New Live Support Chat Upgrade

We have upgraded our live customer support interface for designers and clients.

It makes it easier to chat with out customer service staff!

Login to use the new interface.

Win a new Notebook PC from Compaq

Attention Designers, Writers and Programmers. WDI is giving away a Compaq™ Presario Notebook PC to promote their new directories.
Just register for free on one of the participating sites to enter.

The contest eligibility period will run from March 31st 2011 through May 1st 2011. Details are available on the
WDI Homepage (http://www.webdirectoriesinc.com/). The grand prize is a new laptop computer. The second and third prizes are $250 and $100 credit
packages from design quote ( http://www.DesignQuote.net ) that designers can use to get fresh verified sales leads.

Portfolios are coming!

Soon we are adding in a new feature that will allow designers to upload a image file that shows the work done for a project from DesignQuote. Designers will be able to add a brief description along with their screenshot or photo.

We will also allow the client to leave a comment/testimonial about the project as well as a link to the site the project relates to. Designers will be able to add a link back to their homepage and to the project.

We will link this portfolio page from the original RFP page (we will remove the budget info first).

We will be selecting certain portfolios to be featured on our home page.

Look for this new feature to go into beta testing this May!

Happy Thanksgiving! Design Lead Sale - Recession Rebate 2009

Happy Thanksgiving Designers!

Do you follow us on twitter?


*** Buy Two Leads Get One Free! *** This week only! *** 2009 Recession Rebate! ***

First buy any 3 leads on DesignQuote from Moday 11/23/09 to Sun 11/29/09 and receive one of those leads free. Simply buy 3 leads, then email designquote with the subject "Buy 2 Get 1 Free" and list the RFP numbers 3 leads you purchased. Then we will reimburse credits back into your account worth the value of the lowest lead. For example, if you buy one lead that cost 5 credits, and two leads that cost 3 credits. We will add 3 credits back into your account. It`s just that easy! Mon 12:00AM 11/23 EST - Sun 11:59PM 11/29 EST

Login to your dashboard for details!

New one slot web design leads and email alerts

Today a DesignQuote designer submitted the following question. I realized that many of our designers may have been wondering the same thing, so I decided to post the QandA here.

Question:
I have noticed something strange happening for the last couple of weeks. I get an email alert for a job and underneath the original email is a list of "More recently approved projects:" and there is a list of RFQ's. They are all in numerical order and usually they are all for the same price range and in each case, they are only looking for a single bid. I never get an individual email reporting those RFQ's. I've been with DQ for several years and I've never seen anybody ever ask for a single quote. So here are my questions.

1. Why am I not receiving emails for those single bid requests?
2. Are those jobs real, or are you just getting spammed with fake jobs?

They seem fake because of their similarity to each other and the fact that I don't receive email alerts for them. Please advise.

Response:
The single slot leads are from a new web-design-lead-provider we have partnered with. We are testing routing some of their lead inventory through DesignQuote. They limit leads to 5 designers. They are giving four slots to their existing customers (designers) and then giving one slot to DesignQuote.

- The reason you do not usually receive an email alert about those leads (and probably many other leads in your price range) is because of the way our email alerts work. When a lead is approved, the alert system sends alert emails in groups of 200 emails every 5 minutes. The order we send emails is based on how many credits are in your account - whoever has the most credits gets the first email, the next highest gets the second, etc. ( as described on the alerts page http://www.designquote.net/provider/set_services.cfm )
　
You currently have 14 credit(s). This puts you at number 232 on the email notification list. Which means that 231 designers have 14 or more credits in their account and receive emails before you. There are currently about 2500 designers who have specified instant alerts for projects over $1000 - so when we post a $1k+ project the system queues up about 2500 emails to be sent. We send the first 250 emails immediately then wait 5 minutes (to give the mail processor time to process those 250 emails) and then we check the RFP slots. If the project has not sold out, we send the next 250 emails, wait 5 minutes and check again until the project sells out or everyone has been emailed.

Once a design project sells out all the remaining emails are cleared from the queue and those designers are never notified about the project. So the reason your not receiving alerts for these projects is because the project sells out before it gets to you name in the alert queue.

The clients are actually getting 5 bids, 1 from DQ and the other four from non-DQ designers that get leads from our partner. In order to make our alert emails more informative, we add in a list of other projects with similar budgets under "More recently approved projects:" - The partner RFP numbers are in numerical order because we process them in batches as they come in, one after another and they get sequential RFP IDs.

The partner prequalifies the leads checking their phone and email so they get approved and posted as soon as we receive them. So if several partner leads get approved they are queued and might appear under "More recently approved projects:" before the alerts are even actually sent for those specific projects. The mail-bot checks all open projects every time it sends a batch of emails.

We are currently beta testing this partnership it will change in the future. We just started the partnership 3 weeks ago (the first week of November) which is why you just started seeing the one slot leads. We are collecting data and feedback from our designers to make sure the quality of the leads we get from our new partner meet the quality standards of our regular leads.

We don't have enough data to determine that yet but we should know in a few weeks. If the quality of the leads is good enough, we will expand our partnership and increase the number of slots per lead for DesignQuote designers. The leads would still be limited to 5, but we may divide them up so DQ gets 3 slots and the partners designers get the remaining 2, as opposed to the one single slot we get now.
　
- Wesley Warren
CEO - Vexcom, Inc.
Parent Company of DesignQuote.net