Never ask a surgeon about turkey carving...

[etherial]

I was unclear in my previous post about websites. I'm not looking for a modern web 2.0 data scheme. I want a simple front page that says "Hi, we are legitimately offering you $5 for your short story and will actually pay you if we use it". What information can we provide, besides our writing guidelines, that will help assure you that your $5 short story is not going to be stolen by us?

I am currently suffering from writer's block, not an overwhelming desire to curl up in a ball twitching because I can't get the @!#$ code to work.

Comments

[stillking.livejournal.com]

The simple "mail yourself a sealed, certified, dated letter containing your own short story, with an unbroken signature across the back envelope flap" is a decent stopgap method, and will stand up in court if/when necessary. Authors and publishers have been doing this for, like, 75 years.

To jumpstart this process, you might offer to send them a postage-paid envelope suitable for such activity. This is what half.com (now eBay) does for its sellers.

-- Sven

[catya.livejournal.com]

(I'm happy to build something for you.)

For front page content, I think you want a short description of the project, leading to a longer description.

A short description of what sort of stories you're looking for (again maybe linked to longer)

A form for people to submit entries, including a spot for uploading files.

Does any of that help with writer's block?

[siderea]

Ahh. Though I think you misunderstood the point of the other commenters. The single most important thing you can do to convince people that your company is trustworthy is to look trustworthy. To look "professional". This is image. This is design. Not text.

And one of the fascinating bits of class semiotics online has to do exactly with what pezzonovante said. Most people -- most small businesses and fly-by-night operations -- when they want to throw a quicky web page up, use WordPress or other blog-based CMS to do so. See, they're pre-packaged apps that come pre-skinned. You don't need to pay a designer or have design skills for it to look "professional".

The problem is that they look like "professional" blogs. To anyone with any net-savvy, they scream "cheap, fast, and possibly illegitimate".

I have a strong professional opinion as to what product you should be using to do this the moment you get beyond one page, because evaluating CMSes is one of the things I do for techjob -- ask if you want it -- but one way or another, you're going to need to attend to design.

[jon-libby.livejournal.com]

First thing I'd want to know is who retains copyright.

Is that the kind of thing you are asking?