I do my share of shopping - and buying - as a dedicated consumer in the great economic scheme of our country and world. When I buy anything I usually get what I pay for. But, after you’ve been around the block a few times you know that not everything is as good as it looks. Templates are no exception. If you feel the product is unworkable, or clumsy you have to think about what you expect from a product - or a seller. Technical products and services based on them always need tech support and customer care. How much or how effective it is makes a lot of difference to a lot of buyers.

Some webpage templates can be easily adapted to one project and not another. Designers, and amateurs as well, are faced with the constant appearance and demand for new products or systems. Learning to use these products - even if they are as dependable as they are said to be - is time consuming. In addition to technical complexity the designer faces the unexpected - or in this case the unmentioned problems or exaggerated performance of any given template.

This means customer care and tech support become the last stop before real frustration - and finding a new template vendor. How do customer care departments stack up? I would like to know YOUR opinions - please send them. I see various reports on customer satisfaction from time to time - I have heard about Dell’s legendary support, on which I can personally report 100% satisfaction. But Webpage Templates will be purchased many more times than a single computer system.

I recently received a report - old business actually - that would typify the kind of complaining everybody hears about tech support (or non-support) and customer care indifference. In these notes you see familiar frustrations. In fairness I believe there are always at least two sides to any story, so I contacted Boxed Art . They emailed back a response:
” . . . If this is legitimate, then this person would have a ticket number by which I can search for the user, however your ticket is currently the oldest unanswered ticket in our system, so it is not possible that this user submitted a ticket requesting support and did not receive a response. As for the second posting . . . all terms and conditions are stated up front on BoxedArt. As for what BoxedArt’s terms are, they require users to use the templates as a starting point for clients, which does require changing the look of the templates, as otherwise users could simply download and distribute the templates under the guise of ‘client work’. No changes are required on templates when users use the tem[plates for their own websites. . .”

We all draw our own conclusions, and I have added one, based on one of the complaints, by Hateripoffs “. . . There are no phone numbers to call, and no one but an email form to write to. I’ve been sending them multiple requests and still nothing. So be aware… I will never purchase online without a person to talk to. Should’ve known better. . . ” .

In retrospect I must add that the biggest problems I have encountered have come from companies without a phone.

Arthur Browning