On February 10, 2015, I sent this email to Paul Clerc, Watermelon Web Works top web guru.
Dear Paul:
In my next email, I am attaching a draft of a series of twenty blog posts titled: Watermelon Web Works Review. I am posting Part 1 on February 17, the one-year anniversary of my new site going live.
I am still editing the posts, fixing typos, tweaking this, tweaking that, and trying to inject as much humor as I can in what is otherwise a sad story, but the gist will stay the same.
I will publish any comments you would like to make in their entirety and unedited.
I started writing the series on July 22, 2014. We’d had a series of email exchanges that day and you said the utter failure of the new site was “in NO WAY our fault.” The caps are yours, not mine. The entire email is in Part 13 of the review.
If you’d instead said, “I’m sorry,” I probably wouldn’t have written a review or at any rate, not one that’s almost eighty pages long.
You were always encouraging me to blog. Consider your advice taken.
Sincerely yours,
Theresa (T-) McCracken
humble cartoonist and reluctant blogger
Next: Paul’s Response
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Watermelon Web Works Review Part 20: Paul Clerc’s Response
Over the past nineteen days, I’ve written a detailed account of my experience with Watermelon Web Works, the company that redesigned my website.
At about 6:00 p.m. on February 10, 2015, one week before I posted Part 1 of this series, I sent Paul Clerc, Watermelon’s top web guru, an advance copy of the blog posts. I said I would post any comments he had in their entirety and unedited.
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
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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.
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