Easy to use??? Yeah right!

As I mentioned previously, I am having all sorts of problems in getting our website up and going. It seems to be an ongoing saga, spanning a period of months now. Back in 2004, Mark and I went over to USA to attend the World Dairy Expo in Madison. We took with us some blurbs on our business to share with others, but thought that it would be a good idea to get a website up and going so we could expand a lot more on our business and link people to that site. Plus, we host a great many tours on our farm (including international visitors), and again, this website could provide a point of reference for them when they got back home.

Sounds like a reasonable logical idea? Yes. Is it as easy as it sounds to get it up and going? No.

We started off with a basic website which served our purposes for only a very short period of time. It is very true that you get what you pay for, and we needed more than what we were obviously paying! So after a couple of years, we changed to another plan that is supposed to give us greater flexibilty and access to more templates and page configurations. Sounds great and the demo stuff I have seen is quite good. But it isn't working out quite like I thought.

First, we had an issue with 2 websites being up and going under the one domain name. Many phone calls and emails back and forward eventually sorted that out. Now I am finding that the website builder that I am using is playing funny buggers and after almost constructing the site to how I want it, now wants to move pages around, delete pages and constantly give me error messages. The design is almost back to square 1. I can't even go live because it just isn't anywhere near right.

And trying to get some help from our website host is proving harder than landing that rover thingy on Mars. In fact, I reckon that there is a lot more feedback from Mars. Everything is done via online help, so after posting my problem, I have to sit around and wait for someone to respond. Waiting....waiting.....waiting. I have appended jobs just to get a response. I did get a consultant one time that seemed to actually have looked at my site and gave me some specific actions to follow. I happened to be sitting at the computer at 5am when she initially posted, so I was able to follow her suggestions and then post back when it didn't work. She posted again, but still I had problems. She obviously went off shift, because I have not heard from them again and that was Monday morning.

I think it is time to pull in the big guns, admit defeat and just get someone to do it all for me.