Monday, July 13, 2009

How do you get a recommendation ...

When I search for companies and services on the Web, I also try to find recommendations and reviews. It's getting harder and harder to do this, I think. Searching for the word 'reviews' is part of the problem. Many web sites will explain that there are no reviews, but they have many different ways to say that, and I get hits for them all. Recently, I looked for a low-cost website provider. There are lots of reviews for such companies, but most of the positive ones are obviously written by the companies themselves; they sound too much like marketing documents. The negative reviews sound like they are written by asylum inmates who have been utterly destroyed by their provider and have an urge kill.

By the way, Can anyone recommend an inexpensive website provider that will give me an easy-to-use webpage builder, and also let me post integrated pages of my own html?

The good news story today is that I found a new way to find recommendations. We need a company to do some work on our house. For this type of work, there are many companies that are obviously not local, that service our region. I found no reviews for any of them. And in any case, a review by someone in, say, Indiana would not help me much. But while looking for reviews, I discovered that some of our local real estate agents recommend local businesses. In one such page, I found the recommendations I needed. And like everyone else, I know a few more local real estate agents ...

1 comment:

Robbie Schlosser said...

Hi Toby,
When to not hold a bowling ball: While sitting on a telephone line (see the Pixar animated short film "For the Birds").
About searching for referrals in many fields, one out here I rely on alot is "Yelp", and I'm sure there are many more. Many of the travel services, like Priceline.com, also have referrals, though for a smaller realm. And I agree that most of the referrals sound bogus, demented, and often both.
Finally, I manage two pretty simple websites, and Googling around, I found lots of very economical hosts. I'm using GoDaddy.com and Dot5Hosting.com. If you plan to use some specialized code, better check ahead that they can handle it.

But I'm sure you've thought of all this already. Tonight I seem to have a firm grasp on the obvious.