Our new website is up and running!

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.

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.

Our new website is up and walking Part Two

Robyn and Diamond in the Rough complained that I was on the phone ALL day. In my defense, I was on the phone much of the day dealing with our new website and shopping site.

None of these web things have been easy for us. We're just not techies like some people. So I'm grateful for patient people at iPage who did walk me through the processes. As of tonight, I'm proud to say that our website is up and walking a bit faster.

I mentioned previously that we found out that we had to set up a PrestaShop site to be able to sell t-shirts and things on our iPage-hosted website. I worked much of the day getting everything just perfect on our shopping page and then did a test buy from the site. We were frustrated to discover that we could not make our purchase using a credit card, even though we already opened an iPayment account to be able to do that. So I hunted around the PrestaShop website and finally found the "module" for setting up iPayments.

Things are never easy, and enabling this module was no exception. I had to call iPayment to get our codes, but come to find out you get those from another company named Merchant Resource (the company that already charged us $19.95 twice). Once I put the codes in I got an error message saying our website had to have an SSL Certificate to protect our customer's credit card information. I'm all for that, but I thought it came with our web hosting through iPage. So I called iPage again and learned that no, it doesn't come with your website. It's another $119.95 for two years. We will need to sell five or six t-shirts just to pay for all of this business.

It is not easy to see in this photo, but when you go to our website, you get a message saying the website is not secure (see the arrow pointing to the red line through "http"). The SSL certificate was supposed to fix this.




It took another two hours to get the SSL certificate and then get that on our site. At this hour I'm still not sure you can buy anything on our shopping page with a credit card, so I'm searching for the iNeedHelp site or maybe Building Websites for iDiots.com. But first I'm going to visit iBathroom and iBed for a little rest.

Our new website is up and ... walking

I laugh every time I see the iPage web hosting ads that read, "Build a great website in just 10 minutes."

Unless you know how to write HTML code, building a great website will take you two days and several phone calls to the company you select to host your site. And every person at the company you select that you talk to will suggest different things for you to do.

Our new Arkansas Diamond Mine Adventure website is up and not exactly running; maybe walking slowly. The friendly folks at iPage first had us sign up for iPayment so that we could sell t-shirts on our website. That required giving our personal/banking information to that organization, and the next day we had an iPayment account. That, of course, required us to open a Merchant Resource account which also needed our personal/banking information. However, the next technical-support guy I talked to at iPage said, no, we needed a PrestaShop account to sell items on our website, not iPayment.

This morning we had two charges for $19.95 to our bank account from a company with initials that stand for who knows what, and we're still not sure that anyone can place an order for anything on our website shopping page. I bet we won't get that $40 back even though we no longer need iPayment and Merchant Resource. At least we've got a great logo for everyone to see on our website, for what that's worth.

In addition, our video featuring our 8 y/o Diamond in the Rough is now posted on YouTube and linked to our website. Our hope is that people will see it, be interested and go to our website and buy a t-shirt or make a donation.

Have any of you built a great website for your company? If so, we'd love to know who you used and how you did it. And it would make us feel better to know that it took you longer than 10 minutes to build it.