Our new website is up and walking Part Three

You know the Herman's Hermits song, "I am Henry the eighth, I am." The song says, "Second verse, same as the first." That about sums up our progress with iPage and PrestaShop in getting our new website up and running.

I shake my head when I see the iPage ads that are running on dozens of websites lately that read, "Build a Great Website in Just 10 Minutes!" Here is one of those ads, placed here at no charge to iPage.

I didn't notice this at first, but look closely to the right of the image of the mouse. The ad reads, "No expertise needed!"

No expertise needed? Oh please. I guess some of the drivers we encounter on Little Rock streets responded to similar ads from the Arkansas Revenue Department to go get their driver's license. But I digress.

As frustrated as I am with iPage and PrestaShop, I have to say that iPage's tech support folks have been very nice and have tried to help. If you are not selling anything on your website, we recommend using iPage. Their Weebly drag and drop option is pretty easy. PrestaShop says you have to pay $300 a year for tech support, so I was shocked one recent day when I got a phone call FROM someone in tech support with them. He promised to look at our shopping site and fix it. (Thank you for trying, Matt.)

Tuesday morning iPage e-mailed to say they had fixed the problem, so I went to our website and was disappointed to see that when you clicked on our "shop" page, you no longer went to our PrestaShop page, you just went back to the front page of our website. Wednesday morning they wrote back saying they had fixed the problem, but this time, our iPage website was gone and you automatically went to our PrestaShop page with no explanation. "Second verse, same as the first."

I'm not one to give up quickly on things, but I am very close to giving up on this. We thought we produced a nice looking site on iPage, but if people can't get to it or buy products on it, we're DOA.

Last Saturday we sat by our good friend David Sims at the AWANA games, and he said he had a good friend in Florida in the e-commerce field who could help us. He immediately e-mailed his friend asking for help, and the gentleman wrote back minutes later promising to solve our website dilemma. I confess I am skeptical, but he may be just the person we're looking for. We will keep you posted.