What's Been Happening With ForTheGirls.com

[Ms Naughty]

Hi all.

I hope it's OK to post this here. I just wanted to give our affiliates a bit of an update about what's been going on with ForTheGirls.com for the last 9 months. Because you may have noticed that we've been pretty quiet lately and we also haven't added any new banners and galleries in that time.

Firstly, let me state that we're not going anywhere. Our site is rock solid and is still happily grooving along making plenty of sales. I know a lot of other affiliate programs have gone bust but that's not going to happen to us. The "for women" market is still growing and we're still the market leader

Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a "holding" pattern since November 2009. That's because we decided it was high time to upgrade our old hand-updated member's area to new CMS. Gung-ho, we hired some designers who promised it would be done by the end of January.

It wasn't. And then it wasn't done by the end of February, then March... then they didn't reply to us for 3 weeks... then they said there was a problem with the server... then they didn't talk to us for another week. And then they said it would "definitely be done by Friday."

I'm embarrassed to say they promised this 17 times.

Cue the angry emails, the demands for a refund etc etc etc. The drama was still going in July.

Now we're in the process of starting all over again with a trustworthy programmer. I'm hoping we'll have a new member's area by the end of October.

What this has meant is that, instead of me working on new banners and galleries, I was either waiting for the expected new design or else wasting time sending angry emails to the designers.

And while we've continued to update the site regularly, we haven't really been able to revamp it or make the changes we had planned. And we haven't been supporting our affiliates as much as we'd like.

So, sorry. I'm hoping we can now escape from this disaster and get on with running our lovely site and affiliate program without further delay.

The good news is that we didn't see any decline in sales while all this was going on - the site has just been selling as well as ever.

We have upgraded our server so things are running much faster, although it appears there are a couple of glitches with the affiliate blog - working on it now.

Also, I'm not naming the designers as they have promised a refund. I've only received about 5% of it so far, so if we don't get the money then I will be posting another thread about the whole business.

So, GG&J friends, there's our sad and sorry story. Or our dirty laundry, if you prefer

[Fonz]

I just made another sale so I'm not complaining.
Keep up the good work

[Cleo]

Grandma you probably want to fix the broken image in your sig.

I've always wondered about what it would be like to go from a hand updated member's area to a CMS since that is exactly the situation with FoxyAngel. After reading your post I think we will be continuing with doing it by hand.

[Ms Naughty]

We now have a site-wide hotlinking block... I've been trying to fix the image but now the board is saying I can only have 80 characters in my sig, including code. Jeez!

I am SO OVER updating by hand, it takes me about a day to edit, convert and upload a single movie file with gallery. GRRR.

The designers promised they could create a CMS using Joomla. What we got was a very half-assed job and they didn't upload our 1500+ articles or 90% of our galleries. Didn't really know what they were doing. We're now trying Drupal.

And thanks Fonz!

[RedCherry]

I am sooooo spoiled by site depth. I was one of the first people to get it installed, and use it for all my avs sites content. Unfortunately, its been sold, and the new company doesn't support old owners unless I pay a yearly fee, so hoping nothing goes wrong.

I can't even imagine trying to update content on 40+ sites by hand...it would be mind boggling.

For the Girls has been my #1 sponsor that is not my own AVS site for years. I just got a sale before I posted this.

If you are ever looking to hire outside help to build free sites/galleries for hosted stuff, let me know. I've had a ton of experience.

[terry]

Alright alright.. I signed up.
I love the rss feed and stories.
Any chance of getting content zips?

[Ms Naughty]

Hi Terry
Wow... amazing that my sad tale of woe should create a new affiliate! Welcome.
Unfortunately, we don't do free content zips. The majority of our content is non-exclusive and we don't have the license for it. Also, we've found that reining in the amount of free stuff we've offered has actually be good for sales.

Our plans to create more exclusive content has been delayed by this drama, hopefully we'll be able to fix that soon.

[RedCherry]

Originally Posted by terry

Alright alright.. I signed up.
I love the rss feed and stories.
Any chance of getting content zips?

I use a lot of Scarlett's content to promote them they have a lot of it in the members area.

[terry]

Originally Posted by grandmascrotum

Hi Terry
Wow... amazing that my sad tale of woe should create a new affiliate! Welcome.
Unfortunately, we don't do free content zips.

Thanks.. No prob, I'll use other means to promote.

Originally Posted by RedCherry

I use a lot of Scarlett's content to promote them they have a lot of it in the members area.

Great thanks.