FTD, Teleflora, 1800 Flowers & DOGS from a Fellow Florist in Illinois

You may all be wondering why I’m posting three links for all of you. Yes, they are our competition only because people let them be. Feel free to take a look at each one & all their negative nightmarish comments from Mother’s Day. You will understand why I’m posting this. The thing that bothers me most is many times these companies will blame the local florists for the unhappy customers of theirs.
THAT IS UPSETTING!

We used to be a filling shop for all three of the big ones until we caught them being very deceitful in ripping off people before sending us the orders that they then ripped us off for. Our good name & reputation meant more to us since we work so hard for each & every one of our customers.
Long story short….we FIRED all of them & people are finally starting to realize why you should shop local, which I’ve been saying that for a very long time without all of these explanations.
HAPPY COMMENT READING!

https://www.facebook.com/teleflora
https://www.facebook.com/FTDflowers
https://www.facebook.com/1800flowers

Teleflora, FTD, 1800Flowers, etc. are all just order takers. They collect your money, excessive fees and then forward what is left to the local florist who is required to fill the order for half of what you paid for it. They don’t even pass on the unbelievable high delivery fees to the florist, they keep it all. GREEDY! Contact your local florist next time and get your order filled for the full value of the money that you paid for it, not half of what you paid for it.
AND…..anytime you google search a florist, you will always see names at the top area. They are ALL deceitful order gatherers (DOGS) that pay millions each holiday to take away from local florists. It’s a big business. There are also listings that look like a flower shop name but again, they bought many domain names to pose as a real florist. If you see a toll free number only & no physical address…you’ve found a DOG! If you ever have an order to send out somewhere far, feel free to contact me, I will give you a phone number of a Real Local Florist. Another way to find one is to type in florist in (town, state) on the facebook search box. There you should be able to find florists listed on fb that you can look at some of their designs & look for yourself & decide.
I’m just trying to educate people as the the Whys & Why Nots

What the heck just happened?

Have you ever visited a website, possibly selected some items to view or purchase, and boom, screen disappears or everything on the screen is suddenly not where its’ supposed to be, the list of examples goes on. You may even repeat the process and it happens again, maybe it doesn’t happen again. Well what caused the problem to begin with? Was it my computer, was it a virus, was it spy ware, was it a bug on the website, do I need to buy one of those infomercial software’s to fix my PC?? There are several culprits that could be the root but it may just be your web browser!

My background on computers runs back to the mid 80’s and my job titles ranged from Operations supervisor  at a data center for a manufacturing facility to Programming Development Manager for a Produce Distribution company. So, a few years ago I started looking into website development and boy did my head start to spin. To program a modern website today, you must know multiple programming languages and a lot more about the technologies involved.

After a couple of years of dabbling with a test website and a small fortune on books, last year I decided to buckle down and do this. So I began working on a website using an open source shopping cart as a starter and began heavily modifying it. Now one thing I had read in my learning’s was that the website needed to work in all the available browsers. No problem I thought, I use Internet Explorer and sometimes FireFox so everything should look hunky dory. Boy did I still have more lessons to learn.

Now all of you who use Windows have received those notifications that updates are available for your PC. Most think those updates are just for security vulnerabilities and also to correct any bugs or issues as they like to call them in the Windows software. To most it doesn’t dawn on them that sometimes those updates are for the internet browser itself. Windows comes with Internet Explorer (IE for short) and of course there were several lawsuits over that issue. What you may not know is there have been as many revisions and updates to IE as there have been to the Windows Operating system itself. Each version of IE has known issues that were not resolved and updates came out to replace them. Unless your computer is very old (like original Windows or Windows 95), it could be running IE 5, IE 5.5, IE 6, IE7, IE8, or the newest IE9 (to use IE9 I think it is still a requirement  to use Windows 7).

IE 6 was known to have a lot of issues, IE 7 was better, IE 8 was even better and the jury is still out on IE 9 but it looks good so far. Well you may ask, why not just fix the bugs and everything would work fine. Well as technology progresses, new toys become available to make your website more friendly by adding bells & whistles. Website designers and owners are often eager to have the latest and greatest, so they enhance their website to take advantage of these advances.

Where the rub comes in is that sometimes these new brainstorms don’t work properly in older browsers. In fact the older the browser, the less likely it is functioning to the capability that the developer designed. In fact, in some browsers it just may crash. Now good designers try to test all of their websites with all the browsers out there, but that is not completely possible. As I explained, there are different versions of IE. There are also different versions of FireFox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera, and the list goes on. Also, each one of these browsers have neat add-ons to make your browser experience more robust. Guess what, those add-ons can also make your website bomb.

Now I can’t guarantee that it you have the latest updates to your browsers that you will not receive some unexpected event, but the possibilities are less. That’s also not to say that the website you visit may not be cutting edge and not have all those neat bells and whistles but still may throw an error, but most browsers do better with backward capabilities than forward capabilities. So you have the latest updates, and still getting errors or unexpected events? It could be those add-ons. I have had several occasions when developing the www.wylieflowershop.com  website that things didn’t work as I designed, would work on one computer and not another, it turned out that the addons to the browser was having unforseen effects on the website. The addons can usually be easily removed or disabled but you can see where the different scenarios could drive a web designer crazy and make you wonder what the heck just happened.

Regards, Danny