At 6/10/04 2:23 PM, Kim Phelan wrote: >Yes, without javascript enabled in their browsers, they will have >problems, but the target for this tool is the non-technical >end user who will have the standard browser defaults enabled, as >will most of their visitors.
You're suggesting that because the people using this Web design tool will have JavaScript enabled, visitors to their sites are also more likely to have JavaScript enabled? I don't think that makes sense; there is no necessary connection between those two. Anyway, no matter what kind of site it is, some of their visitors still probably won't have JavaScript turned on (the numbers I've seen recently show that about 2% of visitors have JavaScript disabled). Those people are apparently just going to be out of luck -- even the non-Flash version of the Website Builder product is intentionally crippled so that it doesn't work for those visitors. When our customers forward us the complaints from those visitors, what am I supposed to say? "Yeah, that's a side effect of our system that makes sure you can't switch to another company without paying us $20"? That's going to go over really well. >The reason this is done is so that an end user >can't easily transport their site and use another editor. >The source (as you have seen) is not easily readable by someone using >another editor (frontpage or whatnot), >so they are motivated to continue to use the tool, and stay with you >as a vendor. I think you mean "bullied", not "motivated". I will not subject my customers to that attitude, and it should be beneath Tucows, too. The fact that Website Builder is a good product should be enough to keep people using it, and if someone feels it's not meeting their needs, that person should be free to switch without penalty. Charging people a fairly hefty fee to get the data if they want to stop using the service is unconscionable, especially when the method used to accomplish that makes the created pages incompatible with some visitor's browsers. I can anticipate the arguments for it -- primarily, that the customer could otherwise get the full use of a nice Web site template after paying only one month's fee, which isn't fair -- but "fixing" that by crippling the service for all the other long-term paying customers isn't fair, either (and makes no business sense). Anyway, such an argument is irrelevant, really; by your own admission, this policy is intended not to discourage a few people from grabbing templates at a low price, but rather to create a cancellation penalty that will keep the masses "motivated" to keep using the Web site editing service, even if they think they've found a better way to edit their Web site. Tricking naive people into sticking with a service by artificially limiting their ability to go somewhere else without a penalty is the kind of thing that I'd expect from NSI, not Tucows. It's reminiscent of NSI's transfer shenanigans, or that other registrar who requires a notarized letter to Australia unlock a domain name, or absurd cell phone termination fees, or any one of a dozen other universally reviled restrictions from companies that have a "screw you" attitude towards their customers. If I heard that any PC-based Web design software program prevented its users from being able to export files as plain HTML unless they paid a fee, I would tell all my customers to avoid it like the plague. I'm not about to start selling something that works the same way. If Tucows changes this, I'll gladly consider it. Until then... no thanks. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies http://www.tigertech.net/ "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." -- Darwin
