Document Improvement Service

HeyDan Development has recently launched it's new Document Improvement service (primarily for Thai organisations) to help improve the English content of websites and other documents, which have previously been translated from other languages.

Our site includes some examples of work already performed, along with details of what is offered as part of the service, and the costs involved.

The main reason that this product has been released is to help finance a free Study Centre for Thai students that we are hoping to open in the near future. We also aim to provide services to people from the poorer communities in the area too.

So, if you make use of this Document Correction service, you will not only be helping to support a service for the students and youth of Raamkhamhaeng in Bangkok, you will also be receiving the hugely beneficial service of having the English text on your website, as well as any other documents, proofed and improved.

Site Revamped.....

We have finally completed our updates to the www.heydan.co.uk website. We have kept the old design and colours, but have made the site a little prettier and easier to navigate.

Go and have a look at www.heydan.co.uk, and while you are there, have a look at our new Document Correction Service for Thai organisations.

The Document Correction Service is an idea that we have had to try and make some money here in Thailand, with flexible hours, and to help allow us to move forward with our plans for a study/drop-in center here in Bangkok.

While you are looking at the study/drop-in center page, you will remember that we have recently improved www.heydan.f2s.com and it's associated Blog HayEmX.blogspot.com. Well, there's more now! We have also introduced a new monthly newsletter if you are interested in receiving regular contact regarding what we are doing in Thailand.

Hayden & Emily Andrews' Personal Site

It is not very good marketing for someone offering web-based services to not have a very well designed site of their own.

So, I have spent the last few weeks updating the image of my sites so that they look a little more professional. I have not quite completed all the work on www.heydan.co.uk, but hopefully the latest changes will be uploaded over the next few days; including some new product...

The site that I would like to point out to you today is www.heydan.f2s.com and it's associated Blog HayEmX.blogspot.com. These sites are hosted by separate companies, but I have applied the same design layout to them both so that it becomes less obvious that you are moving between the sites.

As this site already includes so much information, we have chosen a very simple layout to ensure that the site is as straight forward to navigate as possible. .

Go, have a look today. Tell us what you think.

www.heydan.f2s.com

Where has all the Service gone? (part 2 of 2)

This article is continued from Where has all the Service gone? (part 1). My third story is, surprisingly, about Qantas. Yes, customer service is not just declining in the UK. With all of the complaining going on in the world, I like to remember to write to organisations to thank them for their good service. I feel that this is important. Qantas is one such company that I have contacted in the past, as I have always been terribly impressed by their service. My last trip with Qantas (also my last trip with Qantas) was incredible. My new wife and I flew to New Zealand via Thailand and Sydney for our honeymoon and to introduce my wife to my home country, family and friends. Not one leg of our journey was without problems. We booked our tickets in advance, were always at the airport 3-4 hours in advance, and yet on one leg, we were not even able to sit next to each other - in fact we were initially given seats at opposite ends of the plane. We had broken seats, broken TV's, and bad service. On one flight we had an attendant who dropped everything, allowed trollies to escape down the isle, and was just never there. She could be forgiven as she appeared new, except for the fact that she spent most of her time with one particular passanger, and did everything she could to rush back to him at every moment. I mustn't go into everything, but trust me, every leg of this trip had something totally unbelievable, and this is comming from someone who is very carefree, accepting and never likes to complain. In the back of my mind was the fact that I had heard from more than one person that if you complain to an airline about a broken seat, you usually get at least the cost of that leg refunded, but mainly I wanted to write to Qantas to tell them of these experiences and how much this trip had been far, far below what I have come to expect of Qantas over the years. I wrote my email to them very carefully, making sure to just state the facts, to praise the good points, and to not complain. The reply that I got back was a huge surprise. There was not even a hint of sorrow or sympathy. The bad points from our journey that could not be blamed on someone else, were ignored. And the rest were blamed fairly and squarely on our travel agent (they should have put a note on our booking that we wanted to sit together) and on me. There was not even a slight feel that Qantas was in any way responsible for anything, and in fact, they were angry that I had written at all. The funny thing is that I am incredibly habitual. A "We are sorry that you experienced an unusual number of problems on our otherwise flawless service" would have appeased me and would mean that I would still be flying with Qantas. But instead, not only do I fly with other airlines now, but I always recommend others to not fly with Qantas, whereas before I always recommended them. Sure, little old me is not going to bring down the empire, but that is not the point. Let's Return to Old Fashioned Customer Service

You know what? I do not think that it is as simple as that. I think that the computer age has a lot to do with this problem, and has helped cause this customer-service-less age. When I first began setting up websites, I was annoyed by the number of other websites who never got around to replying to my queries. I vowed that I would always respond to each and every email I ever received. And I did ... For a while .... When I receive emails sent via forms on my site, I first have to apply some logic to see if it is a genuine request, SPAM, or someone collecting valid email addresses with genuine-like requests to websites. Unfortunately, I think that I probably delete too many genuine emails as they just do not appear genuine enough. There is a particular trend in information gathering which can be read about elsewhere, which has come about due to so many people having easy access to the Internet. This can be seen in two ways. First, if someone wants to find out about a subject, they will use a search engine to find an appropriate page, read the information (true or not), and become an instant expert. The second technique for information gathering is to find an appropriate looking site and, instead of reading the information, send the website's author a list of your questions. This way, the researcher (hopes to) receives a succinct description of what they need to know. This is also known as 'laziness'. I have come across this many times with one of my websites, CBD-Search. People are easily able to submit their Christian websites for inclusion in this directory by clicking on the 'Submit Resource' link, found on every page. I have used a variety of techniques to make this option clear. I even once had an animated GIF button that slowly circulated through about 10-15 phrases such as 'Submit URL', 'Add Site', 'Include Resource', and every other combination I could think of. Still, I continued (and still do), to receive the usual emails saying "Can you please include my website in your directory". I can not suppose that people can be so stupid, to not just click on the appropriate link, fill in the short form, and click 'submit', so I must assume that they are too lazy and would rather make the process more difficult for themselves. I also receive other requests such as, "Can you please send me a list of websites for Christian bookshops". Easy! I just type "Christian bookshops" into the site and send them the resulting URL. Well.... I used to. I receive many other emails seeking openly available information every day, and this leads me to my second rule of logic for filtering the emails that I will reply to. If it seems like a stupid request, the email gets deleted. I am sure that my two step technique for deciding whether I will reply to a customer, results in many legitimate emails being deleted, but in this age where people are sending too many emails, how can we keep up? So, yes, I am also part of the problem. Some people probably find that my customer service also stinks. What to do? What to do?

Where has all the Service gone? (part 1 of 2)

It has slowly become apparent to me over the years that Customer Service is fast becoming a thing of the past. Pre 2000, I worked with UNIX machines for a bank in New Zealand. I remember one occasion where we were told that customer service was not just for the customer service department, and that we were all expected to represent the bank in a serving manner. I remember this well, as it seems that after this request was made to staff, I began to receive calls from outside the bank. Not many - 1 every month or two at the most. These calls were all from various customers (corporate or personal) who never seemed to require the same department. I have no idea how my external number had become know, but with the 'customer service priority' thought always in my mind, I used to choose to take a few moments out to help these people. Sometimes they were quite upset, or in great need, but it only ever took a few minutes to listen, and to explain that I was not the most appropriate person to help them, but that I would take their details, find the most appropriate person, and make sure that the call was returned. Whatever state of mind the customer was in, they always seemed happy, and all this for only a few moments of my time. It then only ever took a few minutes longer to track down the most appropriate staff member, and only a few minutes longer to explain that I would call back in a couple of hours to check that the customer was happy. So, for less than 10 minutes of my time, one customer was pleased and remained a loyal customer of the bank, so ensuring the banks continued ability to pay my salary. After my time at this bank, I moved to the UK, where I never heard the phrase customer service again. When I needed to talk to various large companies, I would sometimes choose to be facetious, and ask to speak the customer service department, and state that I did not need the 'customer relations' department. I have conducted a very unofficial straw poll of companies in the UK, and I am yet to come across any company with a customer service department. What is the difference between 'customer service' and 'customer relations' you may ask. The biggest difference is that one assumes a position of servitude, and the other a place of power. I have many cases of 'customer relations' stories while I was in the UK, but here are 3 of my favourites... When I arrived in the UK, I decided that I needed broadband (I knew it commonly as ADSL or DSL). It was relatively difficult to find out what telecommunications companies there were, where they served and what products were available. But I quickly found the biggest company, BT, so gave them a call. This particular time, as every time since, I spoke to someone who did not sound older than about 13 and who had absolutely no knowledge of anything. As each new person was unable to help me, I was passed from endless inappropriate phone queue to inappropriate phone queue, until I hung up and rang back again (repeatedly).

The biggest problem (apart from the fact that BT had no customer service department, but just a host of endless phone queues, was that we had a major language barrier. I was able to get across to these pimply faced youths that I wanted an internet connection, but that was as far as we ever got. I tried saying that I wanted "broadband", "ADSL", a "high speed connection", anything I could think of to express my need. Absolutely no-one had any idea at all what I was talking about. In return, they were asking me if I wanted (please excuse my ignorance of BT product names as I now avoid this company like the plague) "BT, around the world 1n 20 seconds", or "BT, my family lives on the moon", or "BT, make a friend today". When I asked what the details of these products were, no-one knew more than "It's for your computer, sir". I was fast becoming very dumb in everyone's eyes .... This experience, and others, forced me to the only other telecommunications company available in my area, NTL, who were at least better than BT. I once got to speak to a very nice guy at NTL, who became a friend that would always help, and he explained to me that telecommunications companies in the UK do not need customer service departments, as they are monitored by OFFTEL (telecom watchdog), and so companies redirect any complaints, etc, to this organisation, and await any report or recommendation that OFFTEL might offer, based on bulk, anonymous, impersonal complaints. My story regarding NTL's 'customer relations' occurs one day when my phone was faulty. So, I rang the technical faults department. Now, if I was ringing a customer service department, I would be the customer, and what I was experiencing would be the truth, but not so with 'customer relations'.... The young (assumed) pimply face youth first queried me, "If your phone is not working, how are you able to ring us then?". I was beaten at the first mark! He had found me out. My little game was up ... But no, my phone really was not working! "Since my phone is broken, I thought that I would ring you from a different phone (my mobile)". He then asked my address, paused while he examined his computer, and then informed me that there was no problem with my phone and that it was working perfectly. He suggested that I hang up and call him back on the house phone to confirm that there was no problem. I was not letting him go that easily! "I am standing right by my phone, and I can confirm that it is still not working. There is no dial tone, and no noises when I push the buttons." "Well, the line to your house is fine sir. I suggest that you plug in a different phone and try that." I already had. "I already have! I have a couple of other extentions in this house, and none of them are working." This went on for quite sometime, before he finally agreed to log a fault. "Someone should be at your house to check this problem sometime later this week" Don't even get me started on the inability of UK companies to know when their people will actually be at your place. The very best ones can tell you either 'morning' or 'afternoon' on a particular day, forcing you to take the whole day off work for a 5 minute (delivery or whatever). That is if they arrive... If not, another day off work is required. To be continued .... Where has all the Service gone? (part 2)

What is SPAM e-mail?

I am interested to ask the question, "What is SPAM e-mail".

From a 'SPAM protection' point of view, it is the worst in unsolicited emails, where even one occurance may result in a whole web hosting company (not just one site or one dial-up user) being banned from sending emails to another host.

But from the point of view of many an everyday user of email, SPAM may simply mean "Unwanted E-mail". But to be clear, I believe that SPAM email is unsolicited, irrelevant, or inappropriate messages, including commercial advertising in mass quantities.

The Internet users understanding of what SPAM e-mail is, certainly causes problems with some ISP's who act upon their users notification of "I don't want this email message today" with extreme severity and prejudice towards the sender of the email.

I have suffered from this issue a number of times, and often grow frustrated with the amount of time and energy these 'SPAM' issues take to resolve.

I see three main problems for those hosting websites with e-mail based services.

1. ISP's have taken to banning whole IP ranges belonging to any organisation that sends a SPAM e-mail. This may be from only one site hosted by that organisation, or one ISP user, or even from one 'attacked/misused' contact-us form on a website. You may be looking at hosting your website with a particular company that offers all sorts of services, but don't forget to ask how many other companies are blocking their outgoing e-mails?
2. E-mail users are signing up for subscription e-mail services, and then rather than following the instructions to unsubscribe from these services (which they know they originally signed up for) they follow their ISP's 'SPAM' procedure which is often easier.
3. End users are also being affected. Many people use an anti-SPAM program which will not accept emails from unknown email addresses, or uses some other method to determine whether an email is SPAM or not. These users sign up for Internet services, not realising that they will not receive the expected e-mail. This problem is made worse by the fact that many ISP's are now performing this task on behalf of their users, without notifying their users and leaving no way for individuals to alter the SPAM filter rules.

I personally choose not to be involved in any web projects that participate in SPAM e-mail operations of any kind, and use anti-SPAM mechanisms on site contact forms, etc. I do use subscription services though for sending newsletters and keeping in contact with customers, and so have encountered problems because of some ISP's SPAM procedures a number of times.

Here are a few examples:

I run a website, CBD-Search which has subscription services including a newsletter. Currently this site is blocked from sending emails to a number of hosts. We have discovered that this is because our hosting company has been blocked - not CBD-Search. This means that our users can not receive their desired services, and that some new users are not able to complete our sign-up process. A number of these hosts use a common anti-SPAM database, but the most exasperating ISP has to be AOL.

I have had to deal with AOL a number of times over the years, both on behalf of their users, and on behalf of organisations having some form of difficulty with them. I am constantly left with no idea why people are still signing up with this company, unless they want to pay higher prices for limited service.

Anyway, CBD-Search has been blocked by this company twice already over the past 6 years. Both times have been easy to resolve by asking AOL if they have viewed one of our 'SPAM' e-mails - once they do, they withdraw their claim. But this company is a perfect example of over-the-top action based on users choosing that they no longer want to receive their subscription e-mail. Unless they have changed their software recently, they have a very prominent and easy method to remove your unwanted e-mails which is even easier than deleting the messages. In turn, they will treat the senders of those e-mails with extreme severity. On one of the occasions that CBD-Search was blocked as a SPAMing site, I asked AOL for a list of the complaining parties (yes I did), which AOL were happy to provide me with (really, yes they did). In this case, out of the 150+ emails we were sending to our AOL users per month, 2 users had clicked the SPAM button that particular month.

My second example involves the Hosting company that I am currently with. They introduced an anti-SPAM program, without notifying their users, which works behind the scenes and does not allow users to modify the policies. It took some months and many calls before I finally discovered that they had introduced this service and that this was the reason why I was not receiving so many emails from my family and friends. Needless to say, I have disabled this service on all my email addresses in favour of using the anti-SPAM and filtering ability of my e-mail client.

Recently, I have been made accutely aware that some UK ISP's have introduced a similar piece of software that their users know nothing of and have no ability to opt out of using.

My wife and I now live in Thailand, and we often (well we try to) send e-mails to our friends and family in New Zealand, the UK, and elsewhere. Well, we used to try ....

We now receive replies back from some UK based ISP's informing us that they do not accept e-mails sent from Thailand. That means that the huge number of ex-pats and tourists here are now starting to be affected by this problem. The first thing I usually do when faced by a new problem like this, is to contact the other party, as a chat often fixes things. The problem is that these ISP's only seem contactable by e-mail, which they are blocking!

So, what can we do about all this? What will come of all this craziness?

The first thing is to be smart about your definition of SPAM and your use of anti-SPAM facilities provided by your ISP. Especially you AOL users with that crazy little 'SPAM' button.

The next thing is to annoy and bug your ISP everytime you do not receive an expected e-mail. If you subscribe to a reasonable, trusted site or web service, and do not receive your email, realise that this is because your ISP has probably blocked it, and get them to do something about it.

The same applies to e-mails from your family and friends (if you are aware that they have sent an e-mail in the first place). If you do not receive it, do not assume that your computer is at fault, assume that your ISP has blocked it, and talk to them about it.

I know that this is a difficult problem to solve. We are not yet all in agreement on what SPAM actually is (or isn't), yet we have attacked the problem with extreme severity. I am sure that as this e-mail blockage problem gets worse, people will cry out (or return to using the phone or snail-mail), but until we come up with a real anti-SPAM solution, we will be left with the choice - receive everything, or block 95% of our e-mails.

Latest News

Sorry to have not included much on this blog recently, but things have been reasonably busy.

CBD-Search, HeyDan Development's biggest project, had had many changes implemented over the past few months, including a new monthly newsletter.

My wife and I also moved to Thailand recently and have been spending time setting our life up here. This has included my returning to language school to learn the Thai language.

We do have further plans for CBD-Search as well as some other projects, especially as we would like to use my skills to help support ourselves while living in Thailand.

For more information, please refer to our other blogs:

Hayden and Emily Andrews CBD-Search Info

Cheap Website Upkeep Service

HeyDan Development, the creator of CBD-Search, is now available to help keep the content of your website up-to-date for a small fee.

Hayden Andrews, the owner of HeyDan Development, and his wife are soon to move to Thailand to live, minister and serve God. As a way of providing an income while living in Thailand, Hayden is making himself available to keep the content of your site updated and current, for a small cost.

Many people have created their own website but then find the time and effort involved keeping the site up-to-date on a regular basis is just too much. Hayden is therefore offering a service to update your website's content, on your instruction, leaving your website structure and design as it is.

This relationship will operate in such a way that you, the customer, will provide Hayden with textual update instructions via email, and Hayden will apply these changes at the earliest possible opportunity on your behalf. While in Thailand, Hayden and Emily are focused on serving God and providing a basic income through their own skills, instead of trying to generate a large profit. Hayden would therefore prefer to provide you with an approximate number of hours per month for a mutually agreed monthly fee.

This is not an opportunity to be missed! As well as ensuring that your website remains current and up-to-date, you will be supporting a couple serving God in Thailand. If this opportunity is of interest to you, then please get in contact with Hayden today.

Hayden is also available for other Web and Internet related work. If you are interested, please contact HeyDan Development for more information.

More information on what Hayden and Emily are up to can be found at their personal Blog site (HayEmX.blogspot.com)

Greetings!

Welcome to the HeyDan Development

Our website can be found at www.heydan.co.uk, and our largest project Christian Business and Information Directory can be found at www.cbd-search.com.

Over the next few months, I will publish articles related to my web based work.

Hayden Andrews www.heydan.f2s.com www.heydan.co.uk www.cbd-search.com