I examined my merchant’s receipt and realized the customer had been overcharged.
I immediately emailed her: “I only charge $15 for use in presentations. I’ll figure out how to rebate you the $35. I just relaunched the site, and there have been glitches.”
She graciously replied: “Thanks very much, I feel it is worth 50 bucks. I have been looking for this exact humor for 3 hours so please, keep the 50 and THANK YOU!”
I replied: “Wow! The money is appreciated in that my relaunched website has been beset by problems and you’re my first sale in over a week. If you find two other cartoons you want, let me know and you can have them too.” Continue reading →
On June 19, 2013, I had a long talk via Google Hangouts with Paul Clerc and Mark Leonas, two of Watermelon Web Works top web gurus. I joked that my mother told me never to hang out with strangers.
I told them about my current website. I’d designed it myself, using Adobe Dreamweaver, and I uploaded the first pages sometime in early 2000. By June of 2013 it had about 2,500 pages, and 4,200 cartoons, in the previous twelve months was visited over 600,000 times, and netted about $1,900 a month. Continue reading →
On February 17, 2014, one year ago today, my redesigned website went “live.” The site was an utter failure. If it had been a city, it would have been declared a disaster area. And, frankly, dealing with FEMA would have been a lot less exasperating than dealing with my web designers, Watermelon Web Works.
I surf the web with a computer. My fifteen-year-old niece surfs it via her smartphone. My cell phone is a dumb phone and all I use it for is making phone calls when I’m out and about. My niece needs an app to remind her that she can use her phone to make phone calls. When she calls me at home I answer on a phone that has a cord and a rotary dial—or, as she calls it, a leashed phone.
More and more people surf the web with mobile devices, and since I’m not terribly attuned to a user’s experience on them, I hired Watermelon to make my site more suitable for viewing on these devices. I also wanted them to make it possible for customers to instantly download cartoons after they pay for them instead of waiting for me to email a jpg.
On February 16, the day before the new design was launched, my site had 939 visitors.
The site Watermelon designed was lovely to look at, but it only averaged three visitors a day. Not three thousand. Not three hundred. But three.
For much of the last year I suffered a double whammy: having no income coming in because no one was visiting the redesigned site, and paying Watermelon’s fees. I nearly went bankrupt.
In June I asked Paul Clerc, Watermelon’s top web guru, if there was any chance I could get a partial refund. My old site netted about $1,900 per month. The new site was netting about $10.76 a month. Paul said “No.”
Soon thereafter I balked at paying Watermelon for a fourth time to fix a programming error that was causing my customers to be overcharged. I concluded my email by saying:
If I was only out $8,000 (almost double your bid) it would be one thing, I could walk away from it, but I’ve lost my livelihood, I’ve lost the way I made a living, I’ve lost a business it took me 35 years to build.
When I was looking for a design firm everyone said: “They do good cheap work in India.” I was an idealist, and was willing to pay more to hire not just a U.S. firm, but an Oregon firm. So much for idealism.
Paul emailed: “I do not appreciate the attitude. … These are services that you should be paying several tens of thousands of dollars for. … I understand why you are upset, and I have a good deal of sympathy for your situation, but it is in NO WAY our fault.” The caps are his, not mine.
He said he was willing to restore my old site for free.
Over the next nineteen days I will blog about my experience with Watermelon. I’ve tried to write the posts in such a way that you won’t need to be a computer geek to get the gist of the story, but there are some technical bits: mostly unedited emails from Watermelon. I’ve included these emails in their entirety so Watermelon can’t claim I’ve taken things out of context.
I doubt that few outside of those who reached this page by Googling “Watermelon Web Works Review” will read my tale of woe all the way through, but that’s OK. I mainly wrote it for those particular Googlers.
Next: In the Beginning
***
At one point Paul said the way to save my website was to blog. Another of Watermelon’s web gurus once wrote me, “Blogs are considered highly sharable, so write great blog posts for people to share!”
Feel free to share–especially with anyone you know who’s looking for a web designer.
Read Watermelon’s response to this review.
Computer Cartoons for use in newsletters, text books, etc.So cheap you can afford them even if you’ve paid your web designer way too much.
In August 2014 I listed this item on eBay: one used copy of TheNew York Times Ferocious Crosswords: 150 Hard Puzzles edited by Will Shortz where I’ve already finished 100 of the puzzles. Starting bid: $15.
Over the course of three weeks, I had no bids and ended up owing eBay $21.68 in listing fees. It’s my own fault. I had meant to spread word of my listing and had hoped it would go viral, but something came up that kept me busy all month. It used to be my goal in life was to have a cartoon published in the New Yorker. Now it’s to have something go viral. Continue reading →
Back in the 1800s people broke in their jeans the honest way–tearing them on barbed wire fences while rustling cattle. Then one day a woman who worried about sending her kid out with “dirty dingy underwear” added rocks instead of softener to the wash. Thus, stone-washed jeans were born … or at any rate that’s how I imagine the idea was born. The only problem with this method of stone washing was that you had to hire people to pick pebbles out of the pockets.
Demographic studies show that almost 100% of those who use coffins are dead and are not repeat customers. A coffin, or as people in the trade refer to them, a casket, is probably the most expensive piece of furniture anyone will probably buy–unless they stop to go to the restroom at an estate sale while a brass-swan lamp with a pink taffeta shade is being auctioned off for $80,000, but that’s another story.
In 2007, not too long after the Danish cartoonist who drew Muhammad was threatened, I lost my passport while in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
I made this unfortunate discovery as I was about to go through security at the airport. I called the hotel I’d stayed at, the last restaurant I’d eaten at, and the bus service that drove me to the airport, and nobody had reported finding a passport. Big surprise. A U.S. passport is worth more than its weight in gold.
It was a weekend evening and the U.S. embassy had no one on duty that could help until morning. In the meantime, the person who answered the phone said I needed to report the loss to the local police. Continue reading →
A friend of mine working on the Malheur National Forest in eastern Oregon said they have a wild horse problem. I jokingly suggested one solution was for all the Forest Service employees to give up their pickup trucks and ride horses.
Here’s a piece about rangers and horses I wrote 20 years ago when I was working for the Siuslaw National Forest.
You’re a Forest Ranger, So Go Out and Range … Preferably On a Horse
As I noted on my December 1, 2014 post, the great thing about the internet is that you can now bore complete strangers with your year-end letters. For the last three-plus weeks I’ve posted all the year-end letters I’ve written since 1987. They’re perfect reading for masochists and insomniacs. Here’s this year’s letter where I write about how just about everything that could go wrong this year has. Don’t worry. I’m not about to jump off a bridge because the one thing that went right made up for everything else. Continue reading →
