professional
sites

Nice words. Give me a professional site. If we’d gotten a Dollar for every time someone asked us to make a professional site we could all have bought a big villa in Nice. What do we mean by a professional site? Hopefully the same as you.

“i wanna have a professional site”

A professional site is a site with valuable content, a clear structure, nicely designed, tailored to your community, and SEO optimized. So not a one-pager you want to quickly get away from after 2 seconds of watching. Neither would we prefer an E-commerce site with millions of products.

The kind of sites we prefer to create are sites that meet the needs of communities. Sites with depth or sites with products that really benefit someone. We can do the rest, but we’d rather not. We’ve done that all too often and that’s why it gets boring for us.

We also love sites that are very innovative or have an innovative message or product. Change and innovation are what make us happy. So are beautiful designs.

what does it cost to have
a “professional” site made?

A site costs as much as a car. One of our partners drove for years in a second-hand Suzuki jeep worth 250 Euro and a few years earlier the latest extended and tuned BMW 7 series wasn’t good enough for him. Sites cost the price it costs to make them do what you want them to do. Experience of course also plays a role.

We will never recommend an extended and tuned BMW 7 series as a shopping trolley, nor will we advise you to travel around the world in a Suzuki jeep worth 250,- Euro. Sites have a function and functions cost money. That’s because it takes time to create certain features.

The kind of site we make starts at 10.000 Euro and that amount can go up to hundreds of thousands of Euro.

how long does it take to make
a “professional” site?

It doesn’t take more than a few weeks to build a professional site. But that depends on many factors. Usually, you yourself are the biggest disturbing factor. Sorry :).

Not knowing what you want or thinking you know exactly what you want can take a lot of time. Fortunately, we usually don’t make what you want, but what you need. We listen to your input, but understand our profession and do what is needed. Otherwise, you should have become a site developer yourself.

If your (communication) strategy is clear and you know which community you want to engage with, our work becomes easier. If not, we would like to look at that first to get this clear. We also want to make sure your site is as SEO friendly as possible. If that is not a priority for you we might not be the right partner for you.

why does mindd only build fully seo optimized sites?

If a site is not fully SEO optimized then you miss all or a lot of organic traffic from the search engines. In that case, you can do two things. You generate traffic from other expensive channels or you are satisfied that no one is visiting your site.

If you choose other paid traffic that’s paying for something you can get for free. You can do that as something extra, but otherwise, it’s a waste of investment. We don’t like to work on that.

If you don’t want traffic to your site it’s the same to ask us to make something beautiful and then put it on your dining room table at home. We don’t do it for that either. We are proud of what we make. We always are. That can and should be seen.

Read more about
SEO
friendliness

READ

Learn more why
SEO
is needed

READ

F*ck
SEO
Do the job for me

OK

the advantages of programming ourselves
and existing tools

Existing tools have the advantage that you can use them immediately. The disadvantage is that they seldom do exactly what you have in mind. In addition, it can get in the way of your SEO optimization. Search engines also look at the speed of your page and standard tools can, among other things, reduce the loading speed of your page.


apps

It’s been fashionable for a while to have your own App. The bakery had an App and so did the hairdresser. Even the local winemaker had an App. By now we know better and realize that an App should be useful. Apps that you only need once or twice a year are quickly deleted and Apps that don’t have any added value is not even installed.

Of course, we also build Apps. For IOS or Android and if you really need it even for Windows Mobile. But Apps must have added value. Not only for you as a brand, but also for the user.


online video call
integration

Video calling is booming. Being able to see each other remotely while communicating with each other is “the next best thing” after meeting each other life. Thanks to video calling we avoid a lot of miscommunication and sometimes one look says more than a thousand words.

Thanks to our platform TheONE we have become specialists in video calling. Both via Apps and web browsers. Through the years we have gained a lot of technical knowledge, but also a lot of knowledge about different fields of use.

the advantage of video calling for business use

Video calling makes remote communication easier and saves a lot of travel time. But there are more advantages.

1. video calls for the customer service department

The average customer service department gets a lot of complaints. Unfortunately, not every customer remains polite and respectful during the call. This is not only annoying for the customer and the customer service employee, but it also costs extra time. Angry customers are a nuisance to help.

Thanks to video calls instead of chat, mail, or traditional calls, this can largely be prevented. Because the customer sees who he is talking to thanks to video calls, the chance that he will raise his voice or be disrespectful is much smaller. Most people have much more trouble misbehaving when someone is looking at them.

2. getting paid through video calls

A lot of short, small questions take a lot of time. And if the customer asks the question by e-mail or phone, they usually assume that you don’t send an invoice for this. Often it is not worth the effort because creating and sending the invoice costs more than it yields.

Through video call integration you can make the customer pay for small questions. Via Call- TheONE, for example, you can call any expert in a particular field. The first minute is free, but after that, you automatically pay a fixed price per minute.

3. more efficiency thanks to video calling

If you have a lot of appointments with clients every day, you may be on the road a lot. The travel time from one customer to another is usually unpaid. Thanks to video calls, you can avoid that travel time and schedule more appointments in one day.

If you still need to be physically present at a location, you can make good use of your travel time thanks to video calls. Thanks to the screen share function, you can view or present presentations and because you can see each other, communication is smoother.


platforms for
communities

Platforms have forced many industries to change. They respond to the needs of communities and are capable of undermining complete business models. What is a platform and why can they be so powerful?

Platforms build a bridge between suppliers and a community without the intervention of a company. Uber, AirBNB, Alibaba and Amazon are platforms that have overthrown entire business chains.

In contrast to more traditional business models, platforms do not purchase anything, have no stock, and operate on a transaction commission basis. Our own platform TheONE works the same way. We bring supply and demand together and only charge a commission on financial transactions.

Another difference between the more traditional companies is that a platform always consists of multiple entry points. Most platforms include at least one site and one app, but physical shops and social media shops are also possible.

Criteria of a platform:

  • Building a bridge between suppliers and a communion
  • No purchasing
  • No stock
  • Commission on transactions
  • Multiple entry points

why are platforms more successful than e-commerce sites?

Informative and e-commerce sites may as well attract a community as platforms, but the difference is that platforms are scalable and self-regulating. The content of a platform is always partly or fully user generated. So not the company itself, but the providers maintain the offer and the prices. The only thing a platform does is facilitate the connection between supply and demand. This saves a lot of time, effort, and therefore costs. They also shift the stock risk and service to the supplier. Sometimes the suppliers are even responsible for the logistics. In addition, platforms can fully focus on what they are good at. Namely the further development and innovation of their platform.

can traditional companies transform into a platform?

Uber, Alibaba, Airbnb and Amazon have been set up to be a platform right from the start. Although Amazon was initially an e-commerce site, its founder Bozos already had the idea of becoming a platform at the end of the 1990s. Still, it is not impossible to transform as a traditional company into a platform.

In 2015 the retail chain Kijkshop was almost bankrupt due to the ever-decreasing margins. Kijkshop was one of the oldest retailers in the Netherlands and sold various household products online and in 90 shops. Because more than a million people walked into the store every month, Mindd was asked to come up with a survival plan. The owners were willing to invest one last time, but then something revolutionary had to happen.

The problem was that Kijkshop supplied all its stores itself and therefore had a huge capital need to purchase the goods. In addition, Kijkshop itself was responsible for the logistics, service handling, and depreciation of old – unsold – stock.

In three months’ time, we developed a Platform (Site and App) on which all suppliers could offer their own products. The price and stock policy was their responsibility and they could do the logistics themselves or they could source from Kijkshop for a fee. In addition, the shop space in the shops was rented out and the suppliers themselves could decide which products would be displayed. Finally, we transferred the role of the shop assistant to the Kijkshop community.

the customer becomes a sales advisor

With 1 million customers every month, you can speak of a significant community. That’s why we integrated video calls into the site and the App. Consumers within the community could voluntarily sign up to give other customers advice about a future purchase via live video calls. If the advice subsequently led to a purchase, this advice was rewarded with a commission.