Weekly Upgrade: Meet Henry, Tweet Us, Paypal

There aren't many visible changes in the upgrade this afternoon (Monday, November 2nd) because we've been spending much of our time on behind-the-scenes work for supporting subscriptions and coupons.

Here's the quick rundown:

Meet the FamZoo Cartoonist: Henry Payne

You've seen his wonderful drawings all over our site, but we finally got around to adding an entry for Henry Payne on our Team page in the About section. Here it is:

(Click to enlarge)

Some New Product and Charitable Recommendations

You've probably noticed that we show recommendations for family-friendly products as well as charitable organizations in the right hand sidebar of our site's pages. When you buy a product after clicking through one of these links on our site, FamZoo receives a small percentage of the revenue. This is known as affiliate marketing and is one of the revenue models that we're experimenting with. Right now, we just have a few products that Chris and I have recommended for testing purposes. We just added a couple more this week for some favorite books as well as two charitable "ads" for DonorsChoose and NothingButNets.

Ultimately, if we decide to pursue this model, we'll open things up for any member to nominate products that we will display at our discretion. We'll also allow members to comment and vote on products appearing on the site. Unpopular products (as judged by our members) would be dropped from the site.

All that said, we really have no intention of gumming up the site with a bunch of random advertising. That just wouldn't be in keeping with our mission of promoting sensible spending habits. So, our overwhelming preference is to buck the Internet trend and rely on modest subscription fees to build a viable business.

Subscriptions Via Paypal

We've decided to go with Paypal for handling subscription payments and have begun writing the underlying code to integrate with their services. We'll be working on the plumbing first and the screens will follow in the next few weeks.

Follow Us on Twitter

We set up a twitter account for FamZoo last week. We'll "tweet" short updates about the site there. In the near future, we'll also announce coupons and other special offers there too. Feel free to "tweet" us whenever the spirit moves you! Come follow us at: http://twitter.com/famzoo