On Friday 11 June 2004 00:52, Ben Kennedy wrote: > > I mean really, do we need to trick our customers into using it once and > then finding they have to stick with it? A clueful customer who wants to > "steal" the HTML would simply take the time to write it himself in the > first place. It seems to me that the audience for this kind of service > is going to be the non-techie (can't figure out FrontPage) or the broke > (can't afford to hire a designer) who wants a simple UI to cobble > together a page. If this customer starts using Page Builder and likes > it, they would likely stick with it.
First I have to declare an interest, my employers offers a "mature" online website builder product aimed at a similar market. I don't think it is revealing any trade secrets if I say many of our users find the "ftp my site to another host" option "challenging", and I don't think it is down to the user interface or attempts to lock customers in. Most such users have at best vaguely heard of "ftp", and certainly don't understand (or care to understand) the intricacies of DNS often required to shuffle sites around (despite us offering handholding all the way through, and OpenSRS's excellent domain managements tools and support). The main abuse we see is people sticking up front pages that redirect or otherwise link to third party sites, and then doing spam runs using the front page on our servers (so we and not their usual host get all the spamcop reports - judging by the hit counts - spam gets read a lot less than you might expect). Kim could do worse than speak to my boss.
