Saturday, August 27, 2005

Website blues

For months now, I've been creating a web site with which I hope to help people choose and then put together Home Theater systems. There's a lot to learn, and competing technologies are racing ahead of each other in a game of leapfrog. Interest in flat panel displays is HUGE and prices are dropping. HDTV is wonderful. Surround sound is immersive! But how do you put it together? Thus, my website. It has become my full-time job. Learning how to construct one was part of that, and the company from which I bought the site building program makes it much, much easier. I hope to generate income from the links... at first it's only a trickle, but you CAN make a good living, eventually.

The other day, though, things started to go haywire. Forums devoted to this company's web-building products started to buzz with "me too"s. It seems if you edited a page you then somehow incurred gremlins that dropped graphics and affected headlines. Why this matters is twofold: it appears your site is amateur and your web-ranking in search engines could be affected, devaluing your site in a keyword search. This is bad.

Surprisingly, the company has not E mailed its customers with this news. It has been reported on one of the forums that they acknowledge the problem and are 'working on it' - it was also reported, not officially, that it was 'fixed' and then other users responded 'no it isn't.' I consider that irresponsible customer service. (And this is a LARGE company!)

I had hoped to turn this enterprise into a money making opportunity, but just don't have it in me to start over if I have to. If they don't fix this bug, and if sites destroy themselves, then rather than do it again with crossed fingers, I'd go do something else.

How do the hurricane victims in Florida start all over again?

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