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My most recent own project. A gathering place for everyone who likes Asian food.

BACKGROUND Have been eating more Asian than Western food for the past 15 years. In addition, I have been to almost every country in Asia and tried the food there in an authentic environment. Asian food has naturally become one of my great interests. That’s why I figured it would be fun to make a site about Asian food.

SOLUTION The project is under development and will result in a site dealing with Asian food. Containing article blog, recipe index and a guide that explains what different things are.

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During a backpacking trip in Asia, shortly after the IT crash and when modems and dial-up Internet were not uncommon, I had an idea. Shouldn’t it be possible to work with graphic design over the internet remotely? A few years later, I had built Sweden’s first service for ordering logos online in package form.

BACKGROUND In 2002 I read an article about a graphic design teacher in the US who made logos online in his spare time. There was nothing like it in Sweden yet, so I did some research and then decided to build Sweden’s first service for ordering logos online in package form. Read more about project digital normad here.

FIRST IN SWEDEN Since I didn’t know html, I started working together with a front-end developer and on May 1, 2003 we launched logofabriken.se. The service was marketed through running advertisements in the start-your-own magazines that existed at the time. When Google later started Adwords ads in 2004, I jumped right on it, which produced very good results.

BECAME A TALKING POINT The first version of logofabriken.se was simply built, but when the business model of buying graphic material at a fixed price online was completely new in Sweden, the site quickly became a talking point. Several well-known internet entrepreneurs got in touch with words of praise and congratulations.

Two years after starting, logofabriken.se was doing so well that I could live on it. But at the same time, the first competition also came.

TOPPED ALL KEYWORDS In 2007 when the competition started getting tougher, I built a new version. In connection with the work with my international site, Logoking.com (see below), I had learned a lot about international SEO. The site was therefore built point and point according to prevailing SEO guidelines. Since most companies in Sweden were quite behind when it came to SEO at the time, I was soon topping all the keywords for logos and the orders were pouring in faster than I could deliver. Under den perioden hade jag 2-3 frilansare som hjälpte mig och som jag samarbetade med online.

I topped the search lists for almost five years until Google finally changed their algorithms and I lost my rankings almost overnight (the famous and infamous update Google Penguin, April 2012).

DJUPINTEVJUAT 600 ST FÖRETAGARE Har jobbat med cirka 600 st företagskunder över hela Sverige sedan start. Alla har jag djupintervjuat per telefon för att kunna förstå deras verksamhet, målgrupp och behov. De flesta har jag aldrig träffat fysiskt.

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International e-commerce site selling semi-finished logos. This means that you can first see the logo, finished in a gallery before you decide to buy it. Upon purchase, it is taken down from the site and the buyer owns the copyright. The idea of ​​selling that way was new to the world and in the first years the site was very successful. I had clients from all over the world. From the Tonga Islands to i.a. a research station in northern Alaska. A logo cost about SEK 1,500-2,000.

BACKGROUND After working on my second site logofabriken.se for two years (see above), I had a lot of leftover logo proposals that I owned the copyright to, so I started to investigate whether it was possible to take the concept of selling graphic material online one step further Forward. After some research, I found a newly started site in Norway that had thought in similar ways. They sold logo templates online where they entered the customer’s company name under the symbol.

But the same symbol was sold several times to different customers and the site and the concept did not give a further good impression. The concept was hard to understand and the last thing you wanted to do was use your debit card on the site. At this time, in 2004, most people were very skeptical about paying for things online.

CONCEPT I decided to build a similar site but take it one step further and make everything much better. Clearer and more trust-inspiring. It would feel safe to use the payment card on the site. The most important thing was that each logo should only be sold once. After purchase, it would then be removed automatically with a script. Since the biggest market was the US and it’s easy to get sued there, I also needed to put together protective legal agreements.

TRADEMARK I searched for a long time for a suitable name for the brand and finally I bought the domain Logoking.com for quite expensive money from a guy in the USA.

UX & UI I did the UX and UI work myself. In the UX work, I interview entrepreneurs in my surroundings. It was important that everyone understood how the site worked and felt confident in paying online. I also drew explanatory illustrations and wrote clear instructions for visitors to understand how the concept worked.
Then produced wireframes and sketches so that everyone in the work group would have the same picture of what I wanted to build. Then I made all the graphics and all the buttons etc. which was needed.
Before launch, we tested the site on a fairly large group and changed some descriptive texts accordingly.

TEAM I brought in a front end person and a back end person to put it all together with me. Texts were written by a Swedish copywriter and then translated by a translation agency into American English. I found a translator there who could give the texts the right casual tone that I was looking for. A lawyer with international legal and intellectual property experience was brought in to write all the legal agreements (not cheap).

E-COMMERCE SOLUTION At this time, it was both difficult and expensive to set up a payment solution. Especially when entering the international market with different currencies and different VAT rules depending on the continent.

I arranged a meeting with the bank and got an agreement, got currency pockets and then also a payment switch at Samport (the founder of Samport was so impressed by the concept that he later became my biggest customer).

LAUNCH 2005 The site came up just in time to I moved to Bangkok in the fall of 2005. But then 100s of hours remained with posting products in the gallery. And to work with SEM (search engine marketing). Det som tog mest tid var att få siten att synas internationellt på olika sökord. Försäljningen tog därför inte fart förrän efter ett år och många lärotimmar senare. Under några år låg siten sedan i toppen på världslistan på sökordet Company Logos och Premade logos, vilket medförde bra försäljning.

KILLING COMPETITION Over the years, competition from all corners of the world began to appear. Suddenly it was difficult to resist without having a large team and a lot of financial resources behind it. Sites like 99design also came up with brand new business ideas on how to sell graphic materials online (auction).

In 2012, I had just started working with an SEO agency in India to help me with link building and other things, when Google suddenly rolled out its update Google Penguin. Google Penguin did not like what I and the Indian agency had done and therefore penalized the site. It all happened overnight and after that I lost the will to continue.

In 2016, I started thinking about bringing the site back to life and redoing the concept a little at a time. That version was never launched (sketch above).

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Had long wondered why there wasn’t a good site that connects freelancers and clients in Sweden. One day I found one that was already fully built and launched for sale, so I jumped at the chance and bought it. The aim was to rebuild it into something better.

BACKGROUND I had worked quite a bit with freelancers who I brought in as help when needed. Both Swedish and international. I had also had plans to build a site that connects freelancers and clients, so when I saw such a site already being built for sale, I jumped at the chance.

KONCEPT The site had two target groups. The first small and medium-sized business that wanted to order services online from freelancers to get it cheaper than going to an agency. The second target group was freelancers selling various services online.

The site’s CMS was very advanced built with many functions and there were three different login roles (orderer, freelancer and admin). There was also a built-in bank where the buyer deposited a down payment.

FORMER OWNER The previous owner had spent about two years developing and marketing the site. He had started by buying a license for a ready-made CMS that he had tweaked himself using html, css and php.

He had then marketed the site diligently, among other things, by recording press releases. Both Resume and Cap & Design had written about it with linked articles.

FUNCTIONALITY The client posted their task which appeared in a list on the 1st page. At the same time, a message went out to all freelancers who had ticked that they wanted assignments that matched the same service area. The freelancers who were interested in the assignment, then reported their interest to the client through the site. The client then selected who he wanted to work with and deposited a deposit into the site’s built-in bank. The bank transactions were handled in the background by me as the site owner using a PayPal account. The freelancers had their own public profiles with personal portfolios where they could post their work.

At the time of the takeover, the site had around 500 active members, but they had started to get annoyed that so few jobs were posted.

UX/UI I started by analyzing why the previous owner had not succeeded in getting the site up and running. After some UX work (asking the target audience what they thought) I came up with the following:

• IDENTITY The logo and the graphic identity did not feel professionally executed and lowered trust in the site. I therefore produced a new one.
• INCORRECTLY BUILT START PAGE. The 1st site was built to communicate as much with the client as the freelancers. But it got messy when you talk to both target groups at the same time. After various tests, it turned out that the only people to talk to are where they post assignments on the site. Namely the client. It turned out that you didn’t have to talk or explain so clearly to the freelancers how it worked. Because if there is a job, they will still do everything they can to make an effort to make it happen. I call it the sugar cube effect.
  
• REMOVED BUILT-IN BANK & DEPOSIT REQUIREMENT There was a built-in bank where the client had to deposit 20% of the total amount to the site before work could start. The problem was that no one dared to deposit any large amounts. And buyers and sellers instead settled the deal privately on the side. They a little more on each other than on the site. I therefore removed the bank and the requirement to place a deposit.
• REMOVED FEE OF 7% TO POST ASSIGNMENTS It used to cost 7% to post an assignment. This resulted in buyers and sellers instead settling the deal on the side of the site. They a little more on each other than on the site. I therefore removed that feature for the time being.

RESULTS It paid off well to rebuild the site. And that resulted in greater interest and more repeat traffic for a period.

But after a while, services like Offerta and Servicefinder suddenly appeared with large marketing budgets. This, combined with the fact that the company that had built the CMS went up in smoke and no longer provided any updates, made me decide to dismantle the site.

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Both sites were intended as a quick SEO experiment. But have now for eight years, without maintenance dominated the keywords (international) for which I optimized them. Together, they have more than 30,000 visitors a month.

BACKGROUND In 2010 I tried to learn the program Dreamweaver to be able to build web pages myself without having to bring in expensive developers. At the same time, I was working on my own SEO project where I built pages with information about symbols. I therefore built two simple sites in Dreamweaver as a test. One about animal and one about religious symbols. Båda var max SEO-otimerade.

RESULTS It was all an SEO experiment but Google loved the sites. Many schools in the world also link to them and use the information in teaching. Today, both sites have a total of more than 30,000 visitors a month, although they are not mobile-friendly. Try searching for different animal symbols. E.g. “snake, lion, tiger, cat symbol” etc. Or “symbol of Islam”.