On the weekend I picked up a copy of a new magazine, Web Designer. It is the magazine’s first issue, well first released in Australia as I later found out there is a UK version and this same magazine is their 142nd issue, and was actually quite good reading. It seemed to be quite mature, though considering there’s been 142 issues released overseas you would expect that, and there was some very ‘current tech’ articles on various elements of web design.
Oh and it also comes with a cover cd!
The cover disk boasts 30 royalty free images, 24 weird web fonts, 6 flash templates, + much much more!
I was really looking forward to playing with some of the stuff on the disk, but…and isn’t there always a but, the disk was a dead one.
Not a big deal I thought, there’s an email address on the back of the disk and I can email them and explain the situation, pretty sure they can just send me a new copy of the disk or maybe they even have an ftp server where I can download the disk image from.
How wrong was I!
I emailed them, it bounced back. I looked up the url end of the email address and there’s no such website.
Fortunately I have the magazine with me, and there’s a url on the cover that is completely different. I go to that website and it’s basically just a holding page to subscribe to the magazine. I flick through the magazine a little more and found another email address on their competitions page, so I email that one and get an email back from the associate publisher within a few minutes. Apparently they had problems with the disks, they’re trying to get it rectified, and if I give them my mailing address I can get one sent to me.
That’s all cool I guess, and hopefully they do send me one out, but a little bit of checking before approving the printing of the disk covers would’ve sorted out the email address problem, a quick entry on their website saying they had problems with the disk and a ‘fill in this form to get sent a new copy’ type of thing would then show people that they’re aware of the problem and that they’ll keen to fix it.
It’s the little things that make great first impressions, and it’s impossible to make a second first impression..unless of course someone gets amnesia.