pinksoda
My friend is a renter and he has wanted a renters interface like this for years.
I've had several successful sites, but dozens more failures and I'm glad I didn't waste the time making them all easily scalable; they simply didn't need it.
Cross those bridges when you get there. I don't see this leverage you keep referring to. They restructure businesses all the time. Having the right incorporation doesn't make your startup/idea/business any better, so why don't you focus on improving those things?
It was difficult to iterate the business, I was locked into a lease, and the equipment was too big to move easily, so I couldn't just pack up and move to a new location when I realized I didn't pick the greatest location.
The worst part was dealing with the local governing agencies for insurance, workman's comp, town, state, federal, permits, etc. They shut me down for a day or two over something trivial and I spent 8 hours driving around to fix it. Felt like the equiv. of my domain being seized and it wasn't worth it for such a thin profit margin.
There was no doubt that I could make it work, but I didn't want to spend the time or money trying to get it right. I have the internet startup stuff down pat; I'll just stick to what I know best.
When an attack this big targets a small business, they usually just null route the servers, essentially sending all data into a blackhole. The downside is that their website will be inaccessible by legitimate users. The upside is that they don't have to pay for the used bandwidth, which is pricey at 10Gbps.
Start-Up Junkies. 8 episodes on Hulu for free.
The IRS usually takes 3 years to find a mistake like yours. It sounds like you've been filing wrong since 2005. The penalties suck but you got to keep that extra 15% for a really long time.
Most importantly, you have a really long time(6-12 months) from your initial notice from the IRS, before they start trying to collect. You couldn't pay right now even if you had the money, that was my experience anyways. I received a different letter from them, months later, and was finally able to pay.
Everyone knows you don't mess with the IRS. I don't get how you did this wrong for 6 years, never researched it, asked someone, or talked to an accountant. My gut tells me you probably knew what you were doing.
Pull the trigger. Buy it. You won't regret it.
I know a guy who is a GENIUS at marketing stuff like this. Let me know if you want an introduction.
"WePay helps you collect, manage, and spend money." should be displayed above the fold and have embedded screenshots or an embedded video nearby. I don't recommend popping it up in a lightbox.
Include a "create account" link near your "Sign in" link. The top right corner is prime real estate and needs a call-to-action for current users and potential users.
The site seems segmented because of the various different styles and content widths used. I found three different widths so far (1010px, 960px, and 770px).
The logo needs to go. It's really bad.
Move "featured in" to the bottom.
Move "What kinds of groups are using WePay?" up more. Remove the italics on the links.
Take a look at this: http://i.imgur.com/4zHX7.png - I threw it together in 5 minutes, so don't judge it too much. White is the primary color here and you'll notice that it is visually easy to follow. Looking at the current WePay is actually straining on the eyes.
The homepage layout is all wrong though. Poor element placement, messy typography, and the color scheme is off. It looks amateur and unpolished. All those SEO'd subpages are worthless if they don't convert.
Also:
- Upgrade to Nginx 0.7.67, there was a lot of bug fixes in 0.7.65 and 0.7.66.
- Limit the number of login attempts to prevent brute forcing.
- Don't show "That email address was not found" when someone tries to recover a password. You are giving out too much info, which can be used maliciously.
- Block scraper/vuln scanner/curl scripts by user-agent to keep away the script kiddies and botnets.
- Don't host your Javascript on Google. This gives hackers another possible point of entry. It's probably safe, but you're better off limiting points of entry.
- Use mod_rewrite as an additional layer of security. You'll need to slightly modify it to make it work with Nginx.
- Remove "access info anytime" and "post to my wall anytime" when signing up with Facebook.
- Limit SSH access by IP address.
Feel free to contact me if you need help.
Doesn't work with WWW.