Adaptability: German Coins – Interfanatic Customer Spotlight

Adapt or die!

Ron Guth has a numismatic career spanning decades as a pinnacle expert. He’s an author, an experienced executive, an auctioneer, … and proprietor of German Coins.

Guth built his first website around the same time we started our business – around 1998. (We started in 1999.) And as the Internet has changed, Ron Guth has changed with it.

As most of our successful clients, Guth embodies our quoter’s thought. Jessica Hagedorn is a bit of a maverick and found success in many ways – all of them through knowing how and when to adapt.

German Coins: Adapting to the Market

I had the great honor of working with Ron Guth when we did some marketing work for PCGS (Collector’s Universe) and handling the marketing for the second tranche brought up from the Ship of Gold. We worked together on more than that, too. It was always great working with Guth. He’s such a pro! Soft spoken, self-effacing, kind, and one of the most knowledgeable and sharp individuals you will ever meet.

And you have to be to take on the niche of numismatics that is German Coins! Coins of most countries are complex and intricate. There are entire libraries dedicated to the two-hundred denominations of U.S. Coins through history.

But German Coins encompass not only the intricacies of the modern era (West German, East German, and Unified Germany), but the upheavals of the 20th century and going back through the German States. Forget 200 denominations, how about 200 States, each with it’s own unique set of non-decimal denominations! And then there’s porcelain coinage, notgeld, precious metals coinage, territories – it’s insane. For reference: if you’ve ever seen the phone book size Krause “Standard Catalog of World Coins”, you know that of the three inches of material, US coins inhabit… maybe 1/8th inch of the 1900-2000 volume. For the 1800-1900 volume, twice that. German States comprise a full inch of the 1700-1800 Krause.

Ron Guth is one of the few sharp enough to take on such a daunting task.

But if you want a deep and rich niche of numismatics to delve into, German Coins are for you! That would be one helluva type set.

We began helping Guth with GermanCoins.com a few years ago. We added a shopping cart to his site, and gave it a quick redesign at that time. More recently, we relaunched the site with an all-new design that makes the site easier and faster than ever.

This quick video shows the changes the site has seen through its life.

Check it out now to see the latest design: https://germancoins.com

Adaptability: An Interfanatic Quality

Adaptability is the simple secret of survival.

Jessica Hagedorn

To survive and yes to thrive, we have to change. We have seen so much change through our 20 years in business. From Netscape to Google, from MySpace to Facebook, from Nokia to iPhones, from AdWords to Yelp, we’ve seen so many fads come and go.

One thing that hasn’t changed: having your own website to tell your story the way you want to tell it is the way to go. You’re not reliant on some external force presenting your message. It’s on you. You get what you want.

“I don’t need a website, I just use Facebook.” Now that facebook is the home of fake news and toxicity on the Internet, that may not be the place for you. Plenty of businesses use facebook successfully. But if you want your message shown without distraction, it may not be the best place to showcase your products and services.

“I don’t need a website, I just use Yelp.” Which is great, so long as you have 5-star reviews! But what happens when Yelp doesn’t prioritize your correct reviews, but rather chooses to showcase some nutjob’s? You have to pay their fee, and even then you may not get what you want.

Websites are not the be-all, end-all, but I’ve heard so many times through my career that “websites are a thing of the past”, and yet here we are.

Kinda like Ron Guth and German Coins. They adapt.

Interfanatic Service Focus: Interfanatic Power Business Website Production

Last week, I told you about our Website Management services, which keeps sites running strong and keep the surprises away. Today, let’s talk about our Power Business Website production.

We’ve adapted this service multiple times through the years. The main thing you get in any service is labor – our prices are determined by the time it takes to properly complete the service you need. In the case of Power Business Website Production, we build a proper business website for you with either a focus on SEO (which most businesses care about) or speed (which is important, but not always the priority.) If you want both, look for our The Works service, which includes both incredible SEO, incredible speed and performance, and more. If neither are critical, look at our Basic Site Production.

Most customers we’ve experienced are most focused on SEO – getting traffic to their site. We’ve always done some SEO service in our builds, it’s just a requirement of the times. But to really focus on SEO in 2021, there’s considerable extra labor involved. And the results are always worth it – especially in the long run.

“…we invest extra time with our SEO-focused builds, we invest extra time in lightning performance for speed-focused builds.”

Some customers are not interested in SEO, (surprisingly.) For those customers, we emphasize the speed and performance of their website. When you have a business that is not concerned with SEO, it’s because you have enough customers – you just want referrals to have something sharp to see when they check you out. As we invest extra time with our SEO-focused build, we invest extra time in lightning performance for speed-focused builds. We have a couple of options here, including headless website builds, that might work best for your application. Talk to us about your needs and we’ll guide you.

If you focus on speed with your Power Business Website Build, there can still be some SEO done. If you focus on SEO with your Power Business Website Build, there will still be good performance. But getting those last few percent of each are labor intensive, so that’s what we do. We invest the labor on your behalf to get you the website you want.

Interfanatic: Adapting to Thrive

Our business changes every second of every day. We don’t do the same thing we did in 1999. Our systems and processes have evolved to adapt to the current business model that works best for our clients. What hasn’t changed is our commitment to excellence. We haven’t changed our willingness to what’s needed to ensure we do everything in our power to help them be successful.

You see, some things need to be adapted. Others, like doing what’s best for our customers, do not need to change.


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