business | Craig Soup Blog

&amp;amp;quot;Free&amp;amp;quot; Credit Report

Craig Campbell @ 9:01 am

Don’t EVER go to freecreditreport.com unless you enjoy being robbed. They lure you in with a FREE report, and then in little tiny letters that nobody ever notices, they tell you that they’re signing you up for a free trial for Triple Advantage credit monitoring, and if you don’t call to cancel before the free trial is up, they start charging you $15/month. They’ve been charging me this for several months now, and I just now noticed it. So I called to figure out the problem, and after they tried to sell me more products, I had to tell them that I was never interested in doing business with them again. And she assured me that I had no grounds for a refund for the $90 they’ve stolen from me so far.

Why have we turned into a society where we have to trick people into giving you money in order to make a profit? Why has the human race stooped so low that we can no longer trust the people and the businesses that surround us?

I want to encourage everybody out there to stop doing business with companies who don’t even respect you enough to tell you the truth without cleverly disguising it.

And if YOU are a business person, if you own a company, I implore you to restore my faith in humanity by being honest. And in my estimation, hiding a $15/month charge among a deluge of tiny paragraphs of text is NOT honesty.

Filed under: business

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Reusing the Reusable

Craig Campbell @ 3:04 pm

Hemmy.net recently posted several images showing how Disney animators have reused animations over the years. The pictures were very interesting and entertaining to look at.

Disney animators reuse animations

I’ve never noticed this before, but it makes perfect sense why they would do it, and I think we could all learn a little bit from it. As Mathias Meyer talked about on his blog, if in the course of your work you’ve had to do something twice, automate it.

For example, if you’ve had more than one customer ask for the same type of Flash slideshow, then there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. Tweak the slideshow you’ve already created. Keep a directory of files that you could possibly reuse, and when the need arises, resurrect the desired piece and reuse it.

Filed under: web design, business, design, graphic design, freelancing, productivity

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Getting Personal: Businesses are Changing Their Ways

Craig Campbell @ 1:24 pm

One of the main reasons that I’m sitting here writing this blog is because being transparent and personable is quickly becoming a crucial success factor for an online business. When the Internet first began gaining popularity, many aspects of society surprisingly became less and less personal. We had access to more people and more information than ever before, but it seems our social skills started to decline.

We started to see the Internet as an easier way to talk to people without having to worry about all the hands-on frustrations of face-to-face communication. If there was something we needed to say to someone but we were too afraid to do it in person, we’d send an email or an instant message! We suddenly became braver. Socially inept teenagers all over the world, when introduced to chat rooms and instant messenger services, suddenly became social butterflies. People who were by nature timid and non-confrontational suddenly found themselves hurling insults and threats at people who they knew they would never meet.

Unfortunately, this detachment from reality also started to seep into the business world. Hiding behind fancy websites, companies large and small built a presence on the Internet that offered them global exposure to people who would never set foot in their stores or offices. And the people who ran the companies became less and less connected with the people who were buying their products. If a company’s website had any contact information, it would ultimately send the customer’s messages to any number of obscure office workers who were being payed minimum wage to weed through customer inquiries. The end users of a company’s website were severely disconnected from any of the company’s major decision makers.

And for a while, it worked. But lately, the Internet is starting to become more personal. Blogs like the one you’re reading right now are giving personality to websites, and it’s getting to the point where a successful website without some sort of blog or personal touch is almost unheard of. Social networks are bringing people together in ways that were never imagined, and businesses are becoming a large part of it.

One company in particular, as pointed out to me on PagePlane’s Blog, has taken a drastic step in the right direction. House Industries has posted names, portraits, and email addresses of their employees on their contact page. Want to email one of their illustrators directly? No problem. Just go to the company’s contact page, and you’ll find the email address you’re looking for.

But wait a minute, Craig! What about spammers?

Well, it seems that sifting through spam is one chore that a business is going to have to endure if they truly want to connect with their customers. It’s a nuisance, sure, but in the long run, I think it’s certainly worth it.

So if you want to set your business apart, stop farming off your customer service calls to some other country just because their wages are lower. Invest in your customers by giving them access to YOUR people.

Filed under: business, marketing, internet

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Oops!

Craig Campbell @ 3:38 pm

Don’t forget to back up everything you do, boys and girls!

Due to a minor slip-up, the entire layout for the June issue of Business 2.0 was deleted from their servers just 2 weeks before the magazine was supposed to go to press. Fortunately, they didn’t lose any of the text from their articles, but all of the layout had to be reproduced from scratch.

Talk about your disgruntled employees!

If you’ve ever lost five hours of work because you forgot to save and suddenly your computer crashed, then you might have an inkling of what the writers and designers of Business 2.0 had to go through. Creating something from scratch once is an exciting, invigorating process. Creating the exact same thing a second time is an excruciating ordeal. I’ve passed kidney stones that have caused me less pain than an accidentally deleted file.

According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, the backup servers at Business 2.0 apparently just weren’t working.

So before you shut down your computers for the day, make sure you’ve got everything backed up properly. It may seem like a pain, but it’s paradise compared to what you’ll go through if something goes wrong and you haven’t taken the necessary precautions.

Filed under: web design, business, design, graphic design

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Craig Soup Web Design Blog

April 18, 2008

&amp;amp;quot;Free&amp;amp;quot; Credit Report

July 5, 2007

Reusing the Reusable

June 18, 2007

Getting Personal: Businesses are Changing Their Ways

May 2, 2007

Oops!

Craig Soup Web Design Blog

April 18, 2008

&amp;amp;amp;quot;Free&amp;amp;amp;quot; Credit Report

July 5, 2007

Reusing the Reusable

June 18, 2007

Getting Personal: Businesses are Changing Their Ways

May 2, 2007

Oops!

&amp;quot;Free&amp;quot; Credit Report