On Thursday Kolby finished up the design of Electric Bandits. He did a great job of skinning his initial design of the forum and I’m very pleased with the outcome. The forum has a top and bottom sponsor area and a place for ads on the right hand side too. The latest threads are displayed at the right hand side of every page too, which I believe will make for a better browsing experience for users.
When I approved his initial design I paid half of the cost of the design via 2checkout. After finishing it off on Thursday Kolby asked if I could pay by Western Union. I was happy to do this however it wasn’t as easy, the whole process was a nightmare.
After signing up I clicked on the send money online option and proceeded to enter Kolbys details. There was 5 or 6 steps in the payment process but by step 3 it had signed me out because of inactivity, which was strange because I’m a quick typer and I was going through the procedure very quickly. So I had to sign in again. This time I got to the credit card stage but after submitting I was logged out again because of inactivity. On the 4th attempt I successfully submitted my card but the payment was rejected and told me to call up. This was around 10.45pm and their telephone support ended at 11pm.
It then took me 3 attempts to be able to speak to someone as twice I got a dead tone after going through dozens of options. Finally I spoke to someone and tried to make the payment but it couldn’t go through because my bank had declined it. This was at 11pm so I was unable to do phone up again.
So I had to call my bank and on the 2nd call got transferred to a department which told me that they had stopped it because they thought it was fraudulent. This is the 6th or 7th time Halifax have done this with me and it can be quite annoying. It’s good to know that if someone stole my card they would stop that person running up a large bill but it’s annoying all the same to have to go through all this. Last year they stopped my card when I was in Japan and I had to spend an hour in a phonebox calling the uk to try and get the hold taken off.
Anyways, they tool the hold off and I did the payment through western union online. The payment couldn’t go through so I had to get up early the next morning and call again and finally it went through. Paypal are bastards but I don’t recall going through all this hassle with them!!
I really do hate these automatic phone services. They always make it incredibly hard to speak to someone. When I called about my credit card I had to go through 3 options, enter my credit card number, date of birth and expiry date all on the phone. I was then given 4 options. To choose the first 3 options you had to press 1, 2 or 3. The 4th option was to talk to a representive and you had to press *0. When I did this the first time it just went dead…..WTF!! Why didn’t they just make it 4 or even 9!!
This video pretty much sums up Thursday evening for me!
Getting the payment to Kolby turned out to be a pain in the butt but he was very easy to work with and I’d definately use him again. If anyone is looking to have their forum skinned I recommend checking Relivo out.
Next step for Electric Bandits is a unique logo. I’ll post about that soon :)
