Request for comment on potential service for web design professionals

Greetings. I work at a website development firm in Indiana. We're doing some initial exploration of an idea for a new service for professional web developers. I thought I'd outline it for you and see if you have any thoughts on whether such a service would be useful to you. (If I'm in the wrong category for this, just let me know - I'm still mapping out all of Dev Shed's discussion areas!)

The basic concept is to create a resource site with information about effective marketing practices related to website promotion and Internet marketing in general. The resources on this site - articles available for download as PDFs - would be provided by web professionals to their clients as a part of their development services. There wouldn't be any particular product or service being promoted between the lines or any other distracting gimmicks, so it would be a purely informational resource for developers and their clients.

The inspiration for this service is the seemingly pervasive phenomenon that our customers - the people we build sites for - often need a lot of help in understanding how to best use their site - search engine optimization, creating engaging content, and just integrating it into their overall marketing strategy. While we can help them with some of that, we as web developers often don't make the cut as reliable marketing experts so this is a way we can benefit from the expertise of peole who do that kind of consulting professionally, without having to acquire it all on our own. And with the right kind of co-branding and content delivery tools, it would be seen by our customers as a value-added service we're providing to them.

For the professional developers out there: would such a service be useful to you? Would you pay some small monthly fee ($20? $50? $100?) for access to such a thing? What kinds of features would be important to you if you did use it?

Again, we're just testing the waters to see if such a service would benefit the web developer community. Thanks for any comments you might have.

Chris

Let me get this straigth (simplyfied).

1. You get marketing experts to write texts - or whatever way you would get it.
2. We (developers) pay to you - so that we could present that as our own to our customers - added value.

Is that the basic story?

What you need to question yourself if who would be your customers. My guess is small developer firms (with no marketing staff), freelancers and such. Obviosly they dont have 1000's of customers - so your guess of small fee is right. And I think that even $100 might go over what they can pay for service like this.

Unless you can offer more - like some "real" support - say a forum, FAQ, support board ...etc.

Eitherway - I belive idea is great! I loose so much time (as a freelance developer) to try to explain why Flash into and site background music is a bad thing (in most cases) and other similar things. Not to mention some "real" stuff that you are targeting.

I actualy want to dedicate a week or so - just to write a guide for my customers.