Prof Web Marketing

Work wise, Yesterday was a great day- AFTER I got rid of Aweber.  I had been ignoring the layout problem that their email form was causing in my sidebar.  While working yesterday, I decided I needed to get it fixed before I start getting more readers.

I wasted about 2 hours trying everything to format their crap code and it was to no avail.  Early on in trying to fix this, I opened up a live chat and the person on the other end completely gave me the impression that many more people have trouble making Aweber’s form into their sidebar.  After trying both the javascript and html versions to no avail, I finally decided that if Aweber couldn’t help make it right, then I wouldn’t be needing them.  I was especially ready to ditch them after reading this in the FAQ dealing with this same problem:

Comment #2 (Posted by Marc Kline, AWeber.com )
The dimensions of the form are going to vary based on different factors. For instance: do you put a long or short headline in? Or, how long are the labels for each input field? My suggestion would be to create a form, publish it to a test page, measure its pixels, then design your page around it. If you have questions about how to measure the pixels, contact our support team. We’ll be happy to shoot you an email with some options.

Are you kidding me?!?!  I pay you $20 per month for what is equal to not much more than server space and you can’t give your customers a setup wizard that they have been asking for?

I called their customer support and was told that they don’t offer design help and that I would have to hire a web designer to make it work!  To this I promptly responded, “No I’m not, cancel my account”  I will say that the customer service agent I talked to was completely professional, so I can’t give Aweber a bad mark there.

Aweber Alternatives

The only paid option so far that I have looked at is Icontact.  They offer a 15 day free trial, so if you are in the market for an email marketing solution, I suggest you check them out.  Personally, being new to this, I don’t have a need for a paid option right now.

I have already checked out a few self hosted solutions and settled on Dada Mail.  There is also Phplist, however I don’t feel it is supported as well as Dada Mail is.  Since I use Bluehost, both are available in the Simplescripts library, which makes them easy to install and upgrade when needed.

SimpleScripts themselves have been extremely good at staying on top of our releases. So, if you want an easy way to install Dada Mail, including the betas of Dada Mail 3.0, it’s literally a one-click installation away. Thousands of people already have - it’s quite amazing to this very teeny tiny developer. The Simple Scripts installer seems to be able to upgrade your Dada Mail, and configures Dada Mail with the SQL backend. None too shabby.

As you can see, `Aweber’ , there are other products including free ones.  Since you have the “Super Affs” pushing your junk, you might want to make it newbie friendly.  Personally, I’m in a time period where I’m trying to build a brand and make long term contacts.  Now Aweber won’t be one of them.