Frequently Asked Questions and Answers If you have a question that is not answered here, please contact us here. How do people find my website? Search Engines - TalkSpot.com gives you the tools and information you need to make your site recognized by search engines, such as google and yahoo. Use the "Increase My Exposure" tool to add keywords, website description and submit to search engines so your site can be found. Be creative with your writing! Email Registration - Keep in touch with the world, as you travel around it! Encourage your friends, family and other members of the community to register to your site. You can email them newsletters, collections of photographs, and your blog entries to keep people up to date with you! Newsletters - This is an incredible way to reach out to your customers to keep them abreast of new happenings, deals, etc. Harness the power of email! Send newsletters out regularly to everyone listed in your Email list. Can I sell products and services on TalkSpot? How? Does it cost me anything? YES! Add pictures and descriptions of your art to any page on your website. Follow the steps in this tutorial to add PayPal "Buy Now" and "View Cart" buttons and take advantage of the PayPal shopping system. All these services are free to use. PayPal only charges fees (a percentage of the transaction) once a sale has taken place. Everything is done for you once the buttons are added, just sit back and watch your email. Once someone has made a purchase both you and the customer will receive an email. Coming Soon! Right now our web developers are creating a custom TalkSpot.com storefront and shopping system. Keep checking back for updates. We will make it even easier to manage your store full of products and collect payments from your customers. What are my options for displaying products and services? We suggest using out photo gallery tool. This tool will allow you to upload multiple images per gallery, add descriptions and display the images in an attractive way on your page. Display them as small thumbnails so when a user clicks on the small image a larger close up will appear. Display them as a slideshow that rotates through the images in the gallery or add a navigation bar (buttons that say next or previous) to allow the customer to flip through the images. Add single images to any page in any location. Partner the images with some text descriptions and keywords using our simple text tool. Does TalkSpot.com offer me copyright security? YES! Use our watermarking tool to watermark your images so no one can use them. What if I don’t have time to build my own site? Is there an inexpensive way to get it built for me? We can help you there too! TalkSpot.com's CustomWebExperts, our team of professional website consultants, can build your initial website and fill it with your content. We build you a professional website, and then show you how to easily maintain it. Just fill out the form here and our team of professionals will be more than happy to discuss your customization needs with you. What if I don't like the templates? Can I get a different one? Can I use one of my own design? We can help you there too! TalkSpot.com's CustomWebExperts, our team of professional website design consultants, can design and create a website to your specifications, giving it a well-designed, professional look that will really make it stand out. We build you a professional website, and then show you how to easily maintain it. Just fill out the form here and our team of professionals will be more than happy to discuss your customization needs with you. What will my website cost? There is no required cost. Nor will any advertising be placed on your website. Are there any hidden costs? No. We do offer extended features which require a subscription, however these are absolutely optional, and over 90% of our customers find that the basic (free) product meets all of their needs. The primary benefit of subscribing is to get a personalized website address, which does not have the word “TalkSpot” in it. For instance, if your business were named “Acme”, we might set your website up as acme.talkspot.com .. and, you would rather be http://www.acme.com/. This requires us to buy the name on your behalf, which costs us money, therefore we need to charge for this service. Another benefit of having a subscription is that once you have your own personal website name, we can provide you with personalized email accounts – so that you can get your email as yourname@acme.com. There are dozens of other benefits to being a paid subscriber, and a paid subscription is very inexpensive ($69 per year). As we have said before, this is a free service, and whether or not you decide to upgrade is 100% up to you. Do I need my own server? Absolutely not! Your site runs on our servers. There are no extra charges to pay. You do not need a hosting center. Your website will exist on our servers, which are professionally hosted at a world class facility. This is a powerful reason for you to place your website on TalkSpot. Not all webservers, and data centers are the same. We use only the best, and you can see this for yourself, by looking at our hosting center (at Maximumasp): http://www.maximumasp.com/infrastructure/dataCenter/tour/dataCenterTour.aspx Do I need to give my credit card? This is a free service.  There is an optional upgrade, which is more than worth the benefit, but it is not required. You do not need to give your credit card to set up your website, and it will not be asked for unless you decide to upgrade to a paid subscription, which is likely to be never. How private is my information? Neither your contact information, or that of any visitors to your site will be given (or sold) to anyone. Will there be advertising on my website? Only if you put it there. You site is your site. We will not sell any advertising. Can I have my own URL (website address)? Yes. We have integrated tools allowing you to set this up, for a small fee.  The process takes about 24 hours. Is there any reason you can think of why I shouldn't build my website? No. We can’t imagine one. It takes almost no time, is fun to do, doesn’t cost anything and gives you worldwide exposure. How can that be bad? Are there any rules as to what I can and can't do on my site? Yes. You may not operate a website that contains adult content. You cannot put content onto your site which is copyrighted by someone else. Also, we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone at any time. How much power do I have to build my site? There is no system on the market today that offers as much power to you, unless you are a highly skilled programmer. Even persons who are veteran website developers will find that TalkSpot is the best, and fastest, way to build professional websites. There are 100 website makers out there. What makes this one different? We are VERY different than the others, in that: Our #1 priority is ease of use, with maximum power. It is easy to make a website maker easy to use, that really doesn’t offer much ability to produce a truly custom website. For instance, several sites will offer you a “fill in the blanks” approach to making your own website. We confess that some of these are easier to use than we are. However, for most businesses, appearance is critical, and as an artist, the expectation is even higher. We provide powerful tools that help you do what you want, your way – and, then we figure out how to make them as easy to use as we can. We are constantly upgrading our product. We do a new release of the product almost every week with new features. The web is not standing still, and a website that looked good last week, may look obsolete this week. We help you keep your website up to date (meaning, we work hard to add features to the product that you need to build an up to date professional looking website). Of course, it is up to you what you want to do to your website. You can use it as a simple page giving driving directions to your gallery, or you can show 100s of paintings, and update the photo selection daily. You can ignore new features as we add them, or add the newest bells and whistles to your site, as fast as we can get them out the door. We give you power. We make is understandable to non-geeks. And, then, you decide what to do with it. Our data center is reliable. Our servers are top of the line. Our network connectivity is the best. Read this: http://www.maximumasp.com/about/whyMaximumASP.aspx We are focused on artists. We are not trying to be all things to all people. TalkSpot has defined a few categories of websites, and are trying to do them better than anyone else. By narrowing our focus we can work harder to understand your business and needs. We spend our days thinking about what tools you might want, and what other creative ways there are to use the internet to help you generate revenue. Can I build my own site, or is it too hard? My mother can barely do email, and I’ve tried several times to teach her google earth, without success. There is no chance she will be doing spreadsheets anytime soon, and doesn’t have the vaguest idea what TalkSpot even is. I must confess that she is unlikely to ever do TalkSpot. On the other hand, there are 10s of thousands of people who have successfully built TalkSpot sites themselves, without any assistance whatsoever. If you are fairly comfortable with your computer, and can use a word processor, you are not going to have a problem. Most people do not feel the need to look at our training videos, and step by step tutorials, which is both a good and a bad thing. We’re happy that our “ease of use” campaign seems to be working, but disappointing that most people don’t need our tutorials that we worked so hard on. As to your ability to build your own site with TalkSpot, we’ll let you make that decision. It really is easy, and it really is free. Just click the button and get started. If it seems too hard, quit and give up. Nothing bad will happen, and we will not spam you. We don’t do that. My guess is that you will have a new website minutes from now, and be a very happy person (who now has their own website address!)

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