3rd party sites are sites that we can post our info & pics on (social media pages) and "Listing" sites that may have our info and claim to have a button to connect you to us. Please don't contact us THROUGH those sites because it may never get to us.
Feel free to enjoy perusing all of the reviews about us on all those sites. But if you're ready to contact us, please just email us directly.
Angie's List (or Angi, as it's now called) is the worst of these. But like many of the others, they try to insert themselves between the contractor and homeowner. You and I are both adults, why do we need someone else to hold our hands just to talk about getting you a deck built?
Others could include:
■ HomeAdvisor
■ Houzz
■ Porch
■ Thumbtack
■ HomeStars
■ Yellow Pages
■ The BBB
■ Nextdoor
...and MORE
Even facebook can mess with our relationship by inserting things on our business page like buttons that make you think you will be in direct contact with us.
Many of these sites put "Contact buttons" on our profile. But what you have to know is this.......
Those buttons do NOT connect you directly to us!
Clicking those buttons will let you leave a message to us that is ON THEIR SYSTEM. Many of them don't even email me to let me know there is a message for me on their system. But either way I have to then find my login info for that site, go log in, navigate to where the messages are and then respond to you. And when I do respond, it will seem easiest for you to reply back to me on that same system since you're on there reading my message.
But for me this is NOT easy. There are many more sites than listed above and if I connected with my customers through all of them I'd never be able to get anything else done. I'm not being dramatic; I've tried it and I literally can't get anything else done. That's just way too much to keep up with and log in to all the time. Even on facebook, which is a close 2nd to this main website for us, I have to take a few steps to get off of my personal profile and see my business profile/messages. And you don't know this unless you have one, but the entire suite of business page features on facebook is extremely convoluted. I can get lost on there and have trouble finding my way back to other sections.
We have purposefully created our profile/page on facebook and Nextdoor. Other sites (like Angi) have created profiles for us (that's their attempt to look necessary and insert themselves as a middleman so they can generate revenue). And on any of these profiles we've found we try to go and edit them to say that you should just email us directly.
But if you run across any that don't tell you to email us directly and they have some sort of "contact button" then we likely aren't aware it's there and we can't help that. We can't help that some company is misleading you. We also can't help the fact that if you found one of those sites before you found this one, you probably didn't get any of these warnings. And even if you found this site you probably haven't tried to read much of anything that's on here.
We can't help any of that. But we don't know where else we can warn you and put disclaimers in an effort to keep you from wasting your time or getting mad because we never responded after you clicked some contact button somewhere on the internet.
We don't deserve bad reviews just because someone contacted us on some platform we didn't build and don't control (and may not even know about) and we never got the message so we never responded.
Don't let the internet lead you around by the nose. When you want to contact ANY business, try to contact them directly before you try it any other way. It's only fair to both of you.
Furthermore....
I get several people every day (7 days a week) contacting me. I have a hard enough time trying to get back with all of them over one medium (email). There is no way I can get back to everyone on every different platform. And it would be a nightmare to try to keep organized!
I need to stick to ALL communications being through email (chris@customdeckworks.com) so that I can keep up with all of them and stay organized.
Angi, Nextdoor, any of them, even facebook could go away at any time. And if they do they're taking our messages with them. The only way to be sure I will always be able to access the messages between you and I is if they are in an email account that I control.
Yes, my business email is through who I host my website with and that company could go away. But every file for my website is backed up on my computer and another detached hard drive. And I use Outlook for my emails (not online, but loaded on my actual computer). And it gets all of my emails from the server every 3 minutes and they are saved on my computer - safe from any other company going out of business or discontinuing their software/app.
Those of you who use gmail or aol or yahoo or any other email client that you have to go login to on the internet will lose all of your emails if those companies go out of business, get hacked, or change something and mistakenly delete stuff.
The bottom line is: Just email me.
It's how I will know you contacted me.
It's how I can keep organized.
It will save us both time.
And it keeps ME in control instead of some 3rd party.
