A New IncSpring for the New Year

11:18 pm | Wes Wilson | Be the first to comment

• ‹ previous
• 811 of 1407
• next ›

You may have noticed IncSpring’s new look, just in time for 2009. Thanks for all of the compliments from those who have said they enjoy the new look.  For those who might think otherwise, we’ve built in a ton of new features to help you buy and sell your brands.  Maybe you’ll like the new look a little more after giving the new site a spin.

Here are just a few of the new features you’ll see:

1. Improved User Interface
2. Better brand navigation, eliminating AJAX browsing
3. Ability to buy and sell domains without attached logos.  Easily search through all available premium domain names in the Browse Domains section.  From this single page you can see which domains include a logo, view prices, add to your Favorites, ‘Spring’ and buy domains.
4. Buy domains directly through IncSpring with top level domains (TLDs) as low as $9.99. All purchases include free Privacy Protection and DNS Management.
5. Domain transfer and management, including the ability to simply point domain to its details page.
6. Automatically recommended domains for brands that did not include domains before.  No need to search through hundreds of domains to see what could work with each logo.
7. Make an Offer feature giving buyer the option to negotiate with sellers for brands and domains
8. Simple and automatic domain transfers when a domain is IncSpring Verified. 
Domains that were purchased through IncSpring or transferred to
IncSpring are marked with the Verified icon.  When purchased, the
domain is automatically transferred to the buyer.  This eliminates the
buyer’s risk and the need to rely on the seller to initiate the
transfer.
9. Easier way to view Brand Variations.  All attached
variations are displayed below the main image and each can be viewed
full size with a click.
10. Just hover over a thumbnail to see a brand’s price.  Now there’s no
need to go into every details page to see if a brand is affordable or
not.
11. See which brands and domains have sold through the Browse Brands or Browse Domains sections.
12 Most Sprung This Week display on landing pages to easily see which brands are the hottest.
13. More integrated management features in My Account.  Manage Brands, Domains and your Favorites from the same area.
14. Easier User Search capabilities, telling you when a user is online and letting you invite them to chat from the browse page.
15. Find Featured Brands and Featured Sellers easier by choosing those Views in each section.

If you run into any bugs or see room for improvement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.  Our goal is to make IncSpring a great resource for buyers and sellers.  Hopefully we’ve taken a huge step towards that with the latest upgrade.

Saying goodbye to the creative brief

6:09 pm | Wes Wilson | Be the first to comment

Some people want my head on a platter.

They say what we are
doing is wrong and undermines “the fundamentals of branding” or some
such read-it-out-of-a-book-marketing-speak nonsense. Those people are
of course account handlers at big marketing agencies. They are all
lovely people but ask them if they can lower their prices on producing
a brand for a start-up and they look at you as if you just shot their
BMW.

Getting your brand produced professionally is a necessary step to
business success, sadly for entrepreneurs and start-ups it is usually
far too expensive. The frustrating aspect of this for designers is that
they have hundreds of unused brands filed away, doing nothing. Brands
that were rejected by clients because they were “Too modern” or “The
blue is too similar to the color of my ex-wife's eyes.” Each of these
pieces of art, lies alone and forgotten on a hard disk or in a drawer,
forlornly hoping one day they may see the light of day.

All I want to do is release those abandoned designs and offer them
to people who will love and cherish and pay for them. So we produced
IncSpring.com. Matching ready-made corporate identities, brands and
even just plain old logos with customers willing to forego their
in-depth brief and save thousands of dollars in the process. Many of
the brands on the site come complete with appropriate domain names
which can give a new business a hugely powerful head start as well as
remove some of the headaches involved in building a consistent identity.

“BUT THE BRIEF IS REALLY IMPORTANT!” I hear you scream and of
course to some extent I agree but can you really say that one company
selling used cars has remarkably different corporate objectives to
another company selling used cars? 

Many entrepreneurs struggle with the process of branding. They
know the qualities they wish their brand to represent but find it
difficult to convey that to designers or the general public at large.
IncSpring will help those clients by presenting them with a wide
variety of existing unused brands so they can point and say: “That's
the one!”

I think the demand is there. Time will tell if I am right.

What I hope to see is a more collaborative experience emerge.
Traditional processes can be adversarial with designers pitching ideas
endlessly to clients trying to reach some kind of common ground on what
they both like. The frustration generated by this approach is neither
productive nor creative.

With IncSpring.com the client already likes the idea and can work
with the designer on tailoring it to suit their business. Those clients
can then throw the results open to the wider IncSpring community to get
instant feedback from people who know what they are talking about.

As a designer, this is what I wanted work to be like but it never
was. In a flash of inspiration I realized to get to that place all I
had to do was say goodbye to the brief.

And here we are. Enjoy.

IncSpring.com