On logging in, agency and *independent users will now see the wizard showing at the top of their dashboard:

This wizard contains the steps we believe to be most important in setting up your escort site. Once completing each of these your site will look amazing , be ready to accept bookings and hopefully bring in some traffic!

You can complete tasks in any order and as each task is completed, it gets ticked off automatically. This helps you visualize how much work is left to do:

I am still going over every client’s site individually and suggesting improvements they can make. The main difference with this wizard is that you can now signup for a free trial then have your website up and finished within minutes. Don’t believe me? Take the challenge today!

Our focus purely on escort websites has enabled us to make a website manager that anyone can use. Before adding any feature we first ask ourselves whether it will either make the system easier to use or provide huge benefit to our users. Being picky in this way has kept us from over-complicating our sytem and this is something our users rave about.

The wizard is switched on  by default for new users but it can be toggled on/off by all users in their site settings area:

*The independents will see ‘Add a gallery photo’ instead of ‘Add a model profile’ but otherwise they are the same.

This post is for users of the escortdesign.com website manager but if you’ve got access to the html of your site you can do it too. Here’s how the calendar will look:

Step 1: Signup for a google calendar account if you haven’t already got one.

Step 2: Generate your calendar html code, through the account settings – click here for instructions

Step 3: Here’s how to add the html code into your page:

Also make sure you sign out of your google account before testing whether it works on your site. If the calendar doesn’t show up, you may have to change your privacy settings.

Take advantage of Google’s awesome calendar system. It’s hugely powerful and you can customize it to fit your website perfectly.

Need detailed website traffic statistics? I recommend using google for escort site analytics too…

Reviews

Start accepting reviews from your clients to show on your about page or your model’s profile page. Check them before approving them to show up on your site. Your client’s email address will be stored here as well for future reference.

Agencies you can manage your reviews by model as well:

Meta Info & Help

If you have read any of my previous posts about escort site SEO, you’ll know about the importance of having the right meta information for your website. Now you can edit the meta info of any page throughout your site. Our in-line help boxes have been improved to include links to helpful forum posts. We updated the color contrast so they are easier to read too.

Updating Your Rates

Change the order of your rates by dragging and dropping, small update, big time saver!

Model photo previews

The view all model page now has thumbnail photos to make it even easier to manage your model profiles.

Gallery File Names

Yeah we don’t know what we were thinking either, those old file names weren’t much use to anyone! Now when you upload a photo it’ll retain the file name…

I hope you guys appreciate these updates and the others I haven’t mentioned. Our aim is to make a website manager that is both simple to use yet very powerful, from the positive response we’ve got it seems like we’re on the right track! Coming soon is a much needed update to the account settings area and some template designs I’m sure you’ll love!

This has business applications too. When you create 20 product or service options and prices for your clients to choose between, you are increasing the likelihood of that client being paralysed and unable to make a choice. Try dumbing things down and seeing if that affects your response rate!

Custom designs are expensive!

Our custom designs could take weeks to create. They involved a designer, project manager and programmer to complete. Hiring staff that can do these tasks at an exceptional quality was not cheap and in order to make any profit we needed to pass these costs onto our customers. We made sales at the $1200-$2400 price range but knew that these were a significant cost to independents and many new escort agencies.

Even if the price was within reach, we doubted whether our clients were seeing a true return on their investment. Large adult affiliate programs have websites that see millions of visits per month and each visitor has the potential to signup and spend $20+ per month, if they can increase their conversion rate then there is literally tens of thousands of dollars a month to be gained from a stunning design. Escorts on the other hand have sites that generally see significantly less traffic so to make the $2000 profit to pay for a custom design was not so easy to come by.

Restricted client numbers

Although we had plenty of resources available through Blue Design Studios, because each project benefits only one client there is a limit to how many clients you can take on. We were happy satisfying our small client base but we knew the quality of our designs would be of interest to so many more escorts and agency owners. Now, instead of a new design benefiting 1 client it benefits 100s! This means we can take the same approach to detail with our templates as we did with our custom designs.

Content Management System difficulties

Our custom designs looked fantastic but creating an easy-to-use content management system for each was near impossible. This was not a problem with the adult design business because the clients ran their own content management systems. The majority of escort clients had no such expertise. With custom designs you’d basically need a custom CMS to match the custom design if you wanted it to be easy to use. The costs involved with creating the software and providing support for clients was not something we wanted to expose ourselves too.

Read why managing your own escort website isn’t much fun without a CMS.

We learned what was important…

The greatest benefit to offering custom designs to escort clients initially was that we learned what pages were important to an escort business. Today the pages we offer include the disclaimer/warning, home, about, gallery, model profile (agencies), bookings and links pages. We knew these were the most important because they had been constantly asked for by our custom design clients.

…and created the Content Management System around that

Having fixed agency and independent website offerings means that we are able to offer stunning designs that don’t look like templates. An example of this freedom is shown below, we know the exact width that the footer menu will take up so we are able to space it perfectly and add a design feature in the middle. A CMS that allowed for adding 15 pages to the menu wouldn’t be able to create such a look because you would need to leave space “just in case” someone wanted a very long footer menu.

Instead of designing with “just in case” in mind, we take the initiative and design what we know works well – after all, if you are buying a site from us, aren’t you paying for our design expertise?