Going to war, web developer style

There is bad customer services everywhere, but nothing quite compares to The Brick for me. Here in Quebec we get raped by Telecom companies on cellphone plans and internet, we pay much more for less, and yet, today I am really more pissed off at The Brick.

I am going to spare you the details of my adventure with them, you can find all the details here. Let’s just say that I bought some furniture and I am really not happy with it.

War, guerrilla style!

I was so pissed off about my discussion with their customer support that I decided to create a website to tell everyone about how shitty The Brick is, and I did it in little more than 4 hours. First thing first, I bought a nice domain name, thebrickwarranty.com. My host, webfaction, has some pre-install softwares, turns out wordpress is one of them. Not that it’s hard to install of course, but it is quite satisfying to have it up in running in 10 seconds.

Ok, but what about the design?

My friend Google told me that there is quite a few nice free themes around, and I found a spectacular one too. I just did a couple of small template tweaking to fit my needs.

I also needed a couple of plugins,

Disqus – The super nice commenting system that handles everything.
Share on facebook – Well a sharing plugin
wp super cache – Hey, using less resources is always good

The longest thing was finding the Facebook sharing plugin! Of course I needed a Twitter account too, I decided to use the nice concept of BP global PR, which was making fun of BP disaster PR campaign, I registered @thebrickwarranty. I was very disappointed, but not surprised, to find out that The Brick does not even own a Twitter account. HEH!

This was the final result, the brick warranty

Now that’s all nice, but I needed people to find me and I needed to get on the first page with the “The Brick” keyword. Turns out there also quite a few people pissed at them, so I tried to advertise thebrickwarranty.com on different consumer forums, with mitigate results.

Google Adword

I had this 100$ Google ad voucher code taking dust for a while, what a nice way to try Adword! Turns out, The Brick is an expensive keyword and it didn’t last long.

One nice thing however, with Google Analytic I saw that some people find the website on keywords like “the brick dining set”, which is pretty cool, over time I am pretty sure my ranking on this type of keywords will become better.

Reflecting on all this

In the end I surely invested more time than it was worth the trouble. I contacted their customer support linking my new website in hope it might at least get a “*(&(u*” from a director or a vice-president, I did not got a response yet. I’m still happy I did it, mission accomplished.