6 ms·

Some suggestions for you: - Style it up a bit using twitter bootstrap. The main button looks awkward. - Found a small company (UG) with 500EUR capital to hold

by bflesch 10y ago

Some suggestions for you: - Style it up a bit using twitter bootstrap. The main button looks awkward. - Found a small company (UG) with 500EUR capital to hold rights on the site if you want to further professionalize this project. - Add caching for search queries (it took ~ 10sec to calculate 800€ and 100€ which might be some of the most requested price points) - Add large buttons at the top which show the most sensible price points - As the others have said, this is easily expandible to other european countries. Add a French / Italian / Swedish version. - Add some social stuff so people can comment etc - Take some inspiration from PC parts picker If you want to talk feel free to shoot me an email.

cruppstahl 10y ago
"Found a small company (UG) with 500EUR capital to hold rights on the site if you want to further professionalize this project." Can you elaborate a bit? I have the same problem as the original poster. But founding a company requires IHK membership fees and tax consultant fees. From what I hear this amounts to ~ 1500 €/year.
- jakobegger 10y ago
  I'd recommend against that. You'll probably be fine as a sole proprietor (Einzelunternehmen). A separate legal entity (UG / GmbH / Limited / whatever) is mainly useful for three things: - avoiding personal liability - shared ownership - tax optimisation For a website like this, there is practically no liability to worry about. And if you don't have a partner, you don't need to worry about shared ownership. For tax purposes, the overhead of a legal entity only pays off if you already have a lot of revenue (in Austria, more than 200k€ per year)
  - cruppstahl 10y ago
    Agree for a website. I'm selling software licenses, avoiding personal liability would be interesting (if it was affordable).
    - jakobegger 10y ago
      "Limited liability" is mainly related to financial liability (taxes, wages, payments for supplies). If you are worried about your software accidentally deleting all your users files, getting insurance would probably be better than founding a GmbH (and more affordable too).
      - cruppstahl 10y ago
        Interesting - thanks for your answers!
  - WA 10y ago
    I second that. There is no need to start a UG or GmbH. Especially not for avoiding personal liability! Because as the director of the company (which you are as a solo founder), you ARE still personally liable (GmbH-Geschäftsführer-Haftung). Get a Gewerbeschein. It's 25€ or so. IHK might want membership fees, but they are really low if you don't have much income. Go with Kleinunternehmerregelung. It makes many things easier if your revenue is below 17,500€ per year. Don't forget: The first 8,000€ in income per year are tax-free.
    - cruppstahl 10y ago
      Thanks for the insights!
- bflesch 10y ago
  If you create a legal entitiy you will have to pay taxes / IHK (depending on your annual profit) and some tax consultant fees. But in my eyes the benefit overweights: - all your business expenses are kept in a professional setting and don't screw with your personal finances - you will have a separate bank account - you have a legal entity you can later sell to a real business - you can use leftover money to (re-)invest into nearby business areas - you have limited liability (and you can buy proper insurances for your risky business activities!!) Your local IHK will be happy to guide you through this process. I also started off as a sole proprietor and moved up the food chain through UG to GmbH(s), and there is so much you will learn during this process. I think every entrepreneur should have experience with local trade laws and taxes, so in my eyes you can't start early enough. If you have any questions feel free to ping me.
  - onli 10y ago
    I was thinking in the direction of a limited in the UK, having read that this is the easiest way. Do you have an opinion on that? I'm a german living in France, the tax situation is already difficult enough, but yeah – I also think it is a good idea to separate any project income and costs from my personal finances
    - bflesch 10y ago
      I strongly advise you against forming a limited in the UK. The setup cost might be low but if something unusual happens the fees for expert advice will eat you alive. Furthermore UK Ltd has a very bad reputation in mainland EU because they are used by many people who aren't allowed to form companies in they home countries (e.g. Germany) any more due to previous bancruptcies. If you do it out of tax reasons and you are willing to take the risk of not being able to do any administrative "things" by going to a local government agency in the town where you live, then form an entity outside of EU for example in singapore. Again, I'd suggest you start your first steps in business locally where you can talk to actual people. There are a lot of services available that can help you out in person.
      - onli 10y ago
- pjlegato 10y ago
  You can form a US corporation for approximately 100-200 per year in most states (California being a notable much more expensive exception.) There is no requirement that you actually live in the US or even visit. Stripe now has "US incorporation as a service": https://stripe.com/atlas https://stripe.com/atlas
onli 10y ago
Could you show me how the main button looks for you? I'm wondering whether its intended design is what you see (certainly possible! If I learned one thing here, then it is that to find a working design that caters to a sufficient high amount of visitors is hard). Caching of course is already implemented. Is it possible the cache was just stale for you, did the second load also take that much time? I really like the idea of letting people comment. It would be great to have a small community on the site, as an alternative to only piggy-back on others. Thanks also for the offer with the email. I might very well take you up on it :)
- miltonsegura 10y ago
  There are websites that let you preview your website in different browsers and even different countries. I can't remember any but a quick online search should find them.
  - DaSilentStorm 10y ago
    Check out https://www.browserstack.com/ https://www.browserstack.com/ or if you want to try something without signing up: http://browsershots.org/https://www.pc-kombo.de/ http://browsershots.org/https://www.pc-kombo.de/
- bflesch 10y ago
  For me it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/MxhVx6Z.png https://i.imgur.com/MxhVx6Z.png I have pretty aggressive ad filtering so this might have an effect on how it is displayed :)
  - onli 10y ago
    Thanks. That's pretty much how it is supposed to look :)
kafkaesq 10y ago
- Style it up a bit using twitter bootstrap. Or just spend an hour or so figuring out how basic styling form styling works. If you pull in a framework for every itch you have to scratch (even as "lightweight" and standardized as Bootstrap), without taking the considerably greater time to actually understand the framework actually works -- you'll likely regret it some day. Usability-wise, the biggest issues I see are: - even after we select for English, we still get captions in German. - in the hover help boxes (that appear over the green "Leistung" bars), all the performance metric (?)names are camelcased; presumably because they are fresh out of some database. These should also be proper names, the way they normally appear out in the wild. - there's lots of wasted space. The entire result set should fit on one page, with no need for scrolling, if at all possible.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  Or just spend an hour or so figuring out how basic styling form styling works. Should you do that if you don't already know how it works? Form styling in a responsive, consistent, and cross-browser way is actually pretty tricky, even for an experienced front-end developer! I totally understand the antipathy for using such frameworks, and I suggest that they're ill-suited to larger projects where you have the resources to solve these problems in a better way. But Bootstrap has it's place, and the clue is in the name.
  - drumdance 10y ago
    I second this, particularly if you're a consultant and expect to hand the project off at some point. I inherited a project that would advance a lot faster if the original developers had used Bootstrap or another CSS framework. They also chose to use an obscure JavaScript framework instead of Angular or React, so it's impossible to recruit anyone with experience, and you can't take advantage of the plug-in ecosystems.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    Should you do that if you don't already know how it works? This is a tough one. But my general instincts suggest that yes, there are significant benefits to be had from at least getting traction on figuring out how stuff works natively before adopting a framework. BTW I'm certainly not anti-Bootstrap. It's just that suspect the tipping point in favor of its adoption lies somewhere beyond the threshold of a single form button.

by bflesch 10y ago

cruppstahl 10y ago

"Found a small company (UG) with 500EUR capital to hold rights on the site if you want to further professionalize this project." Can you elaborate a bit? I have the same problem as the original poster. But founding a company requires IHK membership fees and tax consultant fees. From what I hear this amounts to ~ 1500 €/year.

jakobegger 10y ago
I'd recommend against that. You'll probably be fine as a sole proprietor (Einzelunternehmen). A separate legal entity (UG / GmbH / Limited / whatever) is mainly useful for three things: - avoiding personal liability - shared ownership - tax optimisation For a website like this, there is practically no liability to worry about. And if you don't have a partner, you don't need to worry about shared ownership. For tax purposes, the overhead of a legal entity only pays off if you already have a lot of revenue (in Austria, more than 200k€ per year)
- cruppstahl 10y ago
  Agree for a website. I'm selling software licenses, avoiding personal liability would be interesting (if it was affordable).
  - jakobegger 10y ago
    "Limited liability" is mainly related to financial liability (taxes, wages, payments for supplies). If you are worried about your software accidentally deleting all your users files, getting insurance would probably be better than founding a GmbH (and more affordable too).
    - cruppstahl 10y ago
      Interesting - thanks for your answers!
- WA 10y ago
  I second that. There is no need to start a UG or GmbH. Especially not for avoiding personal liability! Because as the director of the company (which you are as a solo founder), you ARE still personally liable (GmbH-Geschäftsführer-Haftung). Get a Gewerbeschein. It's 25€ or so. IHK might want membership fees, but they are really low if you don't have much income. Go with Kleinunternehmerregelung. It makes many things easier if your revenue is below 17,500€ per year. Don't forget: The first 8,000€ in income per year are tax-free.
  - cruppstahl 10y ago
    Thanks for the insights!
bflesch 10y ago
If you create a legal entitiy you will have to pay taxes / IHK (depending on your annual profit) and some tax consultant fees. But in my eyes the benefit overweights: - all your business expenses are kept in a professional setting and don't screw with your personal finances - you will have a separate bank account - you have a legal entity you can later sell to a real business - you can use leftover money to (re-)invest into nearby business areas - you have limited liability (and you can buy proper insurances for your risky business activities!!) Your local IHK will be happy to guide you through this process. I also started off as a sole proprietor and moved up the food chain through UG to GmbH(s), and there is so much you will learn during this process. I think every entrepreneur should have experience with local trade laws and taxes, so in my eyes you can't start early enough. If you have any questions feel free to ping me.
- onli 10y ago
  I was thinking in the direction of a limited in the UK, having read that this is the easiest way. Do you have an opinion on that? I'm a german living in France, the tax situation is already difficult enough, but yeah – I also think it is a good idea to separate any project income and costs from my personal finances
  - bflesch 10y ago
    I strongly advise you against forming a limited in the UK. The setup cost might be low but if something unusual happens the fees for expert advice will eat you alive. Furthermore UK Ltd has a very bad reputation in mainland EU because they are used by many people who aren't allowed to form companies in they home countries (e.g. Germany) any more due to previous bancruptcies. If you do it out of tax reasons and you are willing to take the risk of not being able to do any administrative "things" by going to a local government agency in the town where you live, then form an entity outside of EU for example in singapore. Again, I'd suggest you start your first steps in business locally where you can talk to actual people. There are a lot of services available that can help you out in person.
    - onli 10y ago
pjlegato 10y ago
You can form a US corporation for approximately 100-200 per year in most states (California being a notable much more expensive exception.) There is no requirement that you actually live in the US or even visit. Stripe now has "US incorporation as a service": https://stripe.com/atlas https://stripe.com/atlas

onli 10y ago

Could you show me how the main button looks for you? I'm wondering whether its intended design is what you see (certainly possible! If I learned one thing here, then it is that to find a working design that caters to a sufficient high amount of visitors is hard). Caching of course is already implemented. Is it possible the cache was just stale for you, did the second load also take that much time? I really like the idea of letting people comment. It would be great to have a small community on the site, as an alternative to only piggy-back on others. Thanks also for the offer with the email. I might very well take you up on it :)

miltonsegura 10y ago
There are websites that let you preview your website in different browsers and even different countries. I can't remember any but a quick online search should find them.
- DaSilentStorm 10y ago
  Check out https://www.browserstack.com/ https://www.browserstack.com/ or if you want to try something without signing up: http://browsershots.org/https://www.pc-kombo.de/ http://browsershots.org/https://www.pc-kombo.de/
bflesch 10y ago
For me it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/MxhVx6Z.png https://i.imgur.com/MxhVx6Z.png I have pretty aggressive ad filtering so this might have an effect on how it is displayed :)
- onli 10y ago
  Thanks. That's pretty much how it is supposed to look :)

kafkaesq 10y ago

- Style it up a bit using twitter bootstrap. Or just spend an hour or so figuring out how basic styling form styling works. If you pull in a framework for every itch you have to scratch (even as "lightweight" and standardized as Bootstrap), without taking the considerably greater time to actually understand the framework actually works -- you'll likely regret it some day. Usability-wise, the biggest issues I see are: - even after we select for English, we still get captions in German. - in the hover help boxes (that appear over the green "Leistung" bars), all the performance metric (?)names are camelcased; presumably because they are fresh out of some database. These should also be proper names, the way they normally appear out in the wild. - there's lots of wasted space. The entire result set should fit on one page, with no need for scrolling, if at all possible.

matthewmacleod 10y ago
Or just spend an hour or so figuring out how basic styling form styling works. Should you do that if you don't already know how it works? Form styling in a responsive, consistent, and cross-browser way is actually pretty tricky, even for an experienced front-end developer! I totally understand the antipathy for using such frameworks, and I suggest that they're ill-suited to larger projects where you have the resources to solve these problems in a better way. But Bootstrap has it's place, and the clue is in the name.
- drumdance 10y ago
  I second this, particularly if you're a consultant and expect to hand the project off at some point. I inherited a project that would advance a lot faster if the original developers had used Bootstrap or another CSS framework. They also chose to use an obscure JavaScript framework instead of Angular or React, so it's impossible to recruit anyone with experience, and you can't take advantage of the plug-in ecosystems.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  Should you do that if you don't already know how it works? This is a tough one. But my general instincts suggest that yes, there are significant benefits to be had from at least getting traction on figuring out how stuff works natively before adopting a framework. BTW I'm certainly not anti-Bootstrap. It's just that suspect the tipping point in favor of its adoption lies somewhere beyond the threshold of a single form button.