We were happy to discover that HourTown was featured today on Feed Growth. It’s a great blog with a unique approach on presenting new ideas to a small business owner. The mission of the site to help small businesses create a “customer feeding frenzy”. This should be required reading for any small business owner who wants more nibbles on their line.
It’s great advice. Something Donny Deutch is famous for saying all the time on his excellent television show. Last week I got a phone call from an inspiring entrepreneur, Tonya R Taylor. Tonya has a thriving newsletter targeted at small business owners which provides inspiration and techniques for “faking it until you make it”. Recently she discovered HourTown and shared it with her community. Take a moment and discover Tonya’s tips. She a very engaging person who has some excellent advice to share with small business owners on her website.
We are pleased to announce that one of first customers, Scot Maitland, has returned to the massage industry and is once again offering the convenience of HourTown online scheduling to his clients. Scot’s happy to be back in Austin, Texas and we have no doubt that Austin is happy to have him back!
HourTown goes to great lengths to insure that you always receive an instant email notification whenever a customer schedules an appointment with you using our system. However, due to the increasingly aggressive spam and junk mail filters being implemented by email providers, occasionally we will receive a complaint from a concerned business owner reporting to us that they “didn’t get our emailâ€. To prevent this, we recommend that you check your spam and junk mail folders and mark messages from HourTown as a “safe†or “trusted†sender.
HourTown’s beta period has officially ended and we’re excited to announce that we will be launching the service nationally in Spring 2008. Existing users of HourTown will not be disrupted in any way during our upgrade process. If you’re using HourTown to provide online scheduling for your small business today, thank you! If you’re looking for an online scheduling solution and haven’t yet tried HourTown - we hope you’ll give us a try. 
Hi HourTown Community,
This evening, from approximately 9:30 -11:30pm PST the HourTown website will be down for scheduled maintenance. We’re going to be launching several improvements to the website that we will be describing in more detail over the coming days. Thanks to everyone who has shared their feedback to make HourTown the best online appointment book available.
Just wanted to congratulate our friend Leslie Evans on the re-launch of her website, www.calmbyleslie.com. She’s done a wonderful job of using a blog format for her business website. And hey, is that an HourTown button we see on the homepage? 
Nice work Leslie, we love the site!
Power up your website with the ability to accept online appointments and customer leads 24 hours a day. It’s easy and HourTown is free to use. Check out the website that HourTown customer Chrisy Mountin just launched today!
Christy Mountin Massage Therapist
Nice site Christy!
Thought I would write a quick post about the two types of online appointment scenarios that HourTown currently provides. When you setup an HourTown account you have a couple choices in terms of how your business accepts online appointments, “request” mode or “guaranteed” mode. What’s the difference? When your account is in “request” mode, your customers request appointment times with your business and you are given the option of approving the requests, or suggesting an alternative time to the customer, if that’s the case.
Imagine you are planning to leave the office a bit early on a Friday afternoon to start your weekend, but a lone customer has scheduled your last time slot of the day. Greeaatttt… You can avoid scenarios like this with HourTown online appointment software in “request” mode. We keep you in control of your schedule by making it a snap for you to suggest an alternative time to the customer in a friendly and professional way. This is the favorite option for HourTown merchants.
With “guaranteed” appointments, when your customer makes an appointment, it’s instantly confirmed and you are agreeing to honor the customer’s request for a specific time slot. This scenario is best for your customers. They see a time they want, the book it, they’re done.
Got additional questions about how HourTown can work for your business? Post a comment below and we’ll respond asap.
Happy Monday HourTown community. As promised, I just wanted to follow up with some more information regarding all the new features that we’ve been launching here at HourTown.
Import your address book
Inviting your customers to book online just got easier. Import your address book from Yahoo, AOL, Hotmal, Gmail with just one click. Visit the “Customers” tab and click “Import email addresses” to see it in action.
Build a buzz with advertising tools
HourTown is online appointment software that builds a buzz. How do we help your business build a buzz? With our growing supply of free advertising tools. Automatically list your business across several popular online classifieds websites and get listed into the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.
Steal these buttons!
HourTown is extremely easy to integrate onto your website or online advertisement. Just copy and past a couple lines of HTML and voila! Your website is ready to accept online appointments from new and exisiting customers! (Note: the buttons above link to an HourTown demo profile. The buttons we’ll give you will link to YOUR HourTown profile.)
Here’s an example of an HourTown customer that has added online appointments to his website www.massagebymauro.comÂ