Recommendation Criteria

If the cheapest option is the best option, then I will recommend that. Unfortunately, that is almost never the case.

It’s also rare that the most expensive choice is going to be right for you because it offers a bunch of “filler” to make it look good, but you’ll probably never need or use any of that.

What I do is look for the lowest price that meets the needs of my community, while also meeting my other criteria.

In my opinion, any company that doesn’t offer some kind of a money-back guarantee should be avoided as this indicates they do not have sufficient confidence in their product or service.

 No matter what product or service you are searching for, the odds are that there are a ton of websites that offer supposed “reviews”. But many of those, if not most, are just a list of who pays the highest commission.

The same goes for reviews shown on a company’s website. If you are on visispan.com, and they have a section for customer reviews, by all means read them, but do so with a grain of salt because they get to pick and choose what reviews to show you, and, hypothetically, can even make up reviews, if they want.

I source reviews from trusted, 3rd-party sources that have a solid reputation for quality, impartial reviews. Also, in most cases, they are products and/or services that I have personally used.

While cheap options are great, they often result in limitations that can completely destroy your ability to grow. On the other hand, paying for way more resources than you can reasonably expect to use is just burning money.

This is a big one. As much as possible, I try to steer people away from products or services that “lock” you in to using their product or service.

For example: Website hosting. I will never recommend companies like Wix, Squarespace, or GoDaddy because they use a proprietary platform that cannot be transferred to a new company. If you’re unhappy with them, you literally have to start over from scratch someplace else. And what if your Wix/Squarespace/GoDaddy website had a #1 listing on Google search? Moving to a new company will destroy that.

That’s one of the reasons I recommend using WordPress.org. If you’re unhappy with your website host, you can just sign up with a new one and transfer your website over without losing anything, including your search engine standings.

When creating an online business or online presence, you are going to be using various forms of technology. And trying to figure out “what is what” can be pretty confusing and time-consuming. So, to the best of my ability, I review the technical capabilities and structures for the products or services that I recommend to make sure they meet or exceed the needs of my community.

What’s “UI” and “UX”? UI stands for user interface and UX stands for user experience. In other words, when you have to interact with a tool (website or software), how easy is it to use (UX), and how good does it look (UI)?

I want to make sure that any tool I recommend is easy to navigate and use, and that it also looks good (because a company that doesn’t stay on top of how their product or service looks, likely isn’t staying on top of other aspects of their business as well).

The truth is, through the journey of creating an online business or online experience, you’re going to run into problems. Things that don’t work the way you think they should work.

And nothing is more frustrating than trying to contact customer support and getting someone that barely speaks English and somehow can’t grasp what the problem is. Or worse yet, blames you, someone else, or something else as the root of the problem, and doesn’t actually help you resolve anything.

Unfortunately, no company offers “perfect” customer support, but I definitely try to recommend only those companies that do their absolute best to provide a great customer support experience.