RealTown's RealTalk

I've had an Advanced Access website for 10 years and was very happy with it the first 5 or so, until the company was sold to Dominion. Since then, Customer Service is a disservice and the product continues to suffer.

They've had periodic outages almost every month, and this last week, they've announced several "down times" late at night, but this weekend, the sites are out without explanation, we have no access to our "Virtual Office" to make needed updates and changes to our listings for our Open Houses on the weekend and no one is replying to emails and "Online Chat" is closed.

No one is receiveing emails and, to add insult to injury, no one is in the AA office and you can't even call because the voice mailbox is FULL!

I thought maybe I was the only disgruntled AA website owner, but I found pleny of other unhappy customers (soon to be ex-customers, I'm guessing.)

I know many people on these Forums suggest Point2 websites and Internet Crusade, but does anyone know, if I cancel my AA website, won't I have to re-create it all again (I have 100's of pages of original content) and don't I risk my page rank and standing in the search engines?

I am so sick of their unresponsive customer service and power outages. They knew they were moving all their data to new servers, why not have extra people on staff to work on the problem or at least answer the phones over the weekend.

Marlow Harris wrote:
I've had an Advanced Access website for 10 years and was very happy with
it the first 5 or so, until the company was sold to Dominion. Since
then, Customer Service is a disservice and the product continues to suffer.
________________

Marlow, apparently you are not alone, as I received a flurry of emails
last week from people asking about moving their AA sites to Point2Agent.

You can move your web site without harm to your ranking, as long as you
move all your original content along with your domain. The ranking for
all the sites that I've moved has either improved or stayed the same.

________________

Suzanne

--
Suzanne Hathcock Stephens
Point2Agent Qualified Web Site Designer
http://www.SuzStephens.com
360-666-0881

Marlow, many feel your pain.. but many of the past "loyal fans" moved on years ago instead of continually having to worry about whether our sites were down. I had what I thought was a great AA site that had great SERP's placement and the #1 spot on G for "[city] real estate". In fact, we were fairly dominant in our area with our site.

We finally had enough of the continual down time and switched to a custom site, custom IDX... and within a year, we had 7-times the unique visitors and exponentially more leads. Done correctly, as Suzanne stated, you will not lose placement.

You have a really unique and great site. However, as you well know....if it can't be found and no one can view it because the servers are down, not much point in having the site.

Marlow Harris wrote -

"... if I cancel my AA website, won't I have to re-create it all again (I have 100's of pages of original content) and don't I risk my page rank and standing in the search engines?"

Maybe, maybe not. There is shareware sofrware you can use to possibly capture your entire web site. A quick search of www.cnet.com for web site capture or download tools brought up -

www.spidersoft.com - WebZIP 7.1 - Web Site Copier for $39.95

www.httrack.com - HTTrack - Web Site Copier for Free

www.web-site-downloader.com - Web Site Copier for $16.95

www.snapfiles.com - WinHTTrack - Web Site Copier for Free

Look at these, download the one you find the best and easiest, and go try to grab all of your content.

Keep in mind though, AA frames all of your content as soon as someone goes beyond your Home page, they have your interior page content inside a section called PageManager, and they keep your graphics inside another section called http://filelibrary.myaasite.com/Content/5/5209/ (the last part being the ID for your template). So even for a web designer like myself with well over a decade of experience, this could end up being tricky. You might also look to see if in the client back-end section there offers anyway to export anything.

Just another reason to be somewhat wary about using template providers where if and when you decide to go elsewhere, it can be anywhere from difficult to impossible to "pack up" your stuff. As a custom designer, if a client wants to leave my service, I can zip up the entire file folder containing all of the web pages and graphics and email my client the entire site.

Hope that helps...

Win

************************
Win Singleton, CRB, e-PRO
Summit Web Design
(703) 536-7631
wins@summitweb.com
http://Summitweb.InternetCrusade.com
an Internet Crusade Approved Vendor
"Custom web site design that gets results!"
************************

Make sure you cancel any automatic payments to this company. They just
charged my credit card, even though I have not had an account for over two
years with them. I immediately called them but their "systems were down".
And guess what else? "No supervisors in the building". I disputed the charge
with my bank and I have yet to hear from any AA rep. Although at this point,
that is probably a good decision on their part.
Robin Kesler, CCIM
Commercial Manager, Re/Max Select
Office: (407) 657-8566
Fax: (866) 807-8916
Cell: (407) 402-1400
email:TheKeslerTeam.com