Does Advertising Work?
Does advertising work? On me, the answer is yes. Let me explain. For years I read Mac Addict magazine, now Maclife. One of the companies that advertised in the magazine was a website hosting company called Fat Cow. They had a nice little cartoon cow, an impressive list of qualities, and a reasonable price. I must have looked at this ad fifty times over the course of several years. But I never needed to buy web space so there was never a reason to explore what they had to offer.
When I decided to start this site, I had stopped serving websites from my house and I needed a host with mysql. Guess the first place I went to. It was Fat Cow. And their prices had actually dropped and their service offerings actually were better than I remembered. So I ordered me up some web space. But great advertising does not always lead to a great product. I couldn’t figure out why my site was so slow. Maybe I’m not as good at making websites as I profess? Maybe My content management system of choice has gone to hell? So I spent some time cutting out features and streamlining the site. But the site actually got slower. At one point it took several minutes to come up. And when someone I sent an article to couldn’t get to the site, the donkeys back broke.
So I sent in a support ticket to Fat Cow. To Fat Cow’ss credit they admitted it was a MYSQL problem on their end. They are trying to fix it. This has been months and they have yet to say whether it is actually fixed. From my standpoint, it would be a pain to move to a different provider (that’s called Commitment/Consistency on my part). So right now they have a customer and despite problems, one that is going to try to stick it out with them. Why? Because of an ad in a magazine. And I doubt I’m the only one they got from that ad.
