Profile counter / Appointment Calendar

It would be nice to have a feature where we could select to show on how many members have visited our profile and/or at least show it on our side. Oh another thing that would be nice is a appointment calendar for our clients that have joined we us which we would have to accept it though our Notary Control Panel.

I like the idea of how many people have viewed our profiles and another suggestion is to have an “update your profile button.” www.joanbergstromnotarypublic.com

I like the idea of the profile views count.

I have to think about the communication exclusively through our site. When I originally developed this site, that was an option. The reason I opted against it was simply because I didn’t want to be in between people and their clients. I know other sites conduct things this way, and the reason is simple from the site owner’s perspective—it forces people to visit their site to get what they want. I’ve done my best to keep our site to best practice web-standards so far (we have XML/RSS feeds freely available for the forums, searching for and contacting a notary does not require login, etc). Consider a mobile notary on the road: They get an email on their BlackBerry. Instead of being able to read the email, they get something that says “log in to Notary Depot to read a message sent to you”. Now, if that was me, I would be mad :) But again, I will consider it. Instead, we pass everything directly through to our members, and let you handle followup directly. Others feel free to weight in.

On the “update your profile” button, where would this be displayed, and under what context? Currently, if you are logged in, you have a full Notary Control Panel at the top of the page to edit all aspects of your account/profile.

Joe

Well then make it an option instead of a mandate so people with PDAs that do not want to have to visit a web site just to see there client information.

BTW Joe are you able to add a signature on these forums when ever we post? I don’t see it so i am just double checking with to see if i am not blind but it don’t look like there are any forum options though, like that anyways.

You are right, automatic signature is not available. Another feature to add to the list :)

:-) that sounds good, also something else i been thinking about that i think could cause you could to get more hits and more business for us notaries, how about change the way the search box looks to have one box that says search by zip code, city, county and state or a drop down box to select the way you want search rather than just a search box? Like similar to the way gomobilenoatary.com has it but your own unique way a course.

Our search engine does all of that, and then some—many times over. I deliberately do not have select boxes or search types as options.

Your opinion is valid. This again was an intentional decision, so I will give you my opinions that led to it:

If someone types in “Danville, CA”, why should they need to tell us it is a city? If someone types in 94526, why should they need to tell us it is a zip code? We can just be smart about this internally, and eliminate the need for the user to tell us what they are searching for. The search engine should be responsible for searching with the proper criteria. A user should “just search”.

Now on top of that, there is an Advanced Search query language for advanced users, which gives very fine grained control.

In total, this is the trend that Google and Gmail employ for the most part, and I assumed the style had already grown on most people. There is an entire ideology here that is too complex to get into in one discussion, but for illustrative purposes compare Microsoft’s software to Apple’s, or Yahoo’s engine to Google’s. I’ll let you imagine the arguments :)

But, if its not clear, I’m on the “Less is better” side.

I’ll always keep the idea in mind though. It would be excellent to have others weight in on it as well.

Joe

The only reason i suggest that because you know how some of these computer illiterates that do not know jack but that is a good point. I know people that try to tell me Yahoo is better and i debate that go no it is not because if that is the case then how come a lot of things Google does is being copy by Yahoo. I think the only reason some people say that is because of Google’s keep it clean policy but there is iGoogle now or you can just have a plain old Google customized page rather than the old classic page.

Happy that you are always staying with technology and are aware how quickly things are changing.