Here are some important points to understand:

Groupon (or Living Social) is doing this for their own benefit, not yours. They seem to have little to no care about your business except how it can help their business make money. That kind of relationship is never a good one to get into.

The goal of a deal is not to make money from the deal itself, but recurring income from those customers coming back or buying more product/services than the deal itself. The deal company wants you to sell your product for 50% (or more!) off than it’s original value. Whatever profit you would make selling it so low, the deal company then wants to take 50-100% of that. This leaves you with nothing financially at the end of the deal.

The type of customers Groupon attracts are not customers that will help your business grow. Typically customers that are buying from Groupon are bargain hunting and not looking for the best quality product or service. Based on experience, customers that only care about a bargain typically are the most difficult to work with as they have the most demands or requirements of the product or service. According to the article, they also don’t even tip! If you are a very small, local shop that thrives off local business like the bakery in the article then getting new customers from 30 miles away will not help grow your business in the end. These customers are also more likely to cheat you even out of your already ridiculously low prices by taking advantage of the fact that it’s very hard to track the coupon usage.

Logistics of the increased business a nightmare. Tracking coupon usage, the sheer volume of customers can quickly overwhelm a small business. Although it may be nice to see people lined up out the door, trying to take care of them is very difficult – let alone in a way that will give them a positive experience about your business and want to come back. The end result could be a large number of negative reviews about your business which will never disappear from the internet.

Some businesses have reported huge successes as a result of using this new online marketing method so this isn’t the case for everyone. However, you should really consider if this is right for your business. For Erika and her photography business, she would have been so busy for about a full year before she would be able to come out from under a daily deal promotion after she did all the  photo sessions, post processing, managing print orders and more. We did some math and she would have ended up making about $1/hr for that year – clearly not worthwhile for her.

In my opinion, quality customer service is what makes the difference for who I choose as a service provider. So it makes sense that AshWebStudio does what I would expect – let people talk to someone who knows what is going on. When you call us, I (Derek) will 99% of the time be the one who answers the phone. If I don’t answer, it’s because I am on the other line or in the middle of another client’s design and don’t want to break my concentration or thought process (the same thing I will do with your design should you choose to work with us). When you call, I’ll be calling you back within a reasonable time frame. What is reasonable? I aim for immediately and at least the same day. If anyone has to wait more than 24 hours for a return call back, then something tragic has likely happened because I feel anything over 24 hours is unreasonable for a call back.

The one thing I have run into repeatedly recently is a prompt which asks me to choose from 5 different people. If I’ve never called in to the company before  I have no idea who these people are and which one is the right person to talk to about my questions. Why isn’t there a starting point for communication? It makes absolutely no sense to me and I bet these companies are losing tons of potential business as a result.

In tough times like today’s economy, customer service is what will help separate your business from others. Want to make more sales? You don’t have to be the cheapest. Have excellent customer service and you’ll get people banging down your door. That’s what we shoot for here at AshWebStudio at least.

So why post this on a web design company blog? Well, browsers are a big deal for us. Each browser has it’s own quirks in how it will display the same website. We have to build HTML and CSS which can be a little “not-the-original-intention” in order to make it actually display properly. When FireFox was introduced, the web design community was ecstatic because it promised to render web pages as they were intended – unlike Internet Explorer (which is a major headache for most web designers). With Google’s Chrome browser, we have to wait and see if our websites display properly. If not, we have to start considering the special requirements of yet another browser. However, that won’t happen for quite some time (if ever) because Chrome won’t (and may never) have a large enough percentage of users to make it worthwhile to check your site. It even took a couple years before it became necessary for web designers to check their website in Internet Explorer and FireFox as it has finally gained a strong enough marketshare.

Will we be using the new Chrome browser? Nope. We use Macs and for now it is only available to PCs.

First, Web 2.0 is an adjective – not a noun. It isn’t a thing. I use it to describe two different areas: Design and Development.

A web design is considered “Web 2.0″ by having a focus on usability – this usually means a clean, simple interface that doesn’t add unnecessary graphics for the sole purpose of looking pretty. As such, many of our website designs get called “Web 2.0″ designs. We actively strive to create designs which are goal driven and simple for people to find the information they want (or, make it easy for users to see the information we want them to see).

For web development, the term “Web 2.0″ general describes programming that is “agile”. Many programming languages have adapted code structures which allow them to create web data applications very quickly. Essentially do this by making common code libraries for the most common things. This means developers don’t have to rewrite the same code for every single website. Things like user profiles, login systems, etc. are already setup and a programmer just needs to build on top of that core system. Saving time (and money) makes the development process agile and thus “Web 2.0″.

However, for the flight back, we wanted to really test it out by purchasing a movie and then watching it on the plane. I bought the movie from my parents’ computer and then tried moving it to the iPhone – no go. I simply got an error message saying something like “Cannot move this movie to the iPhone”. Not real helpful explanation there Apple. I searched and searched online, but apparantly nobody else has problems putting movies onto the iPhone. The only thing I found was to convert it for use on an iPod. I tried that as well, still no go. I called iPhone support and we finally tracked down the problem: Copyright restrictions on the particular movie I purchased (Ratatouille) do not allow it to be converted to another format which is required in order to put the movie on the iPhone. There was absolutely no indication of this when I bought it on iTunes. So, I have put in a request for a full refund – we’ll see if they do it.

As a last tidbit, we flew Frontier and it was cheaper to buy the same movie on the plane than through iTunes – so it all worked out anyway. We never watch the 10 DVDs we have as it is, so paying for one-time use is no big deal.