Today is a big day in the relatively short life of Double Glazing Blogger, as this site turns a grand five years old today!

Over the next few days I’ll be writing a series of posts which go over some of the best and some of the worst of DGB. I’ll show you what the top 5 most read posts on this site are, as well as list the posts which had the most comments. I’ll also display some of the posts that have landed me in more bother than I’d care to think about. It’s fair to say there has been the odd occasion where my naivety has put me very close to some serious trouble. But we all learn!

I’ve also decided to give the site a bit of an appearance change too. This will be the last post you read on DGB whilst its in this guise. All being well I’ll be able to introduce a new look to DGB late Monday evening. It’s been about a year since my last upgrade, and I do want to keep DGB looking as fresh and modern as possible. I have decided that the site will change each year, probably on it’s birthday. Most of you probably won’t care about that detail, or at the very least wonder why I would go to the bother of changing it so often. Well ask anyone that knows me and they’ll tell you I can’t leave things alone. Leaving it a full year before I can change to again is long enough!

Anyway, I thought I might kick the comparisons off by showing you the very first post I’d ever written. Now go easy on me. I’d only just set the site up and was still finding my way around the world of blogging and actual writing. I’ve improved much since then, though I’m still learning. This is what I decided my first post should be about:

Offers All Wrapped Up In T’s & C’s

Something came through the post today which i found quite…well if i were a customer I’d think ‘whats the point’?

Everest sent a mailshot to where I live, with a flimsy small brochure and a two page cover letter. And it was at the bottom of the second page which left me a bit…well unimpressed to say the least. The letter makes a point to tell the potential customer that they are valid for ‘at least’ a 35% discount if they were to buy. It goes on to say that there is no hard sell, but then straight away goes on to confirm that this 35% discount applies if you buy immediately, so straight away pressure on the customer. At the bottom of the letter, plenty of fine print. Read on and i found that to qualify for this discount (which is probably added on anyway!) the customer has to place an order of over two grand, is dependent on the product you pick (which probably means the products with the highest profit margins!), have to buy immediately, which most customers don’t want to do, and the discount can’t be used with any other offers.

Oh and you’ve got to pay through their finance system, so diddling the customer with high interest payments.

So it got me thinking, for all the effort they make to say that ‘hard sell’ isn’t used, any customer who spent just a few minutes working out how they would qualify for this discount, would realize that it is in fact, a ‘hard sell’, not a directly vocal hard sell, but one which would bind the customer in the home to make a buying decision, one which they probably would not have liked to make in that manner.

The company I work for has always worked on the premise that we give the customer the keenest price in the first place, no fake discounts by adding then taking away money, just the best price, in writing, definitely no hard sell, then the balls in the customer’s court. Honesty being the best policy in my opinion!

Original post: https://www.doubleglazingblogger.com/2009/03/offers-all-wrapped-up-in-ts-cs/

Now I have copied and pasted this exactly how I wrote it, grammar mistakes and all. Personally it’s a bit cringy to read what I wrote so long ago. I know in myself that my writing style has become a little more refined over time and I’ve learned how to get my point across better.

In all honesty, I started this blog having absolutely no intention of it sticking around for this long. I thought it would just be one of those things that fizzles out after a few months and then I’d just leave it to gather dust. But I found myself updating it regularly, and to the point where I was posting fresh content on a daily basis.

And it really started to take off once the fenestration blogger trailblazer that was Renegade Conservatory Guy (Matthew Glover) mentioned the site on his. Traffic started to build from there and what started as a small following steadily grew into something more promising.

Then there was that post covering the Veka purchase of Halo. That’s when things blew up for DGB in a big way – almost literally! I had absolutely no idea how much traffic and focus the site would get after I posted that story. It was easily the busiest day in the site’s history so far, and at the time the novelty was great. But later, once the hype died down, I was informed that the companies involved considered taking me to court. That was a sobering moment for me and brought me well and truly back down to earth. So for any of you wondering why I don’t post such risqué stuff any more, that is the reason why! On that day, I think in an effort to keep my mouth shut, I had a massive attack on my Twitter account from proxy accounts based in China. I suspect that someone who knew what they were doing overloaded DGB with followers so as to shut my Twitter account down temporarily.

After that, DGB was firmly on the radar of far more many industry people than it was before I wrote about that story. From there, the site has grown into a more mature, well rounded place for my thoughts, as well as covering topics which have larger effects on the UK fenestration industry as a whole.

But I also believe that DGB wouldn’t have lasted so long without it’s haters. I want to give them a virtual handshake for disagreeing with my posts, your threats to sue, the verbal abuse and the personal attacks. Your angry, often inappropriate comments in the past have given me the energy and vigour to do better, succeed at tasks in life just to display that whatever you say to me, no matter how politely to you go about criticising me, you won’t change what I do. I especially want to thank the person who left a comment on this site calling me a mouthy kid. That started a great new hashtag for me on Twitter: #mouthykid which I believe backfired your point spectacularly! It has stuck ever since.

This site, as well as other new projects which I am involved with, continues to thrive despite resistance and negativity. I would like to thank each and every one of you who has left a comment (good or bad), tweeted links to my site, sent me messages privately, read any of my posts, flicked through all of my pages and my sponsors. All of that interaction really is appreciated more than you probably understand.

I hope that you’ll all continue to come back to DGB in the future and read what daily musings I have to offer you that day!

Kind Regards

DGB – Jason