iWeb Communities: Blog

Today’s feature is about Kathryn Presner, who owns a web design consultancy firm called Zoonini Web Services. You can meet Kathryn on Twitter; you can also get her monthly newsletter, which is how I discovered what she was doing in the web design and web development industry in Montreal, Canada. Kathryn Presner has had a dedicated server at iweb for the past 4 years, and using it to offer website solutions to her customers.

Can you present yourself? What’s your background, and how did you become a web designer?

I’m Kathryn Presner, founder of Zoonini Web Services . My background is in film and television production, but I found the field extremely stressful and never really found my passion in that industry. When I first discovered the Web around 1994, I was fascinated with its potential. Designing and building sites offered a challenging way to use both the creative and logical parts of my brain, and I found it very satisfying. By late 90s I was designing Web sites professionally.

Can you tell us more about Zoonini? What kind of services are you offering, and what kind of companies (or individuals) are you providing services for?

I specialize in one-of-a-kind, custom-designed sites for small-to-medium-sized businesses and organizations. I have clients all over Canada and the US, in areas as diverse as business coaching, professional organizing, arts education, and even pest control! One of the things I take pride in is always keeping the “big picture” in mind: crafting sites that are pleasing to the eye, but also serve the visitor well by providing the information they’re looking for quickly and easily. I also partner with two trusted colleagues to offer complementary services: A.C. Riley Communications for organic search-engine optimization and Cresedo Tec for custom database-driven applications.

About web hosting, how do you present this service to your customer?

I always ask potential clients if they’ll need hosting. Very often, their answer is “What’s a host?” – so right from the start I need to educate most folks about what Web hosting is, and what I can offer. I try to explain in a non-jargony way that the host is simply the computer where your site “lives.” Easy-to-understand metaphors often help, so for example, I might say that your site is like a book, and that book lives in a reference library (the host), where people can come and look at the book (the public viewing the site). I explain that by having me provide their hosting, it’s one less company for them to have to deal with, and that since I only provide hosting to my own clients, and not the general public, I can provide stable hosting on a server that hosts many fewer other sites than a regular commercial host may have.

What product and services do you use at iWeb? What made you choose iWeb? How has been your experience so far?

Gabrielle Zacek of Cresedo Tec and I have shared an iWeb dedicated server for our clients since early 2005. We upgraded to a more powerful NOW III+ server last year. We choose iWeb because we’d met Yves Lafond at an IT tech show at the Palais des Congrès. He seemed very genuine and “un-salesy” and invited us to come visit the data centre, even though we weren’t sure we were ready for a dedicated server. He was very supportive and reassured us that with our skills we could handle it, and whatever we couldn’t handle ourselves, iWeb support could assist us. We chose a server with cPanel/WHM, which definitely had a learning curve to it (not the most intuitive interface in the world, even though we’d used it before!) but which, for us, was preferable to solely relying on the command-line. Fortunately, Gabrielle comes from a physics background and knows her way around a Linux command or two. Our biggest hiccup with iWeb so far has been with some hardware issues on our new server; it was very hard to identify the source. Fortunately, the techs eventually found the major culprit: the motherboard itself! Our account manager Patrick Hanley was invaluable in helping us get to the root of the problem. During that time, we decided to opt for the Level 5 Managed support package, which relieves a lot of the stress of making sure our server is up 24/7. For us, it’s been worth it.

In addition to our main server, I also have a smaller dedicated server for one client who hosts several Flash movies there.

What kind of product/service would you want to be offered or improved at iWeb? Finally, would you recommend iWeb Technologies to friends or contacts?

From my perspective as a client over the last four years, the biggest thing that can be improved even further at iWeb is the flow of information on the tech support end. One gets the feeling often that information is not being passed along smoothly from one tech support person to another, which results in having to re-explain things. Also, I definitely get the sense that there is a really varying level of expertise – and communication skills – among tech support staff. We get some great and clear answers to our tech queries – other times, the responses are not as helpful.

I would definitely recommend iWeb to anyone looking for a dedicated server.