The phone rang and the caller ID displayed “Pricester.com”. I picked up and the person on the other end started asking me questions. I answered them and asked, “Who’s Pricester.com?” Pause. “They’re an e-commerce company.” Pause. “I’m consulting here.” Pause. “I gotta go.”

Ya gotta love being priced by the competition.

Pricester’s gig is amortizing your web design over the live of a hosting contract or, it appears, taking some percentage of sales. I’m not sure. But here are a couple of things to watch out for.

First, all of their sample sites are using a technique known as frame forwarding. These appear to live sites. Frame forwarding is an absolute no-no in the world of search engine marketing.

Second, their construction techniques leave a little to be desired. The sites are generally OK graphically when you view them on Internet Explorer. However, many break when you view them on other browsers used by about 20% of visitors. Here’s a comparison of one site in IE7, Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.0.

See those lines? Those are improper spacing between the images. That’s shoddy and the images are, from a search engine standpoint, almost as deadly as frames.

Anyway, I figure turnabout is fair play. If you have any experience with these guys, write me at reid@fastwebupdates.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 4:32 am and is filed under Competition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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