I received an interesting email yesterday. The email was from a teacher (Miss Cassandra Smith) who said her students used my website, DellaJane to study the internet. (Carrot!) Someone recognizes how wonderful my website is!! They particularly loved my links page.(Warm Fuzzies!) What's not to love? Check it out yourself if you don't believe me!
One of her best & brightest students (Samantha) found an article about making quilts. Of course it would be a good addition to my already wonderful resource page. Would I please add a link to this article on my links page so Samantha and the other students could see a tangible reward for their hard work? (Appeal to my human nature to help others.) As an additional carrot, she told me Samantha was going to get extra credit points for her efforts.
I'll be the first one to admit I'm in love with my website. But the links page? Please! What is fascinating about a list of links? Because I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday, I checked out Samantha's recommended resource, the "make a quilt" page. The article had been posted one day before and was a very broad overview of quilting terms. NOT the first page I would recommend to someone who wants to know more about making quilts! Or the second. Or the third. The web page with the article was on a site selling personalized gifts. If this was the best resource Samantha could find, she wasn't working hard enough!
I checked out the school web site link in the teacher's signature. At first glance it appeared to be a valid school website. Further exploration had me doubting this. No physical address, no staff names, just vague mission statements, directions for picking up your child after school, uniform description. The "News and Events" page had a paragraph about parking lot safety. Really? That's the biggest (only?) thing going on? Red flags flying everywhere! Private schools tell you where they are. They tell you where to buy the uniforms. They brag about their faculty and include extensive bios. They list emails for contacting the (over-qualified) staff who will shape your child's life. They show pictures of the buildings. Their website shares all the cultural and mind-expanding events they've held in the past and will hold in the future. They ask for money!! They offer scholarships to not-quite-well-off-enough parents are wise enough to consider their school. This "school" website had none of these.
Final Analysis: This is a scam. A good scam. A victimless scam. But a scam nevertheless. This personalized gifts website is trying to get inbound links from reputable sites to increase their own ratings in Google searches. Sorry, Miss Cassandra Smith. Not from me. Momma didn't raise no fools.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Maybe its the South African in me but I picked up on the name Cassandra. I doubt whether there are very many Cassandras around.
Post a Comment