Esurance Review and Report

Esurance.com esurance

This is a review and user experience (mine) after switching from Geico to Esurance (a Safeco company). After being with Geico/Travelers for several years I made my first claim - my front deck collapsed after snowfall from my roof this past winter. Gieco paid quickly and in full - all good.

Sadly - this resulted in a substantial jump in my insurance premium so I began searching for alternatives. The Esurance website was easy to find and easy to use - and after soliciting quotes from several other companies - ended up selecting Esurance because they were the cheapest home owners insurance I could find.

The problem started after Esurance "placed" my policy with an underwriter. The underwriting company was based in California (I'm in Vermont) - so they sent out an inspector to check out my house. The inspector arrived on a day when i wasn't there - and did not contact me before or after the inspection.

A few weeks later I received a notice of cancellation. After two months!

The reasons given? 

*Peeling paint on my garage.

*No railing around my tree house (under construction - no access).

*no fire hydrant.

We live in Vermont and no one in our neighborhood has a fire hydrant. The tree house has no access - no stairs or ladder. The peeling paint was on our garage only.

After calling to complain I was told that the decision was final and made on the part of the "underwriter" who I was never allowed to talk to them. After getting stuck on hold multiple times I was finally told that "that was all there was" and told to go away. End of story.

My take away on all this? Stay away from Esurance. Stick with a known brand or better yet a local agent.

Esurance Review: One star

Xcel Infinity wetsuit review

Xcel Infinity Wetsuit

The Xcel infinity wetsuit promises "less seam and more stretch" - in my case I was looking for a comfortable suit that would work for August surfing along Cape Cod - hopefully without getting chomped by a shark (several sightings this summer) or hammered too hard by choppy surf.

First impression  - this is a very stretchy comfortable suit. The inner lining has an almost fleece like feel - two different thicknesses and colors along top and bottom halves.

Infinity - arm seam and wrist gasket

 I have fairly small wrists and the wrist closure fit very snug - good for keeping water out - but hard to get on.

Xcel infinity ankle gasket

 The ankle gasket was this bit of zig zag rubber - was pretty easy to get on and off.

excel infinity neck opening

Hard to tell from this photo but the zipper doesn't go down as far as many other suits - and there is a flap that stretches from one side to the other. This is intended to catch water coming in through the zipper - but it makes the suit a bit hard to get on.


Overall - the suit is well constructed and very comfortable to wear. On the down side - the short zipper combined with very tight wrists and forearms makes this a tough suit to get off.

Use test coming after my August trip to the Cape...

Creating mobile websites quick, cheap and easy with Go|Mo

By now pretty much everyone has acknowledged the importance of delivering web content in a mobile friendly way. Typically this is done through one of 4 strategies.
1. Create a stand alone mobile website
2. Use "responsive" design to ensure that your website renders well on small screen devices.
3. Create an iPhone/Droid app
4. Do nothing and hope mobile browsing was only a fad.

The best strategy for your particular situation depends a variety of variables including:
1. Site complexity. More complex sites are harder to move toward responsive design.
2. Budget
3. Mobile traffic
4. Audience
5. "Must have" features

While responsive design is the current hot topic in web dev I've found that for clients with highly complex "must have's" (and large enough budgets) native phone apps and stand alone mobile sites are still the way to go.

As you are trying to decide on a strategy take a quick read of Google's recent post (http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/07/mobile-websites-vs-responsive-design.html) on this subject. They seem to come out in favor of responsive design - but in the end I think taking a case by case approach is the best bet.

One interesting approach is to create a test version of your site using Google's free tool for creating mobile friendly sites - http://www.howtogomo.com/en/d/ - and then using this as a test case for your mobile efforts.

Go|Mo allows you to quickly create a mobile friendly version of your site (or any site!)  - interact with it - share with friends and customers  - and really get a sense of how your existing content could be formatted for mobile. The mobile version of your site won't be as professional and well crafted as it would be starting from scratch with a good developer - but in a matter of minutes you'll get a sense of how your optimized site could look.

As a test case I decided to create a mobile optimized version of noaa.gov (my favorite weather site). Their website is complex and poorly designed (for both traditional and mobile visitors) - and gets even worse when viewed from an iPhone. In spite of the poor design I still favor this site because of the lack of ads and the quality of data. The solution? Use GoMo and create an awesome mobile friendly version of my favorite site.

Getting started required simply copying the URL of my forecast page:
http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?zoneid=VTZ017 and then entering this into the GoMo home page.

The GoMo tool allows you to choose from a variety of "skins" and also allows you to modify the layout (and even included content) by adding or removing blocks of content from the mobile version of your site. The actual "mobile friendly" version ends up hosted on duda mobile - this is the URL for my GoMo forecast site (Chittenden Vermont only):

http://mobile.dudamobile.com/site/forecast_weather_1

While I'm not recommending that anyone use GoMo to create the final mobile friendly version of their site - it is a good way to see the possibilities -and also garner feedback from friends and customers. It also allowed me to create a mobile friendly version of one of my favorite sites with very little effort.

Happy coding!