Hi all.
I hope it's OK to post this here. I just wanted to give our affiliates a bit of an update about what's been going on with ForTheGirls.com for the last 9 months. Because you may have noticed that we've been pretty quiet lately and we also haven't added any new banners and galleries in that time.
Firstly, let me state that we're not going anywhere. Our site is rock solid and is still happily grooving along making plenty of sales. I know a lot of other affiliate programs have gone bust but that's not going to happen to us. The "for women" market is still growing and we're still the market leader
Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a "holding" pattern since November 2009. That's because we decided it was high time to upgrade our old hand-updated member's area to new CMS. Gung-ho, we hired some designers who promised it would be done by the end of January.
It wasn't. And then it wasn't done by the end of February, then March... then they didn't reply to us for 3 weeks... then they said there was a problem with the server... then they didn't talk to us for another week. And then they said it would "definitely be done by Friday."
I'm embarrassed to say they promised this 17 times.
Cue the angry emails, the demands for a refund etc etc etc. The drama was still going in July.
Now we're in the process of starting all over again with a trustworthy programmer. I'm hoping we'll have a new member's area by the end of October.
What this has meant is that, instead of me working on new banners and galleries, I was either waiting for the expected new design or else wasting time sending angry emails to the designers.
And while we've continued to update the site regularly, we haven't really been able to revamp it or make the changes we had planned. And we haven't been supporting our affiliates as much as we'd like.
So, sorry. I'm hoping we can now escape from this disaster and get on with running our lovely site and affiliate program without further delay.
The good news is that we didn't see any decline in sales while all this was going on - the site has just been selling as well as ever.
We have upgraded our server so things are running much faster, although it appears there are a couple of glitches with the affiliate blog - working on it now.
Also, I'm not naming the designers as they have promised a refund. I've only received about 5% of it so far, so if we don't get the money then I will be posting another thread about the whole business.
So, GG&J friends, there's our sad and sorry story. Or our dirty laundry, if you prefer