Made @ www.text2logo.com.Why are there so many ads?
This site is made by a single person who is disabled (unemployed, no disability, had open heart surgery and other heart procedures) and who's only income is from the sponsor advertising found on sites and the occasional custom magnet orders. That is why there are so many ads throughout the sites, I need the money. I have never sold a site to a big corporation to help bring in money. I have not ever had anyone contact me about sponsorship or partnership. There are no investors (other than me). Even all the ads that are the sites are not quite enough to live comfortably (I have a wife and 3 year old son, wife has a job) yet.
Are these sites really free? What's the scam?
No scam! It is free to create, download, upload or print out your novelty photo creations. I do however place a small web site ad at the bottom of the free images so that I have some credit for the making of the tool. The part that costs money is if you want to get a fridge magnet or a postcard of your image made by me. So far sponsor ads pay for the $250+/month costs of running the sites so I do not have to charge you (or your friends/family) a monthly membership fee. PLEASE LINK TO www.FotoTrix.com AND TELL YOUR FRIENDS!
Why does the site look so (UGLY) homemade and not very well laid out?
I spend most of my time creating templates and programming advanced PHP and ASP scripts. Currently no other site in the world has as many photo templates! I do not have the skills or the money to hire a web development team to make the sites look good. I worry more that the sites are useful more than I worry about how they look. I hope to be able to hire a part timer to help keep things looking better down the road when I can afford it.
Even on other sites that I worked my ass off to look good (here is a good example), people complained all the time that they didn't like it (but I loved it)! I find it very hard to make a good layout for a website that looks original. I could easily copy another popular site's look, but I consider that lame.
Where do you host your sites?
I have to host my own, I have professional servers and high speed business internet lines. Because my sites are so popular and use up so much bandwidth (500 to 800 GB a month) I have to have other side web hosting accounts with my ISP (fastest), WebHost4Life (recent trial, their unlimited is actually limited and they want me to pay more to run as much as I do on Brinkster, but they offer a static IP address that will come in handy) and Brinkster (2 accounts, they offer PHP and ASP together and 3500GB a month transfer but not as fast as I wish). Domain names and total costs exceed $275.00 a month (please make a small donation if you find these sites useful). Not only is there the costs, but much time devoted (24 hour on-call) to keeping my servers (I do everything myself, from tech team to public relations) and checking in on other hosting accounts (12 hours a week maintenance plus 40 hours a week programming new web toys). Due to the huge amounts of bandwidth used, it is a tough job finding reliable hosting methods that I can afford (most sites that get my kind of traffic are owned by huge corporations that have lots of cash to play with) and I often get cut off "unlimited bandwidth hosting" accounts for using too much bandwidth. Contact me if you have web space to donate for free hosting of generated images (200 GB a month needed).
Why did I find your site posted to my blog?
You must have mentioned another fun site that let's you create neat things with your photographs. I was only posting resources related to your posting. These sites are my life and I like to share them with the world!
Are these sites popular?
FotoTrix.com alone gets about 50-150,000 page views a day! They are getting more and more popular (it's gradual), I get over 2 million unique people a year visiting so far. There are usually 500 people on my main web server at any given time (3 other servers not included) using my free web based software applications. Each month over 750GB of data gets transferred to my web surfers (that's about 1,000 CDs or about 750,000 floppies worth, more GB used, more it costs me).
What are the web server stats for the image generators?
Can I advertise on your site?
Yes I can do that! The cheapest way is to purchase a monthly text ad on the sponsor ad clump at the bottom of all pages (your ad will show up on every visit to the page and you will not be charged for clicks), try it out HERE (65% exposure, unfortunately these are JavaScript based and not all surfers can view them). I can also put a direct link/image on selected pages or on all the FotoTrix pages for $75-$500 a month (depending on ad sizing, location on page, how many pages ad shown and product offered), these are pure HTML ads that anyone can see in a web browser (100% exposure). Contact us for info.
Why was your site down the other day?
Being a one man show (running my own servers), I have to do the job of 5-10 people (everything from PR to fixing servers) and sometimes I have to sleep. Sometimes things can go wrong and I may not notice it right away. I do have alarms set that if things are down I get notified, but sometimes that doesn't work or if I am asleep, I might not get the email until the following day. The day will come where I can afford to have my servers collocated in a server farm where there are qualified people on hand 24/7 to fix things (at a price) or maybe I will get big enough to have a headquarters some day with full time employees around the clock. Currently my uptime stats are averaging 96-99% (means that about 97% of the time everything is working okay).
How many sites do you have?
I have about 15 image making sites (see the list on CustomSignGenerator.com of over 7,500 image generators), but I also have 20 other sites relating to comedy, Web 2.0 tools, religion, medical/health and others (I started by making search engines back in the 90's, gave up keeping them up to date, there is too many BIG BOYS with lot's of money to burn competing these days). The image generators are the sites that get the most attention.
How can I help out?
You can link to www.FotoTrix.com (Photo Tricks) on your web site, blog or internet profile. Tell others to check out www.FotoTrix.com. You can make photo templates for us (fake magazine covers are quite popular) and email them to use (make the length about 900 pixels with proportionate widths). You can send money to me with PayPal (no membership needed, accepts credit cards), you can see the donate buttons above. If you wish to sponsor or buy one of my sites, the contact email is at the bottom of this page. You can donate extra hardware.
What services, hardware or software do you need?
Here are some items I could use to earn more money (perhaps a partnership):
I own a Dell PowerEdge 2900 almost fully upgraded with dual quad Xeon CPUs, 4GB RAM and dual 30GB hard drives for the main server. Database/email server uses a Dell workstation that uses same basic/standard hardware as a desktop PC for easy & rather cheap upgrading. I also own 2 desktop computers for working on websites.
Are you a real business?
I am the CEO & owner of Gigahertz Inc..
Where do you live?
I live in New York, USA (born & raised in Canada) with my wife and 3 yr old son.
How can I contact you to help out?
Made @ www.text2logo.com.