I picked up some contract work tonight revamping a private company's web page. They want a complete redesign, including an embedded shopping cart system. I'm pretty excited to be creating their site and I know they are elated.

I went over and talked with the proprietors tonight and we discussed everything from colour schemes and design to user interfaces and secure ordering. Good-bye hot pink table based layout, hello ... well something CSS based anyway - I can't give everything away now, can I?

The thing that was most disturbing was their horror story about the trouble they've been going through trying to get their site online. It sounded like there were several overlapping problems which I helped them sort out today.

Now their DNS service (provided by register.com) has totally screwed them over. They insist that they are entitled to put a giant banner ad on the bottom of my client's site. Of course you're wondering, did they tell my client up front about the obtrusive ad? Or is this particular DNS service free and using the ad to make back their losses? No it wasn't free, and no they never mentioned that as part of the cost for the overcharged $35 DNS service. Who would expect that their DNS service would put a big banner ad on the bottom of their page? I recommended moving to a new DNS service but my client tells me that register.com claims it will take at least 3 months! for the change to happen. Whatever you do, don't buy anything from register.com!

In the meantime I'm going to try and setup their site to forward itself away from the crappy register.com ad.

I'll also keep readers here updated on whether things really are as complicated as they claim. I'm thinking the three month claim is just a scare tactic to keep my less technically savvy client suffering. Any advice from you, "the Internet" would be appreciated in the comments.

Search keywords: web design, DNS, register.com