual Terminal

Dave Jackson — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:46:25 +0000

Need a cheap domain? Use the Godaddy.com Promotional Code cooler3 to get your domain for $6.95 a year.

In today’s show I talk about a free button creating software, as well as my surprise to Paypal’s Virtual Terminal (I missed the fine print about the $30 charge per month), and I found another great tool for handling emails, autoresponders, and surveys all in one package.

Trellion Button Factory
With Trellian Button Factory you can quickly and easily create stunning buttons, menus, logos and icons for use on your website or multimedia presentations. No previous graphic design experience required. Just use your imagination to create original web graphics that stand out on the Internet.

I was pleased to hear there was a way to take credit card orders over the phone using Paypal. I signed up for the Virtual Terminal, went through all the hoops, and got approved. Then on the final step I see where this is going to cost me $30 a month. They say that adding the option of taking orders over the phone can increase your sales by 80+ percent. I find this surprising in the year 2008 that there are THAT many people afraid to order over the Internet. For more information go to paypal.com

I found out about iContact when I interview Tom Sibella for the Musicians Cooler. iContact is primarily an email list manager, but is also has a SUPER easy to use interface with a POWERFUL feature set (email, autoresponder, surveys, the ability to do multiple filters on a list). Best of all its only $9.95 a month. It is based on how many subscribers you have and how many emails you send (so if you have 500 subscribers you can send 3000 emails). There is a free trial available at icontact.com

More Free Web Tools

Dave Jackson — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 03:45:04 +0000

Adam from www.seydoggy.com (Graphics and Web Design) says this free tool at http://www.kimai.org to track yor time on projects. He plans on having multiple users login to track time on projects.

Ad Peels has been update to have ever corner have a “peel” as well as add scrolling text.

Looking to Track the ROI from www.passiveincomemachine.com/max_cpc.html

Want to have a GROUP Chat on your site for free? Check out www.chatango.com

Got a web tool you think is cool? Leave a comment over in the forums

Track Links From Your Desktop

Dave Jackson — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:59:32 +0000

Jay Jennings has some great software. I recently stumbled up his cloak and tracker Link tracking software. (See Jays Video about where he explains cloacking ).

This software runs on your desktop (so no need to set up a SQL database, and can be used on multiple websites (so need to remember 15 different logins and passwords). It creates reports and diagrams. Also you can specify the folder where the script resides and change it for each website. For example The link for Cloak and Track is http://weeklywebtools.com/likes?cloakandtracker so I used the name of “Likes.” You can change this and make it specific to each website you use it on. Also if you feel comfortable editing a .htaccess file, you can easily remove the “?” in the link (Jay shows you step by step how to do this with videos). Its a great tool for affiliate marketing, links tracking, and rediretion.
I will also be using this for sponsors to show them how many clicks they are receiving from this site to theirs. I can make a login and password and grant them access to links that pertain to their site ONLY.

I’ve only used it a couple of days, but am blown away by how easy it is to use and install (I had it up and running in less than 10 minutes).

If you are looking to track links, and calculate ROI (in terms of sales). You may want to check out Adtackz its a web based solution that will track all links, and show your reports on ROI (as you put some code on your thank you page. It’s $77, $97 if you want it installed and you can use it on 5 domains.

I also go over some of the latest SEO NEWS

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