Even as we typed the headline, we were nervous that we might be getting ahead of ourselves. But after 24 days and many hours of frustration with iPage and PrestaShop, it appears that our Arkansas Diamond Mine Adventure website is finally up and running. Hallelujah.
Developing a website with a page where you can sell things is probably easy if you have a lot of website development experience. We don't. We noticed several local websites were developed by a company in Little Rock, so we called them Friday to see what they charge. Their basic website development starts at $5,000.
So we are very grateful for iPage, where we got a free domain name and website hosting for $3 a month for two years. That's a good bit cheaper than GoDaddy and the other companies. Included in this price, we've received friendly and committed tech support from them, even if it took them three weeks to figure out what we needed to do. After the dozens of phone calls and e-mails that we've traded with the iPage tech support folks, we wonder if they have someone devoted just to our account.
PrestaShop, on the other hand, refuses to give you any tech support unless you fork over $400 a year. They tell you (when you can reach them) to go to their website and read through their forum to find the help you need. That is similar to looking for a needle in a world wide web haystack.
We thought about taking a screenshot of our iPage tech support page to show you how many times they wrote that our issue had been "resolved." Why they say that, we don't know, but it was very depressing to discover that they never solved our problem.
In a nutshell, they said that to sell items on our PrestaShop site, we needed to purchase an SSL certificate to protect our customers' personal information. We bought one, but it never worked. Finally last Friday one of the "level 3 tech support" folks at iPage came clean and said that we would never be able to secure our PrestaShop page, thank you very much.
Saturday morning, "Alexander" helped show us how to set up our website using their Weebly drag and drop software to allow purchases using PayPal. We had to pay an additional $3 a month to be able to use ecommerce, but still we're paying about $108 for a website compared to $5,000, and we think it looks pretty good.
Please go to our website and try to purchase something to make sure it's working. You'll love our T-shirts.
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