My SEO partner and I met with a prospective client today - and it’s a good thing we met at her shop!

Based on her existing website and the new, 28-page website that some designer has been building for her for the last 12 months (I kid you not), my assumptions about the business were pretty solid. To my surprise, I walked in the door and see something totally different!

This woman and her husband have an interesting, viable and serious business going on but the impression one gets from both her old and in-progress websites is that of a lone hobbyist.

She asked, at the conclusion of our meeting, whether we could help her with presenting a true and accurate picture of her business and getting it found on Google. Our answer was: of course. This is what we do for a living.

When she told us about the current designer, what he has and has not done, and what he’s convinced them of, I mentally shook my head. It’s sad when small businesses are taken advantage of this way; the designer is building them a site that’s not standards-compliant, valid, accessible, or search engine-friendly and says absolutely nothing about the true nature of their work.

And the fact that this redesign experience has gone on for a year now… I just want to help this company. I really do. I think they could be a strong competitor in their industry in our region - if more people knew about them and understood what they really do.

I’m working with a prospective client who needs specialized e-commerce assistance - more than I’m capable of doing in a timely manner. So I found an experienced PHP programmer who can provide this expertise.

We met with the client today and all went well. The programmer has a good grasp of the rather non-traditional desires of the client as far as the workings of the checkout process, and that’s great. I’m not going to make as much money from the job as I originally thought, because I’m now not going to be the one doing the cart, but the client will get exactly what he wants and hopefully I’ll get a good long-term business relationship out of it.

What irked me today was the way the programmer continually referred to me as ‘the one who’ll make it all pretty.’

‘Pretty’ isn’t the tip of the iceberg. What I bring to the table goes way beyond aesthetics.

It’s 9 years of personal e-commerce experience and 12 years of building websites; a strong graphic design background; an understanding of search engine optimization practices; a deep understanding of cross-browser compatibility and web standards; familiarity with Section 508 accessibility guidelines; the ability to partner with my clients and provide as much education on the care of feeding of their web presence as they can take; an understanding of information architecture and navigation; and an understanding of how to create a website that engages the customer from page one.

Programmers think that my job is all about aesthetics, and hard-core designers think that I shouldn’t use the word ‘creative’ in my business name because I’m not really a creative if I work with code. I’ve actually been told that to my face…

What exactly am I? I refer to myself as a designer/developer on my business cards and I thought that covered the bases pretty well, but perhaps not. Should I consider reworking my title yet again? Web strategist? Web jack-of-all-trades? Web designoper? Web develsigner?

I launched a client on GoDaddy hosting today, and while I was nosing around in his Wordpress admin site I noticed how very sl-l-o-o-w it was. I did a little research on GoDaddy and found that that’s pretty much the consensus.

One writer mentioned a reverse IP lookup tool that tells you how many domains are on any given IP address. I checked my client’s name and found over 3,500 other domains are hosted there. Then I checked my own host server and there are 1,900.

I don’t know what’s considered too many, but I suspect that GoDaddy might be being slowed down by sheer numbers here.

For the past few days, I’ve been unable to dump anything from phpMyAdmin. The host told me it was because my DB was large (wasn’t) and another suggested I try another browser.

I use FF for everything, but I tried it in IE7 and voila, it worked.

Doing a bit more investigating I found a forum where someone was having a similar issue and the suggestion was ‘toss your cookies.’

I tossed mine, and suddenly FF is exporting again in phpMyAdmin. Lesson learned (and recorded here for future reference).

REVISED 3/20/08

Actually this turned out to be a FF profile issue. Here’s what Mozilla told me:

Occasionally a Firefox profile will get gummed up in a way that is very difficult to track down.

As a diagnostic, you could try using a “clean” Firefox profile: Creating a new Firefox profile on Windows @ MozillaZine Knowledge Base. If that works, then one of your extensions may be at fault, or a bad setting, or a corrupted file. If the cure isn’t obvious, you can move your bookmarks and (selectively) your other settings to the new profile: Migrating settings to a new profile @ MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

I tried to obtain an authorization code from Register.com today and gave up. I sat on hold for 45 minutes - there were no ‘we estimate you have 10 minutes’ or ‘are number 20 in the queue,’ which would have been helpful.

I contacted a Live Chat tech and asked about wait times on the phone, he invited me to ‘continue to wait and my call would be answered shortly’ and he ‘would forward my comments to the appropriate department but could not give me my authorization key.’

This is why all my domains are now on Enom.

We used Authorize.net for about 9 years for our retail site with almost no problems. When we sold our business last fall, we highly recommended the buyer stick with them, and she chose to.

We closed our own account in December, but had to reopen it briefly in January to retrieve some tax data. However, getting it closed again is another matter.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve tried to contact tech support several times to have my account closed. The shortest wait time I’ve encountered has been 28 minutes, the longest over 48 minutes (and these are at the beginning and end of the day, when they suggest that wait times are shorter).

Sorry, but I think this is ridiculous. It has never in the past taken me more than 5-10 minutes to speak to a human at Authorize.net, even during very busy holiday periods.  I’m wondering what’s happening with them to cause such extraordinary delays in service… And I’ll definitely keep it in mind if my customers ask me about them in the future for other ecommerce solutions.

So today our phones have been slowing fading away, the call quality and ability to send and receive calls going steadily downhill.

I went down to reboot the Vonage phone adapter and discovered that, for the second time in about 4 months, the adapter cord has failed. I called them up (on my cell, of course) and after sitting on hold for 15 minutes got a relatively well-spoken tech.

I asked him about this cord - I’m a bit concerned that I’ve had this problem twice in a few months. He tells me that overall, this device tends to fail every 8 months.

Does that not seem a bit extreme? Why would you sell and support a product that fails every 8 months, on average? Granted it’s just a power cable, but still…

I asked about alternatives and he tried to sell me a $79.00 box. I don’t need that. But the next time this cable fails, I might reconsider my choice of phone service for a few minutes. The last time it happened someone sent me a travel charger which looks nothing like an adaptor cable, and it took me 10 days to get my service back on.

I love bookstores. We only have one large one in my town, but I could spend hours looking around with a cold frapaccino in hand. And do, on a regular basis.

One of my pet peeves is people who walk around the bookstore blathering on their cell phones. IMHO, bookstores are like libraries - they are places for people to think, read, and entertain their curiosity. Loud conversations aren’t appropriate. I don’t have them myself because I think it’s very rude.

Today I read a bit from a NYT article about Borders bookstores, and what they’re planning to do to some (all?) of their stores. I like Borders because it, like Barnes & Noble, has a nice selection of movies and music as well as books. But this is just not cool:

A new strategy at Borders will reinforce the message that its stores are not just about books: the company has been installing 37-inch flat-screen televisions to show original programming, advertisements, news and weather.

I can watch original programming, advertisements, news and weather at home, if I feel the urge. I certainly don’t want to see (much less listen to) them while I’m enjoying some quiet time at my local bookstore, and I’ll bet I’m not the only one. I’m thinking this idea might not go over so well…