We're now on Facebook! I said - WE ARE NOW ON FACEBOOK!

Hello and Happy Holidays everyone!

One of the long-time goals of Remembered.com was to get tightly integrated with Facebook. (If you call 18 months a long time, and in technology 18 months is a lifetime...) We designed the site specifically so it would fit into the 720px Facebook wrapper. Heck, Last week we even redesigned this BLOG so it would fit into the Facebook wrapper. We're simply gluttons for punishment, what can I say?

Our goal was to create a hybrid website. Something that could work as a standalone website AND as a Facebook application. Early on we debated going with the IFrame or rewriting Remembered.com in FBML (Facebook Markup Language). We agonized over learning FBML, especially after we were just getting our hands dirty with Joomla and PHP. Our site probably seems fairly simple from the outside - but Remembered.com has a LOT of moving parts - Registration, Shopping Cart, Invite Module, Photo Gallery, Emails, Comments, etc. that all have to talk to each other - correctly.

Can you imagine having to maintain TWO versions of each? One in PHP and one in FBML? By detecting your FB wrapper it determine's which one to run? Luckily - we didn't go that way. Everything today is served up to you in a single format AND works within the context of the Facebook app. WHEW!

I have give a TON of credit to Adolfo and Ivan for keeping a lot of balls in the air and delivering a superb product to the market. They have given 110%, learned new technology in days instead of weeks, and pushed the envelope with our development partners to make this a great website.

So here we are... Out there and ready to rock. Find us on http://apps.facebook.com/beremembered/

Thanks for all your support and Happy Holidays!

Andy, Ivan, and Adolfo...

Blogs! Blogs! Blogs!

I found this handy article on Ereleases.com about ten great places to post your blog... click here
Before doing so I would definitely get a Feedburner account as it makes the process a lot simpler.

So keep an eye out for us on Bloggapaedia and Technorati real soon!

FW5XGBSJ9TVJ

Doing something special for #WorldAIDSDay

Hiya,

I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving and there's a lot we all have to be thankful for. It's been awhile since we've last posted and there's been a lot of development here at Remembered.com in the last few weeks. But before talking about what we've done, let me tell you a bit about what we are doing for World AIDS Day.

AIDS has killed more than 25 million people, and an estimated 33.2 million people worldwide live with HIV, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. And although it may not be in the limelight like it once was - AIDS is still a very much here and taking lives much too early.

World AIDS Day, observed December 1 each year, is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. It is common to hold memorials to honor persons who have died from HIV/AIDS on this day. For this reason, we are offering Free Memorials for anyone who has been lost to AIDS or HIV complications for the entire month of December. Details here:

You can help spread the word and bring about more AIDS/HIV awareness by posting this on your Facebook status:

#WorldAidsDay - World AIDS day is TODAY! Paste this message to your status - Help us build HIV/AIDS Awareness. http://bit.ly/ihgJa6

Okay - now onto our latest developments for Remembered.com ...

• We've put in place a new firewall to protect against DOS attacks and bad people on the internets.
• We've added a Memorial Wall, which lets invited friends and family post comments and condolences
• We've upgrade our Facebook Connection and are able to take advantage of Facebook's more powerful API features and functions.
• We've added a new activity list, which shows all the activity associated with a memorial.
• We've integrated Remembered.com even more with Facebook, allowing activities to stream over.

Hopefully you like everything we've accomplished so far, and if you have any suggestions be sure to
let us know about them here... http://remembered.com/suggestions

Thanks!

Honor Our Veterans Today!

Today is Veterans Day. We've chosen to Honor our Vets in the best way we know how.
We're giving free memorials for any Veteran who has ever served. Ever. For details click here.

It's been awhile since we've posted so I'll give you all a rundown on what's happening...

We'd gotten great response to our Breast Cancer campaign, with a number of new memorials
created for just that purpose. Our users and traffic were up 100% over September's numbers.
We slowed down a bit at the end of October to retool, and now we're blasting off again.

We've done a number of major upgrades to the site, including a new Firewall for the website,
a new Memorial Search, a Memorial Wall where people can leave comments, and a number
of targeted ad campaigns for breast cancer awareness, and now Veteran's Day.

We hope you like some of the new changes, and there's some more in store for you in the
coming months as well. Stay Tuned...

Hey - Do you think we're just a bunch of boobs?

Did you know that 12.15% of women will have breast cancer in their lifetime? October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and we're doing our best to contribute to awareness by offering free memorials for anyone who has passed due to breast cancer. Did you know that if you catch it early enough - your 93% likely to be still kickin' after 5 years. Another interesting fact is if you're ever diagnosed, taking aspirin is a great way to improve your odds of surviving.

We're hoping that awareness of catching it early will help increase long term survival rates and well, give us less business here at Remembered.com.

We got a lot accomplished since leaving Beta. We did a bunch of tweaks to the website layout. Launched a new Funeral Notice service that we think will take a lot of time and distance out of the bereavement process. Put our first sets of ads onto Facebook (which are doing quite well, as opposed to Google Adwords) and things are rolling along. Traffic to our website is up 88% week over week and the average visitor stays for about 5 minutes and views 5 pages of content. All good numbers for a site that's just starting out.

But as good as news gets, it's never good enough is it? This week was a bit humbling for me. I hired a consultant (I know!) to review our site and give us some ideas to a. make process improvements and b. build traffic. Oh - well here's the punch line - He's a Rabbi. Yep - He knows a bit about life and death business. But those weren't his only qualifications - he's been awarded Entrepreneur of the year and mentioned in dozens of business magazines. What the heck - why not find out if what we're doing is errrrr.... Kosher?

Apparently, we are a bunch of boobs (at least this month) and we have absolutely no idea what we're doing. In 45 minutes our good Rabbi proceeded to give me a L O N G list of things that need to change. Some ideas were great - like having a way for people to donate to charity right from the memorial, or putting testimonials from people on the site. Other ideas - like raising the prices to $39.95 and $19.95 for memorials took a little more convincing. I'd rather keep it affordable for everyone. On a scale from 1-10 I'd give our man a 9. So if you've got a small business and you need a little bit of accelleration give the good Rabbi a shout out.

So be on the lookout for a bunch of changes to the website next week. I leave you with this thought :


Q: Most bees make honey, but there is a certain type of bee that makes milk. What kind of bee makes milk?


A. Boo Bees!

Save your groans, you know you're going to repeat it at work tomorrow.

Leaving Las Betas... Get your memorials FREE for one more week.

Well here we are. Another week gone by and we're putting in a whole host of changes.

First, we're going to make some tweaks to the home page so that it looks / aligns a bit better. I think it may also help a bit with SEO but we'll see when we get there... We don't want to be like Facebook redesigning every 6-9 months, but I think the changes are a net positive.

Props out to Nicole Ferraro of InternetEvolution.com who "gagged" when she saw the Facebook "Like" button on the memorials. It didn't register with me until someone posted a memorial for a 10 year old girl. Somehow "Be the first person to LIKE this" just hit me way hard and I nearly lost it. We're changing the button as I type this.

Once the payment system is in and tested we'll be leaving Beta (finally!) and start charging for memorials. So if you have a family member or a loved one that you'd like to share photos and memories with your family, you've got a chance now to create a free commemorative memorial anytime before September 30th.

Last note - today a Utah serviceman was killed in Afghanistan. I'm thinking that it would be good if we didn't charge the military, policemen, firemen, etc. for memorials. I think anyone who has served their country should be honored in every way possible. What do you think?

Until next time...

Two weeks in - How we doin'?

Well it's been an interesting 2 weeks since we launched. Where do I start?

We're still struggling to get the shopping cart customized so that we can accept payments on the site. The software we selected is new, and they're still ironing out the bugs as we go. So much for collecting money out of this thing. The good news is that we can now offer and accept coupons on the site - so let the 100% discounts begin! (or uh... continue...)

We've gone through testing a new invite system that allows us to send HTML emails, and we did quite a bit of testing to make sure they don't arrive in your spam box when they are sent. It also has the ability to put people's photos in the email. That should be coming online this week. Fingers crossed.

We knew at some point we'd have to make a policy decision on handling memorials for pets. Then lo and behold we get our first PET MEMORIAL.  Yes, it's a pet mouse. Yes, it's from Germany. Yes, it's in German. What can I say? We now accept Pet Memorials. Guess somebody needs to update the Terms of Service. (And write a version of it in German.)

We've started running ads across a number of websites. Many are flash ads that I can't display on this blog - and some traffic is finally rolling into the site. But I really don't care for the quality of the hits you get at Adwords. Most people just close the box as soon as it pops up. There must be a better way to get people's interest...

Marketing is never easy when the subject matter is death. The press (who ironically make quite a living telling us "who died today") has really been hit or miss with our product launch. Here's a miss: Nicole Ferraro who covers Web 2.0 sites at InternetEvolution.com doesn't really care for our "social deathworking" moniker - or the subject matter in general. She found a place selling cremation jewelry - which even I admit is a bit creepy. I mean, even I draw the line at selling you a coffee mug with Uncle Joe's picture on it while his funeral is going on. It's a tightrope we walk when we're dealing with a sensitive subject, and there's very little room for humor. But every day I learn there's a little bit of room for humor, when I told one of our programmers about her negative take on things, his first response was "She's really cute."  Programmers...  ;-)

Check out her cuteness, her tirade against the ghouls of the internet (and my response) here.

That's it for this week. Tune in next week for more fun from Ghoul Central, where another press release is sure to drive the media into a somnabulistic typing frenzy. Or not...

3-2-1 LAUNCH!

Today we kicked off Remembered.com in grand fashion!

We dropped a press release out to over 300 media outlets, and I hand submitted to at least 100 more magazines and websites. Fingers are crossed but traffic to the site is flowing. You can read the release on Yahoo here.  We also got our first article written by Sherrie Giddens of the St. Louis Examiner that you can take a look at here.

We've got a number of web ads about to come online. Right now we're focusing on areas of the US that have high median age populations, and we'll broaden based on ad-testing and success. All apologies to Dave Matthews band but here's a sample ad - tell me what you think?

In other interesting news. We got picked up somehow by KillerStartups.com and profiled as one of their great startup ideas. They rank the ideas by votes given by people on the site, so if you're reading this and haven't voted - please do so by going to the blue button on the top left of this page and clicking the + button.

Work on the shopping cart continues... Adolfo's been cranking into the odd hours to get it done. There's a lot of customization to do because we don't have a lot of products to offer - basically just two, and we don't ship you  anything so it's a matter of removing code to make it align with our offerings. It's performing well in testing, and we should be able to put it online in a few weeks. That said - everyone getting in right now basically gets the site for FREE. Hooray!

Poor Ivan has been working his tail off the past week to get the site ready for primetime. I'm sure he's losing his mind with every odd request I throw his way. He made a great breakthru with our HTAccess component so that the subdomains don't get duplicate indexed. This should go a long way to helping Googlebot crawl the site correctly without a ton of garbage displaying. Longer term, he's replacing our Invite component with something new that allows HTML emails to be generated. We've still got a problem with Remembered.com mails appearing in people's spam folders, but I think it's because we're new and not necessarily a trusted commodity yet.

It's been a heck of a week... and it's only Tuesday. Sheesh.

Andy & the Staff @Remembered.com

Getting closer and closer...

This week's meeting was a long one. We covered a lot of ground though. Let me hit the high points...

Adolfo is setting up the order/payment system using a new component that he found. We gave up on the previous component because it was actually too powerful for what we needed. We would have had to customize downward for our needs. The new one shows tremendous promise from the demo, but we're starting from scratch again. I hope we're able to get it integrated quickly.

There's a ton of cleanup work from the beta, lots of little things that would make the site better. Ivan and I have been running around fielding grounders and turning and occasional double play. On the development side, he's been diligently integrating a new "invite" component that would replace our existing on.

As for me, I got in a bit of a pickle with Google. I opened an Adwords account for the company, but when I linked it to Google Analytics, I was logged in with my personal email address. Hence our cost data is not being associated with the proper adwords account. Google support has not been very helpful in rectifying the situation. Somehow I suspect a language barrier is in the equation to slow things down.

Anyway - we're pulling things together. Hopefully a couple of weeks and we're ready to blast off.

AJ

Great Meeting Today...

We're close to adding our payment systems after going through a few different options out there. The gist is that credit cards = good and paypal = bad. Not sure how we got there, but I'm comfortable with where we are going. Facebook integration right now seems very difficult. They are always changing their game and it's hard to make a solid connection with an ever changing borg.

Nuff Said - I am goodnightin'

AJ

Welcome to Remembered.com

We're going to use this our forum to post development updates and issues with Remembered.com
We hope you'll come back from time to time and learn about what we've been up to.

Andy & the Staff @ Remembered.com