Who's your Go-Daddy ... or The Problem of Pain

I had intended to blog every day about our progress on establishing our business, but I learned that could be a difficult task. So I commit to recording our progress on a regular basis, meaning every few days.

As with most toddlers, our first baby steps were filled with excitement, fear and trepidation. They did not go as smoothly or as quickly as we thought they would. "Starting a website? How difficult can that be?" Lean in close to your screen and see if you can hear us scream.

We Googled website registration and clicked on GoDaddy.com just because we had heard of them from their past Super Bowl commercials. Their home page had a box comparing their services and prices to Network Solutions and several other businesses. NS had been recommended by several friends, but they charge $35 per domain name compared to GoDaddy's sale price of $5.99. That's a no-brainer, we thought. We can go out to eat with that $29.

Well, we couldn't register our domain names for the advertised sale price, so we called their customer service line. A nice gentleman answered and he took our information to open our account. Then we gave him our domain names and he said it would be $9.99 each. We asked for their website special price, and after searching for a few seconds he said that offer had expired. Hmmmm.

The next 7 or 8 minutes are a blur, but we communicated as nicely as we could that we thought he should give us the price on their website. He explained (repeatedly) that Google had erred by taking us to, I think he called it, a cached homepage that had expired. So it was Google's fault. We're only talking four bucks here, but it was the principle of the matter. So we asked if a supervisor could override their policy and give us the lower price. On hold for several minutes while he supposedly checked with a supervisor, we Googled GoDaddy.com again. This time, it took us to a homepage offering a special price of $4.99. When he came back on the line, he said his boss said no deal. We excitedly told him we had found a different offer number for $4.99. He looked it up and--you guessed it--said that it too was an expired web page. We decided to wait a day and see if we found anything better. Meanwhile, GoDaddy.com sent us an e-mail asking for an evaluation of their customer service, and offered us a 20% discount on our next order. So yesterday we went ahead and placed the order. The 20% discount comes off the full price of $11.99, not the advertised price of $9.99 currently on their website. We think that stinks, but what can you do?

Getting on GoDaddy.com's website to create our first website (you only get one web page for the low price) was the most frustrating thing I've done since trying to ... I can't think of anything to compare it to just now. Suffice it to say, our first stab at creating a website is nothing like the websites we go to everyday. We decided to put "under construction" on the sites and will continue to explore how to do a better job. Please send any suggestions. (I'm taking a slow, deep breath to relax.)

The wonderful writer C.S. Lewis wrote, "Pain is God's megaphone." Yes, I'm trivializing here, but our first baby step was painful. Pain reminds us how much God loves us. So today we are grateful for GoDaddy.com reminding us how much God loves us. :-)

Alright, our next baby step is to create a FaceBook page. This can't be nearly as difficult, can it? We'll let you know early next week. Blessings to you.