Make it easy to buy from a salesperson or on-line -- whichever the client chooses. We do that. It never ceases to amaze me how many of our competitors do a pretty good job of describing their products and then have the infamous "call for pricing" verbiage on their sites. As a business-to-business and business-to-consumer buyer, my reaction to "call for pricing" is that I call another vendor for pricing.

Make your job board easy to use. We went through a complete re-design 11 months ago to make our site incredibly easy to use. We've since found some things that are making our site harder to use than it should be -- mostly our navigation. We're about to fix those things.

The job board should remind the client of tasks they should or need to do, including when the client's package expires. We send an email to all active clients on the first of each month that lists all of the positions they had running the previous months along with detailed statistics on each, the number of postings remaining in their account, etc. But we're working on improvements to this report to also show remaining inventory for emails, cell phone text messages, etc. that the client has purchased.

The client should be able to send their postings to the board via an XML feed and also use intermediate services that allow the client to post a job once and have it to go multiple boards. We do this quite well since our re-launch almost a year ago.

Allow different clients to post jobs in different ways. I'm not quite sure what Jeff was envisioning here, but I suspect that he wants to be able to use formatting and graphics in his postings so his postings won't look the same as the postings coming from his competitor. We have a WSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor that allows our clients to format their jobs postings just like they format a Microsoft Word document, including being able to upload graphics.

Don't try to sell something to your clients every time they visit your site. Jeff singled out Monster and Careerbuilder as the biggest offenders of using interstitial ads. Those are the ads that appear in between the page you're on and the page you want to go to -- sometimes inaccurately referred to as the similar but different pop-ups. A lot of job boards use interstitials. We don't. The annoyance factor isn't worth the very small additional revenue they generate.

Don't add features that slow down your site so that your net value to your client decreases. I've heard complaints about this from some clients of Monster. Some of them have told me that Monster's re-designed site has great "wow" factor but it takes them hours to post jobs and search the resume bank when before it took them minutes. If it now takes an hour to find a resume and before it took 10 minutes, then the new design needs to deliver a resume that's six times as good just to break even. If the few complaints that I've heard from Monster are widespread, then that would explain the rumors about their sales revenues for first quarter being only 40 percent of their goals.

Listen to your clients as they often have useful comments or suggestions. We definitely do this but there's always room for improvement. One of the problems that we have and share with the vast majority of niche boards is that our development budgets are far, far smaller than the development budgets of sites like Monster and Careerbuilder. So they can afford to buy a company for $80 million for that company's technology. Many niche boards don't even come close to generating $1 million in sales per year. We're well over that, but many aren't. If you're generating $800,000 in sales a year, you can't afford to buy better technology for $80 million. But most suggestions don't require an $80 million investment. Most are fairly inexpensive tweaks, like the comments we've been receiving about our navigation. They'll take a developer a day or two to fix. That's not terribly expensive.

Regularly improve and update your job board. Jeff wrote that some sites he uses have gone two to three years between revisions. He added, quite correctly, that going two to three years between revisions is 60 or 70 years in Internet time. I suspect that virtually all of the boards that Jeff uses are making revisions but many and perhaps most are behind the scenes so not very obvious to him. But then they should do a better job of communicating those improvements. If your clients don't notice the improvements then how valuable can they be and if they aren't valuable then why are you spending money on them?

Provide reporting so your clients can justify spending part of their budget with your job board. We definitely provide reporting. We're actually incredibly transparent. Take a look at any job posting running on our site and you'll see the number of candidates views and apply clicks. We email the same information out on the first of each month. And we provide similar reporting to our email, cell phone text messaging, and banner ad clients.