Jack Stapleton's Daily Blog

So, most of you know that I come from a strong technology background. I am a Microsoft Certified engineer and worked for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. I was made employee of the year two years in a row, and just prior to the company being sold I was made a full partner. After the company sold, I started my own company and built and supported the technology infrastructures of literally hundreds of companies worldwide. After a decade in the business, I made the decision that I wanted to use my knowledge to build my own business instead of building other people’s companies. I sold my company and opened an ecommerce website and chain of retail stores and had the time of my life.
At the core, I am a problem solver. Microsoft had coined the term “Microsoft Solution Provider”, and I found the term unusually accurate. I loved being faced with difficult and mufti faceted problems and having to come up with the absolute best solution, on the fly, and implement it lighting fast. I enjoy chaos, a fast paced lifestyle, and knowing that I am one of the best at what I do. My customer base was mostly mature companies; so much of my day was responding to emergencies or “putting out fires” so to speak. I have been removed from the daily tech world now for five years. I thought you might find delight in knowing that even I pull my hair out now and then. This is a story of how creating a simple blog and changing the name of a domain, which all should take an hour turned into a multiple day fiasco.
I have had a real estate website at my www.jackstapleton domain for many years. Because of my background, my partners put me on the task of creating our web technology plan. I first changed the website from a single branded site to a multi branded site for all of us to share. I changed the domain name on the site from www.jackstapleton.com to www.austinsuburbanproperties.com. The old adage of there is power is numbers is never more true than on the web. A single website that multiple people contribute to will perform better and rank better in terms of SEO than those same four people contributing to their own individual websites. I made the decision that each of our personal domain names and websites will be stripped down and turned into personal blogs. Nicole is going to blog on Active Rain, David Burton is going to blog on Blogger, David Richard is going to blog directly on the website, and I am going to blog on Wordpress.
I had never really worked with wordpress and I started on the road to configuring and setting up my first wordpress blog. First, I quickly learned that Wordpress.org is the company that developed the wordpress software not wordpress.com. A wordpress blog is not a website that you create a blog on, it is rather software that you download to install on a website. This is where wordpress.com comes in. wordpress.com is a separate company from wordpress.org. Wordpress.com saw an opportunity where people who do not want to download the software from wordpress.org and try and figure out how to set it up on their own website can simply go to their website and create a profile and immediately start blogging. However, there are some very big limitations that you should be aware of on wordpress.com that you could only run into after you have already setup a blog on their site and spent the time configuring it. The problem that I ran into was my original goal was for my jackstapleton.com domain go to my blog. I quickly learned that you can create a sub domain and point the sub domain to them like blog.jackstapleton.com but jackstapleton.com will then go to a page that cannot be displayed. Wordpress.com does not have phone support, so after many emails they told me that they can host my domain but I would have to change the name servers and point the entire domain directly to them and there was a $10 fee. I asked them if I point my entire domain to them I would be pointing my mail and my website. They said that was the only way their systems are setup. I asked them if they can forward my mail to another service or if they have a mail server, and they told me there was no way to do it. I then decided wordpress.com was not the way to go for me. I asked them to refund my money, and they have still not responded to my many emails to cancel my account or refund my money. Their customer service is poor, and they have no inbound phones, and they hide from you when you want to cancel the account or a refund. I had heard somewhere that godaddy offers a wordpress blog and will host it and they have an automated install. I went to their website and logged in, and their wizard to create a wordpress blog was terrific. However, in order for godaddy to host a website, they require that the name servers point to them. The way domain names were originally designed was to point the MX mail records to one place, and the A and Host records to another place to host your website. I called yahoo to get their MX mail records and found out that yahoo small business no longer connect with just an MX record, they required that you change the name servers also. They have become a registrar like Network Solutions and Google and they hint that it is better and easier to transfer your name to yahoo preying on the ignorance of most users trying to get people to transfer their domain name to them. I found this unethical and deplorable. I had been using yahoo small business for many years, and I was disappointed with them. I moved my email to godaddy and closed my yahoo account because there was no way for me to have a wordpress blog with godaddy and use yahoo as my email. I now have a wordpress hosting account with godaddy, and have my email at godaddy. This really was not meant to be a ad for godaddy, but they really do have great customer service. After I setup my godaddy wordpress blog, I logged in and said SHOOT. That is not really what I said, but you get the idea. There was very cool functionality that I saw in the wordpress.com version of wordpress than godaddy’s. There was no way to call wordpress.com to ask them if they build some functionality themselves, and wordpress.org will not support a 3rd party installation. This could have turned into a nightmare but godaddy again went over and above. The tech at godaddy created a wordpress.com account so that he could compare the differences. We were on the phone for more than two hour and he helped me come up with a solution for each one. The biggest thing I quickly learned was that there are many free addins on the wordpress.org website that you can download to your desktop, then log into the control panel on the godaddy word press blog and then install with a click of a button. There is two small issues that wordpress.com has that godaddy does not which is a upload for a favicon and an upload for a logo on the banner of the blog, but there are manual ways of working through that. The moral to todays story is customer service and listing to the customer. Some companies have put a strong focus on customer service and have become mega companies, and others don’t. Austin Suburban Properties, like godaddy, goes the extra mile for our customers and will not stop until we exceed our customers’ expectations.