BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

“An excellent website takes a particularly savvy blend of both great design and great code. Because of this, you often find designers having to figure out code and developers trying their hand at design…“

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Great article if you are involved in web design and if you read it thoroughly. I must admit - in our web design studio we sometimes get carried away with using free fonts and free images. However, the problem (at least sometimes) isn’t our laziness or not knowing any better.

Most problem arise with such “bad behavior” are tied to our inability to persuade clients not to use widespread imagery. At times it gets all but funny - “it worked for them, it will naturally work for us“. Naturally, it won’t. We’re getting better at explaining things to our clients, but we’re not flawless yet.

This, however, poses another opportunity to be better then competition. Alright, we’ll use that image you’ve seen a dozen times, but we’ll try to do it the best we can. So that the next time you see it on someone else’s web site, you would recall our client, not that other web site. Use that image to create a point of origin.

Creativity doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be creative.

Popularity: 21%

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Beginning this year I grabbed couple of special hosting deals with Netfirms. I was attracted by low cost and ability to run PHP4, PHP5 and .NET all under same account. As I spent more and more time trying to figure out why the heck a bunch of familiar and well-worked out scripts wouldn’t run on Netfirm’s hosting platform I came to know how messed up the whole deal was. Tech support responded to my e-mail after 4 days (I already forgot I filed a ticket). Performance was iffy at best - sometimes on par with my home-run server, sometimes way slower. ASP.NET application that runs without any tweaking on my company’s internal server failed to start in seemingly similar environment on Netfirms. You think I could use their tech support? Yeah, right.

So couple of days ago, as both my domain and account were reaching expiration date, I decided to move out. Transferring domain was the easiest, so I did this as soon as I have made the decision. Canceling account, however, is a much more difficult task. First of all - there is no way you can cancel from your control panel. And, there is no way of canceling via e-mail request to support. The only way to cancel the account with Netfirms is to call their toll-free number (I don’t want this idea to really get out, but I was expecting a 900- number) between 9am and 5pm EST and request the cancellation over the phone. Let me check what year is this? Right, still 2007.

Generally, I wouldn’t go over such a routine task as canceling some online service unless there was some incentive. Well, the incentive is as follows - nowhere on Netfirms’ web site nor in their knowledge base does it say how to cancel the account. While doing the digging I stumbled upon some blogs that describe exactly same problems with Netfirms I was facing - poor service, non-existent customer service, hard-to-find cancellation procedure.

However, I don’t see anyone at Netfirms to care. They seem to be overly busy taking new sign ups.

Popularity: 32%

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