My boss was talked into having our website redone by the lady she hired to take care of our advertising. This person, Linda Peace of Magic Mountain Media has proven a number of times that she is terrible at her job. Almost every ad she has come up with we have had to send back with our own revisions because they are lousy. She has been trying to convince my boss to redo the website for quite some time by making promises she can't possibly keep and in the process showing her complete ignorance when it comes to websites, the internet in general and internet marketing. Her big marketing idea: Send emails to everyone that visits our site. A little concept I like to call SPAM and one that could get us kicked off of our host's server.

This year Linda Peace of Magic Mountain Media finally talked the boss into it going ahead with it. This was in January. The person Linda hired to build the site understood retail sites and shopping carts almost as little as she does. Over the next couple of months we were constantly having to explain why this or that needed to be changed or done in a certain way and the responses we received were not satisfactory. It took almost five months for them to get the site up and running and then half of our products weren't on there. Why would it take so long to build a relatively simple site? An excellent question! First of all, the guy doing it (Jeff something or other) transferred all of the items by hand! He didn't know how to transfer a database! Now, I am by no means an expert on websites or shopping carts but even I know how to transfer databases or parts of them. We had been using osCommerce which is an open source cart you can get for free. Jeff decided to change over to Zen Cart which is also an open source cart based on osCommerce. It has some built in features that osCommerce doesn't come with out of the box and in theory is more user friendly. However, it doesn't actually do some of the simpler things that osCommerce does. This wouldn't have been a major problem if he had set it up correctly in the first place but that didn't happen.

Anyway, after nearly five months they came in to train us on the new cart and Jeff had to have us open Internet Explorer for him because he is a Mac guy and doesn't know how to do anything on a PC! How do you claim to be a website designer and not know how to open Internet Explorer? I have nothing against Macs and have a number of friends who prefer them but Internet Explorer (whether you hate it or not) is still the most widely used internet browser and if you're building websites you should know how to use it! Shortly after this Jeff was fired and someone else was hired to finish the site. He seemed to know a great deal more about what he was doing and fixed some of the problems. However, the fact that much of our product was not on the site was still a major issue and Linda Peace of Magic Mountain Media insisted that this was not her problem. She stated that she had received a list of all the products that were to be added to the new site and the ones left off were not on the list. This was a blatant lie and we have emails to prove it.

After many arguments and at our insistence that she fix this she offered to either hire someone to manually add the products (it was too late at this point to simply transfer the databases without causing havoc with the site) or pay me to do it. At first I was going to do it but then decided that I just didn't have and didn't want to take the time to do it on my own time. So last week we told her to just have someone come in and do it. A nice lady came in on Monday to start the work but was unable to begin because Linda Peace of Magic Mountain Media had failed to make the changes we had told her needed to be made the week before in order to get this done. So, she came back in on Tuesday and I had to come in on my day off to assist her. She got quite a bit accomplished and returned on Wednesday to do more.

However, I found out today that she will not be back to finish because she was only allotted a certain number of hours to get the job done and she had used those hours. Linda Peace of Magic Mountain Media then proceeded to blame us for that. So we are going to have to finish putting in the products and then create dropdown price lists and go through all of the products to tweak things here and there. The real kicker is that Linda Peace of Magic Mountain Media keeps telling my boss that this is all her fault. My boss is a little too nice and allows people to make her feel bad about things that she shouldn't feel bad about. All the screw-ups and false promises are one thing but I can't stand a person who is manipulative, can't accept responsibility for their mistakes and tries to blame everyone else for what they have done.

Please be sure to never, ever use Linda Peace or Magic Mountain Media for any of your business or advertising needs. Unprofessional and incompetent doesn't even start to truly describe them.