Competition amongst financial institutions is fierce and offering the right person, the right offer at the right time and in the right way is tricky business. The marketing department’s job is to hook the recipient. If they can get someone to take action and contact the financial institution they have done their jobs, right?

I would have to say no, they have not done their job if the action they drive you to take does not help you achieve your goal, and PNC Bank’s marketing department recently failed in a huge way.

The legal sized, full color letter I received from PNC directed me to call, visit a branch or visit their website to get the refinancing process underway. Remember, my end goal is to find a bank with better online services so I chose to visit the website.

I was directed to PNC.com/auto where I noticed the title said “Apply For An Automobile Loan”. I would have expected letter to send me to a page specifically for refinancing, but not to be thwarted I continued the application process and clicked the link on the right to apply online.

The first screen of the form asked me for general information which I easily filled out. The second screen asked for the purpose of the loan, and from the dropdown I chose “Refinance vehicle”.  Continuing down the page I was asked to enter my vehicle’s information and the information for my trade-in. I thought entering the value of the car I traded in a year ago was odd, but I diligently filled the form (pictured below)  and clicked to continue.

The error I received read “The requested loan amount must equal the vehicle selling price less the total of your trade-in allowance and cash down payment.”

This error made it obvious that the form was not meant for refinancing a car loan, only applying for a new loan. Good job, Marketing Department! You sent out a costly directly mail offer about refinancing my car loan and directed me to a page where I could only apply for a new loan. In fact, I can’t even find a form on your site that I can fill out to refinance my loan and apparently customer service can’t either because I emailed them asking for a new link and they told me to call a 1-888 number.

IRONIC, don’t you think?

Obviously Marketing needs to check their information, test the actions customers will take and most importantly talk to the development team. From the start the Marketing Department should have been asking for a customized landing page and form they could direct customers to. Also, if you want to look at the bigger picture, PNC is currently offering a service that is not advertised or supported by the website. I bet this could be remedied in a single work day by a developer. Building a cooperative relationship between the two departments might take a little more work but it undoubtedly it would be worth the effort.

PNC's form to "refiance" an auto loan.

Every GardenSMART episode is supplemented by Quick Tips which are short video segments viewers are encouraged to visit the web site to watch. James went to view his Quick Tips when they became available and immediately emailed me for help because they would not play for him. Was there a problem with his computer? His browser? A plugin?

I visited the Quick Tips page and quickly diagnosed the problem. The page was attempting to play a QuickTime .mov file in Windows Media Player, which does not work! From the source code I collected the links to the .mov files for James so he could visit the files directly. Of course this does not solve the problem for everyone so I also emailed GardenSMART to let them know they used the wrong video file and/or template for the River Farms Quick Tip pages. The reply was:

“Works for us.
Thanks for watching GardenSMART,
GS”

I replied back with a more technical email explaining the issue, the solution, and the fact that I tested the page on 2 operating systems with four major browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome) and it did not work.

This second email was ignored and the page remained unfixed.

James then emailed the producer asking him to fix the site, since not only are friends and family interested but I’m sure the AHS would like to be able to direct their 21,000 members to the videos. James received the response:

“They all work for me.”

The ball was back in my court when James asked me why it would work for them and not him. My answer is that it doesn’t.  They aren’t actually looking at the pages and this a terrible display of site visitor service. If James did not have someone with advanced technical skills to help him understand what was going on and give him links to the .mov files what would he do?

If you are a web master and someone emails you saying they have a problem viewing content on your site,  “It works for us.”  is not an acceptable response. There is either a problem with your site or there is an issue with the viewer’s machine. Either way you need do some troubleshooting.

One of the most challenging web sites I ever maintained was a high traffic site that streamed and podcast media. Occasionally I screwed up and posted incorrect links to the media files. Sometimes there were user issues and I had to help visitors set up iTunes or install a plugin. User issues were tedious to solve, sometimes it took days with emails going back and forth as I tried to figure out the problem and walk the user through the solution but I saw it as part of my job and my efforts were always appreciated.

Every web master’s rule should be to never, ever ignored a visitor with an issue. The visitor is a real person, with a real problem and they want the information you produced badly enough to ask for help. What do you think, maybe 1 person in 20? 50? 100? having a problem will email for help. We should consider ourselves lucky someone is emailing us with issues, because if a site is broken and remains broken because we don’t know about it, how many audience members are we losing?

Apparently GardenSMART feels their audience is big enough, they can afford to start letting it thin out and it will since they are currently repeating their mistake on other pages. The Quick Tips for the latest episode on Mt. Vernon are posted using the same template as the videos for River Farms, creating another set of useless pages.

Before I end this post, if you are interested in viewing the Quick Tips for the River Farms and seeing James in action, you may click the links below. The links will take you directly to the .mov files, you will need QuickTime installed to view them. Enjoy!

Small Scale Meadow Garden
American Horticulture Society
Fall Color
Fall Plantings

I agreed to build the site immediately with only one stipulation. Having worked with James the penchant procrastinator on another project for the AHS, the André Bluemel Meadow, I made him promise to be as available and responsive as possible to me. (If you want to know more about the meadow project visit the Five Star Developer’s Blog.) With such a short timeline I needed immediate answers to my questions because even a 24 hour delay could put the deadline at risk… and I did mention I was tricked right? I assumed the auction web site would need to be finalized a few days before the auction started, but I was soon told there was going to be a preview period. The auction web site was going to be announced to 21,000 AHS members via an email newsletter and a printed article in the American Gardener Magazine two weeks prior to the auction.

Considering the short timeline and potential for disaster that accompanies every major project, this one went very well. I built the site using WordPress as a content management system and extending it with a custom plugin to manage information about each experience. James did a great job filling in the database with information, sending me graphics when necessary and keeping his cell phone on to answer my calls all hours of the night.

From what I hear the AHS office had a great time testing the site and out bidding each other.  I enjoyed registering my rabbit, Sneaky Pete Gagliardi, to outbid my brother while he slept. I am hoping the real bidders find the auction as fun as the AHS office. Even those who are not participating in the auction can watch the action in the sidebar where the highest bid and the first name, city and state of the bidder are displayed.

The six week auction started on Saturday, September 19th and is off to a good start with 4 items already having bids. If you want to place a bid yourself or just watch the action visit http://www.ahs.org/auction.

The pictures I took for our first assignment and are already a million times better than anything I’ve ever taken before. The assignment was to take the camera off automatic, and in manual mode try different exposure, f-stop and shutter speeds. On my quest for some outdoor pictures where I could use a 400 ISO I went on an exploratory run during my lunch break one day and photographed all the interesting things I saw. Some of the photos are below.

Cintas truck on a coal barge.

Island Boat Club on the Northside. Want to hang out there sometime?

Telephone pole by the river.

Only in Pittsburgh would you see a Wonder Hostess Bakery Thriftshop and yes it is open daily offering bakery items at discount prices.

For all you Pittsburgh people looking for Tamara mayo you should look in the Greek store in the strip because that’s the only place Tzveti knows it’s sold, or use gerular mayo with some spice.

Design and photography credits for the web site go to Rob Larson, you can see more pictures from the food photo shoot on his blog.

In the meantime… check out the results for A List Apart’s 2007 Web Deisgn Survey. This was the first survey ever conducted asking web professionals about the industry in the U.S. and worldwide. 37 questions were answered by 33,000 web professionals and the results are eye opening to say the least. The survey was conducted again in 2008 but the results are not out yet.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Good luck Microsoft Expressions. Don’t fall off the bandwagon!

Overall I thought the conference went well, especially for it’s first year, but it started out a little rough. Lee Brimelow from Adobe was introduced with very little energy by Kromer. Brimelow’s speech was not to memorable and he didn’t have much energy either. Flashpitt needs to take a cue from Carsonified on how to start a conference.

Before the break we found out a speaker was delayed (and would eventually cancel), so the schedule was shuffled. Originally a technical speech was paired with a creative speech throughout the day, so if you were strictly creative or technical you were going to waste any time. With the shuffling technical and creative speeches were paired with each other and I felt that was a poor decision.

The first speech I when to was AS2 to AS3 Migration because I’m currently migrating a code base at work. I won an awesome book, The ActionScript 3.0 Migration Guide by Kris Hadlock, for answering a question. The book is short, easy to skim and a great thing for me because often times learning as I go means I miss some nuances of the language. It’s good to sit and read sometimes.

The next speech I went to was the best of the day. Craig Swann gave a speech titled Re:Discovery that was meant to inspire us to look at the world around us and how we interact with it. Craig plays with different ways people can interact with computers and technology, intergrating his love for music and obsession with time. He will wire chimes to play sounds from a computer and use color sensors to create interactive videos. It was cool too see someone just play with their computer and see what they could come up with.

Following Swann’s speech I attended For Placement Only by Zander Brimijoin. This was a tiring speech. Bimijoin talked to specifically and indepth about projects so the speech dragged.

After lunch was Stacey Mulcahy, who spoke about creating user experiences. She had more energy than most the other speakers combined. I enjoyed her speech, and she clearly ascribes to the 37 Signals of “Half, not half-assed”.

Next was Dan Mall from Happy Cog, one of my favorite companies. Dan discussed using, not abusing, Flash to enhance the users experience. I was exposed to some new ideas on ways to handle Flash content on the web, and handle the absence of the Flash Player on a users computer. So it was a worthwhile speech for me.

The speeches ended with a general session by Golan Levin. He does art installations similar to those of Craig Swann, but he does not use Flash. So the topic was similar but the content less applicable, and I thought it was a poor choice for a general session.

We wrapped up the day with a great assortment of prizes raffled off and a nice after party.

With Flashpitt the good was great and the bad was ugly. There were no mediocre speeches in my opinion, just the two extremes. I would recommend going next year if your a local. I would travel far for this one until it matures a little, and if the dedication is the same as it was this year by the team that won’t take long.

I downloaded it immediately to check it out. I expect much tighter and flashier design elements from the browser named “Chrome”, but instead it looks plain and boring. I don’t mind the minimalism, but I would like a little personality. Beyond the design though I am pleased with the features. I love how there is URL bar can also be used to enter a search and I definitely noticed that is very really fast. It opens in an instant and I haven’t noticed any delays when using the browser where I have to wait while it stops to “thinks” about what to do.

I’ve been developing a fairly complicated web site over the past three weeks and think it’s a good test for how Chrome interprets CSS. The bottom line is that the release of Chrome did not complicate the development at all. The only wierd thing I rand into was that the very first line of the stylesheet needed to be:

@charset “utf-8″;

If you had anything else in line 1, even a comment, the font-family you defined in the body tag for the web site would be ignored and your text would default to Times New Roman.

Download Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome

See the list of features for Chrome: http://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en-US/features.html