My Choice of Affiliates

I’d like to use this post to share with you four affiliations I have that really please me:

• My web host: Tiger Technologies, a fantastic web-hosting company
• My site design: Thesis by Chris Pearson.
• My favorite place to buy books and lots of other things: Amazon

When people do really good work, I believe you should talk about them. And these people/organizations do really good work, and all impress me a lot. So, I wanted to share that with you. I am pleased to be an affiliate with each of them, and I recommend their products because I personally know them to be excellent and to be backed with top-notch customer service.

Tiger Technologies

When I became disgruntled with my previous web host, I noticed that Search Engine Land was using Tiger Technologies for its hosting. Although I did not know Danny Sullivan (of SEL), I decided to contact him to see what he thought about Tiger. He was kind enough to write back to me, and told me he was absolutely delighted with them. Given that he easily has at least 50 times the traffic that I do, I figured they could easily handle my needs, and I contacted them.

Like Danny, I am delighted with these guys. The server has been rock solid. And, I’ve contacted them a few times when I had some questions and they have been prompt and thorough in responding to me. Extraordinarily thorough. Not only do they answer my questions, they often point me to other really helpful resources.

For example, I discussed with them some problems I encountered with Google crawling my web site. Google was reporting some 404 (not found) pages when the pages actually existed, and I had been working with others in the Google Forums to try to figure out what was going on. This had been going on for a couple of months and was driving me crazy.

The people at Tiger went through my server logs and confirmed that the server was indeed not the problem (confirming what I had determined from reviewing the logs), and they researched the web to find other instances where other people were occasionally encountering this sort of problem. Google eventually solved the problem, but the point is: Tiger Technologies went an extra mile for me, more than once, when a lot of other web hosts would have just tried to minimize the problem.

The Thesis Theme

I have been a fan of Chris Pearson’s web designs and blogging advice ever since I began blogging. His designs are typographically perfect, and work equally well on all browsers and all platforms. I used his free Copyblogger design for a long time and I still like it.

So, when Chris began selling premium versions of his designs, I immediately bought the first one available: the Thesis theme that I am currently using. I’ve received great feedback from many of you on it, and I love how well put together it is. It is not only well-designed, from an aesthetics view, it also has rock-solid underlying code. And, it’s easy to customize and the underlying framework is future-proofed, so the theme can be upgraded without you having to redo your customizations. To turn the default three-column Thesis design into two columns took two mouse-clicks, with no coding changes. To change the content font to 12pt Verdana took two mouse clicks, no coding. All of my customizations to the header, sidebars, footer, and so on are done through only two files, custom-functions.php and custom.css … I do not have to change a half-dozen files like I do with other theme designs.

Amazon

I have been an Amazon affiliate for a long time because I believe they offer the best value of any bookseller. I can often order a book and have it shipped to me for half of what it would cost elsewhere. And, they have become much more than booksellers, too, offering value in a number of areas.

They have established themselves as a leader in customer service. Jeff Bezos has been relentless in driving Amazon to listen to everything its customers say, to anticipate customer needs, and to provide a great customer experience. He is one of the two CEOs that I most admire, with Steve Jobs being the other one.

Closing Remarks

I wanted to write this so that when you see advertisements in my about Tiger Technologies, Thesis (DIYthemes), and Amazon, you know I stand behind them. I am proud to be affiliated with these folks and their products and services.