“It’s For Your Protection”…But We Could Have Done a Better Job Telling You

Yesterday we launched MI4P.info for Ink Inc. customers! Everything went pretty much as we had planned.

Except for one tiny detail.

For a short period of time, Ink Inc. customers logging in at MI4P.info saw this:

 

And that request didn’t go over very well. The request was intended to be presented only to a subset of Websites For Printers customers. We got a wire crossed, we should have never presented this request to Ink Inc. customers. Once we realized the message was being displayed to the wrong audience, we quickly turned off this request for Ink Inc. customers.

But the whole incident got us thinking … we need to do a much better job on telling our Websites For Printers customers exactly why we’re making this request when they log in to MI4P.info, and that is what we’ll cover in the rest of this post.

It’s For Your Protection

It’s for your protection. That sounds like something you’d say if you were trying to make something bad sound like something good. However, in this case, the request for identification truly is for your protection if you’re a Websites For Printers customer.

Here’s the rest of the story. We’ve been building websites since 2001, and during that time there have been two memorable instances in which the ownership of a website address (domain name) was being disputed. One domain name fight was between a brother and sister that (at the time) owned a print shop together, and the other was between a disgruntled employee and print shop owner. Thankfully we were able to sort out who the “real” owner was in both cases, but it took time and there was emotion involved. LOTS of emotion.

“Blood in the street” disputes like that are rare, but our goal is to eliminate disputes like that completely. This procedure is modeled after the same process used to establish merchant accounts. Having the Personal ID and Business ID on file allows anyone on our team to immediately identify who the real owner is, and that allows us to make sure there are no missteps. That allows us to make sure the domain name stays with the rightful owner, even though tempers and emotions may reach a boiling point.

We needed to do a better job of telling the story, and we hope this blog post accomplishes that. We want to make sure you know that when we say “It’s for your protection,” you know that it really is!