What Good Tech Support Looks Like

You may have noticed that I am a affiliate of web hosting company AN Hosting, since I pimp promote their services in a couple of places on this page. But in the words of Cy Sperling, the infamous founder of Hair Club for Men, “I’m also a client”. And as of today, I’m also a fan.

I host several domains on my account. One of these is bloglabs.net, a news aggregator for the blogging community. I haven’t had much time to put in on it, so yesterday I set to work. Almost immediately, I encountered a mysterious problem.

I set up the site to load quickly, so the only native image on the page is a thin blue stripe across the top. For some reason this tiny 4k image refused to load. I spent hours coding and re-coding the html and css, re-encoding and re-uploading the image, and getting more and more frustrated. I worked for years as a web designer, and I couldn’t get one lousy little gif to show up? It was downright embarrassing.

Finally I gave in to my lack of self-sufficiency, and at about 11:00 pm sent an email to AN’s tech support. Now, this image was purely decorative, so I didn’t mark the ticket as urgent, and I was not expecting a response until today. And quite frankly, my description of the issue was considerably less detailed than this post; nor did I inform them of the steps I had already taken to try and fix it.

Amazingly, I received a response within ten minutes. TEN MINUTES. If you’ve ever dealt with tech support of any kind, especially web hosting, it’s hard to describe how outstanding that is. I’ve had hosting companies take days to get to a routine problem like this.

The support rep (who is located in the United States, by the way) responded in grammatically-perfect English that he had re-built the image, and it was working on his end. He requested that I try it and report back. I felt as if I was communicating with a real person, who was actually taking my problem seriously. Hallelujah.

This was a logical first step, but he couldn’t have known that I already tried it, since I didn’t tell him. Tech support does require both sides to be communicative, and I wasn’t holding up my end. So I unfortunately had to report that the image still wasn’t displaying for me. Again, I did not expect a response until the following day.

And again I was pleasantly surprised when, about an hour later, they informed me they had found the problem. I was trying to link to the image across my hosted domains, but I had overzealously enabled “hotlink protection“, which only allows linking to a image from the same domain. Thus I had altered the mysterious .htaccess file, and was giving the server conflicting instructions.

Perhaps they found the problem by following the trail of smoke coming from the computer hosting my site, or by the robotic cries of “DOES NOT COMPUTE!”

But more likely, they patiently checked the many custom settings I had made in my admin interface until they found the culprit, tested and confirmed their theory, fixed it for me, and let me know everything was working perfectly.

Yes, they fixed it for me. They could have send me instructions, copied and pasted from somewhere, but no. They just fixed it.

And the tone of their emails was downright friendly. Not only did they solve the problem, they didn’t scold me about my error, like some support reps are prone to do. They simply included a helpful link regarding the use of hotlink protection, so I could use it appropriately in the future.

Finally, when I gratefully let them know it was working, they send back a friendly, non-boilerplate email that seemed genuinely happy to have the problem solved. It was 1:18 am.

It seems crazy to even have to point it out, but this is what good tech support looks like. If that isn’t what you’re getting, switch now. It’s $6.95 a month. The domain name is free. If you ask me, it’s a damn good deal.

p.s.: On the first sign-up page, scroll down and enter coupon code ”GOTAPEX-ROX-A-LOT” for 3 months free. Just don’t tell anyone else – this will be our little secret…

CSS Grid Design Made Easy

Via ISO50 comes word of an excellent (and free) tool for grid-based CSS layout: Grid Designer 2, by Danish web developer Rasmus Shultz.

For anyone not yet on the grid, here are two nice introductory pieces, some more resources, and a couple of well-known systems.

Grid Designer 2 allows you to mock up a complete grid design online in a single open source script. Incredibly, it’s only three simple steps:

1. Columns

Input the number and width of the desired columns. Use the buttons, or type in numeric values. You can play with the gutters and margins to your heart’s content, while previewing live on screen.

2. Typography

Now it gets fun. Adjust the fonts, styles, leading, spacing, line height and more, again with live preview. Paragraph and H1 through H6 are all available.

3. Export

Are you kidding? Yes, unbelievably, we’re done. Grid Designer outputs the CSS style sheet and an html container, scalable if you wish. Copy it, use it, love it.

I’ve just begun playing with this, but as I’m sure you can tell, I’m pretty impressed. I’m sure the output will require some tweaking unless you want a straight-laced, magazine-style grid.

Also, despite the alert stating “NEW! Now supports designs with spanning columns!” it looks to me like you’d have to add these manually after the fact. If anyone can see that I’m missing something, please let me know.

In any case, Grid Designer 2 gets five stars so far, and I look forward to using it for real very soon. Thanks Rasmus!

Web-safe Fonts: the Beginning of the End?

Web-safe fonts.

A nice, friendly-sounding phrase; it’s even got that comforting word “safe” in the middle.

But for web designers, that phrase is as comforting as a straitjacket. For print designers, finding out about web-safe fonts is like learning there’s no Santa Claus. And if you’re just someone who appreciates the beauty of typography, you may just be wondering why the web is so damn ugly.

It’s those web-safe fonts.

Since 1996, when Microsoft designated the web-safe font families in their “Core fonts for the Web” program, designers have been restricted to a tiny group out of the tens of thousands of existing fonts.

Not only that, but designers are forced to specify a replacement in case the desired font is unavailable, and a last-resort font-family (e.g. “sans-serif”) for the worst-case scenario. This means you can never test all possible appearances of a page without knowing what fonts are installed on the user’s machine. That doesn’t exactly encourage bold, innovative design.

Perhaps most offensive to some was the inclusion of Arial, Microsoft’s copyright-avoiding knockoff of Helvetica, which is perhaps the best-loved font in existence, and even the subject of a full-length film of the same name.

Basically, web typography sucks and web-safe fonts are an ugly, constricting anachronism. But the end may be near; the Holy Grail of rich typography for the web could be around the corner.

There have been numerous attempts to solve the problem of web-safe fonts before. First was plain old image replacement, which did the job for large logos and the occasional headline. But unless properly tagged, they sent no information to screen readers or search engines, the text could not be copied/pasted, and entire pages were out of the question.

Then there were embedded fonts (too big), SiFR (a slow, complicated Flash workaround with accessibility issues), DTR (relies on server-generated images, basically a fancy version of simple image replacement), FLIR (an attempt at a better SiFR), and others.

Today, Smashing Magazine reports on upcoming CSS3 support for custom web fonts with the @font-face tag. This calls a font from a specific URL to be used in the page, just like a call to a remote script or stylesheet.

Actually, this isn’t really news, since it was first proposed for CSS2 and has been growing in support for some time. Safari users are already seeing it, and it’s planned for the next major update to Firefox. As usual, Internet Explorer lags behind, in this case due to Microsoft’s insistence on using their own “Embedded OpenType” technology…sound familiar?

But thanks to the rapidly-growing adoption of better browsers, designers may start designing for the best-case scenario, with a back-up plan for the worst – not the other way around.

Usage licenses still apply of course, and there is the obligatory intellectual property debate among font creators. Discussion of a universal web type library has already begun. But there are more than enough fonts available right now to give our tired eyes a rest from the stalest of the web-safe fonts, like Tahoma and Trebuchet.

Which means a whole universe of fonts will soon be appearing all over the web – just maybe in this new year.

Better 12 years late than never.