AT&T Yellowpages scam

I have a client who has a nice website I designed. I landed him when he complained to his computer guru that his website wasn't coming up on any of the search engines. I took a look at his existing site and noted several things:

The site was put together using 1990s technology (and many sites still out there are). All of the HTML code was inline code and he was not formatting his website using CSS. That pushes you down a lot on search engines. I redid his website in its entirety and, within three days, his company was on Google's first page in their mapping section. That's unheard-of performance.

Back in December, 2008, he signed a one-year contract with AT&T Yellowpages to push people to his website. The salesperson claimed that he'd receive 60 visitors monthly. He was told that AT&T has proprietary SEO technologies and a whole lot of gooberspeak for a sales pitch. My customer took the bait.

First of all, nobody who has no access to the actual code on your website can "search engine optimize" your website. the way you do SEO is to clean up your site's code so that you don't have much inline code on your page. Also you want a site that is W3C compliant with standards and you can validate any site here. If the AT&T Yellopages salesperson told my client that they were going to SEO his website, he didn't know what he was talking about or was simply lying to get a sale. But there is another way to drive traffic to a website and that is to create inbound links.

And that is, essentially what AT&T Yellowpages did: They placed advertisements online for my client to try to "drive traffic." My client could have done the same thing. AT&T doesn't charge per click, they charge a monthly fee. And they mark up per-click ads.

I showed my client how to create a marketing campaign using Google's AdWords. As a result, he is paying Google directly around $100 to $150 monthly -- except when it is not useful for his seasonal business to do that. He has complete control. He can run multiple advertisements, he can make special offers, he can change the wording on a seasonal basis -- anything he wants. And it's a fraction of what AT&T Yellowpages wants.

So, now he wants out of his contract. And I looked at his AW Stats, which are collected by most good Hosting Providers and I don't see their claimed 60 hits monthly. AT&T Yellowpages sent him a spreadsheet showing 63 hits on his website in January. As my client installs in-ground sprinkler systems in your lawn, I'm not thinking that's credible because nobody is planning for sprinkler systems in the middle of winter in Connecticut.

And the funny thing is that their spreadsheet did not correctly add up the monthly total hits to a grand total! It was two short and there was no formula in the totals box! Someone just entered in a random number!

So today we were supposed to have a three-way conversation with AT&T Yellowpages at 9:00 AM. At 8:29, they want to know if we can do it on Friday. They're "having trouble coordinating schedules," despite the fact that this 9:00 AM conversation was set by them yesterday but proposed on June 19th by a gal named Audrey B. She wanted my documentation and I sent over the AW Stats I had collected since December that show that there are nowhere near the number of hits on his website (pre-redesign and optimization by me) as a result of their campaign.

Oh, but wait, can't do it Friday, can we do it Thursday?

It sounds to me like they're fishing for a time when I am not available.

In a way, I pity AT&T Yellowpages. The print version of their Yellowpages (which arrived last January) is one third smaller than last year's issue. And the AT&T Yellowpages book was sold last Summer, when Bush was refusing to talk about a recession and well before any sense of economic emergency, so I would suggest the downsizing of the print edition was not driven by a poor economy. People are just not going to a book any more to find companies to do business.

But taking money from customers and not performing on your end is not a good way to do business. I wish them luck in their uncertain future as more and more of their clients catch on to their scams.

Don't sign up with AT&T-Yellow Pages for Internet!

So I have been making web pages and things are going OK, for a startup. But I do note one thing: AT&T, when they get a website, hardly ever let go. I have a medical doctor who is outstanding in his field who has a website with AT&T and they're charging him a lot of money for it.

It's template-driven and limited to 5 pages!

The website I created for the Doctor has 42 pages. I charge less for the design than AT&T charges for a whole year and my web hosting fees are $10 monthly for a non-selling website! I don't know how AT&T justifies their prices.

But they won't let his URL go. They are pulling a passive-aggressive routine with him.

I do realize AT&T Yellow Pages is seeing a downturn due to the economy and I do have an appropriate amount of empathy for a company that is facing economic woes. But they're being very heavy handed here.

If you want to compare the two services, go to Dr. Fosdick's AT&T website and then go to the one I created.

Musings

Well, it's been a twisted road.

I used to work in television and now I make websites. Perhaps that is the way it ought to be because television is headed to online as television audiences become massively more fragmented and as more and more people find easier ways to connect to the Internet at something approaching decent speeds.

Decent. That means you're not doing 56k dialup. It means websites load all at once. It means you're able to get content from the Internet that includes video and audio that does not stutter, drop frames and look overly cartoonish due to compression. 

Frankly, as someone who worked for 25 years in television, everything on the internet makes really crummy VHS look good. And I have a fair amount of experience in high-definition as well as our previous US television standard.

I now have three websites under my belt—four if you count my own. I am still working on learning php and, if anyone knows how to reliably set up a testing server on a Macintosh running a Power PC chip, I'd surely love to know how to set up a mySQL database with php without making my computer unsafe to run. 

I did buy a good book on Dreamweaver. It goes through the steps but the MAMP software has changed so much that the book is now incorrect. Anyone want to help?

I do like Dreamweaver. You can work in code or you can just put the page together using the Design view and it won't create bad code. It also checks for compatibility with browsers that won't run on a Mac, like Microsoft's Internet Exploder. And that is a great feature.

I can't buy Dreamweaver CS4. It won't run on my venerable G4-400 that I purchased in 1999. I did upgrade the processor and put 1.5G of system RAM into it. My Venerable G4 is proving the concept that, if you buy a Macintosh and you buy one that is not trailing-edge, you will pay less over the years of service for your Apple computer than you will anyone else's. Today's Intel-based Apple computers run Microsoft's operating system faster than anything comparable made by anyone else. There's so much innovation at Apple that I still recommend their stock.

My clients are really happy with the websites I made them. One of them has a "contact" form that took me three days of noodling and internet searching to build. Now, I can make a contact form in a snap by simply copying and pasting code with Dreamweaver. That's hot.

I sure hope this political situation sorts out. In Washington, DC you have these Republicans posturing that they'll stop any government spending aimed at helping the main mass of people out. Seems Republicans only want to help out the rich guy. Frankly, if I were a rich guy, I'd be happy to be helped out. But it would bother me if government help was impoverishing others. I've seen too much poverty in my life to want to see the United States play host to that kind of lifestyle for most of the wage earners.

Republicans are telling everyone that this stimulus bill "spends too much." Gee, they must think we're pretty dumb because they were all-too happy to pass non-budgeted bills to make war in Iraq and waste millions and trillions of taxpayer dollars fixing up Iraq. They seem to think we have forgotten how happy they were to spend back when Bush was running things.

I suppose it's always the Party in Opposition that wants to be "fiscally-conservative." But that's not true, either. The Hoover administration wanted to be fiscally-conservative during the Great Depression. And his party backed him while they were in power. Problem is, that didn't work out so well for most Americans.

My mother, who was born in 1930, wanted me to learn how to do hard work. She had me working in restaurants when I was in high school. It built character and was always something I could fall back on. Well, I understand restaurants these days. And if this business of making websites doesn't pan out, I suppose I could always wait on tables or wash dishes.