Found this conversation thread recently where a website owner had got really messed around by two other website designers and reading their thoughts and seeing how frustrated the website owner had become I can see how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, needless to say both companies disappeared leaving their clients in a big mess. We have been building websites for over 10 years, why risk your valuable website with anyone else.
[Website Owner to old Website Designer] My website I hate to say it looks atrocious, everything is now out of sync. My blog is missing, about me is missing, size chart missing, black bold goes over the frame, the home page is still showing a box with nothing in it. It’s hard to upload images without having to pay you guys – I want to be able to upload my own . I’ve had enough!
Everyone who looks at it including professional website designers are all saying it’s rubbish and I now agree. It’s not phone friendly either which you promised it to be, it’s hard to navigate and not professional looking. I’m selling high end products.
Yes I’ve taken time away as I explain I’ve had a very hard time of late. But NEW YEAR fresh start for me I thinks with it all. When I came to you, I was crystal clear with my brief ‘I wanted a professional high end website.’ Not a cheap as chips’
I have not got that and now I would like a full refund minus any images I have paid for to be sent to me in files, so I can implement them for future use on my site. I will now have to have someone else build it and host it where I can be content and proud of my website and company name. You have not achieved this for me and you should have been upfront from the very beginning.
I’ve been told you’ve used a cheap back end and made it as cheap as possible for you to profit and it shows. I would like all my admin passwords etc so I can pass this to my new designer who we have been recommended to, which is Delicious Webdesign who are based in Stanford-le-Hope in Essex.
[Second Website Designer] To be honest, I have logged onto the site with my phone and can see that it adapts to the phone as it should in a responsive style, it is not the best I have ever seen, but it does show the categories and products. The landing page with the characters are still visible but unless you have visited the site before you may not know what to press. I could not say what pages are missing. This is something that you would know. My Website is phone friendly but not the main website. There is some differences when they display on the phones as it has to be formatted to the Width and Length and so such changes are generally down to the CSS style sheets that have the settings configured for the different sizes.
In relation to the Security aspect, there is NOTHING on your site that can be considered as secure. HTTPS certificates have to be purchased from a CA (Certificate Authority), this then provides an encrypted Key that encrypts the Data making your site Secure. you can tell Secure sites as they have the padlock just before the URL or somewhere on the page, for example, go to google.com, it automatically changes to https from http and it has a padlock, the biggest best websites are all secure now.
The Certificate cost is ongoing, you have to pay each year, it is an ongoing cost and different levels or types cost you more or less money, go to somewhere like a domain registrar and hosting company and you can see the costs for this. The Cert is associated with your site and at that point it becomes secure.
I think that your website designer is a not that great, to be honest I went and looked at his own page and consider it to be lower end of skill set, I looked at the other sites that he has done and they all look the same, pretty much a similar layout and all using that appalling spidery font, which quite honestly looks too thin and as if it has been scratched out on a piece of old parchment with a matchstick and limited ink supply. It screams cheap and nasty, the beauty site was sort of okay but even that has issues that are obvious. There is a lack of professionalism and I have to ask does he know what Photoshop is?
This person may or may not have abilities in terms of code, personally I do not see anything creative in that coding, however, his creative ability can be seen by their own lucklustre website I have seen this Southend Website Design company before, they dont have a good reputation.
Considering the “experts” have nothing to gain either way in the advice that they give then I consider his response to that a joke, people just say what they see and no more, scare you in what way? Unless of course he is talking about Google who seem to be leaning towards forcing people to do what they want and have responsive sites. I see that though as fact and not as scaremongering.
In respect to the carts that you have mentioned, Woocommerce is a plugin in the CMS website framework WordPress and is good with SEO but does not have too many templates designed yet, it has it’s quirks but is apparently good, I have never used it so do not know. In regards to Prestashop I believe that is now less supported that all the rest. I use Opencart – It is okay, does the Job, has its quirks but is reasonably configurable.
If it was me, I would probably move away from this website designer and if I really liked my design I would see about adapting it to a more modern cart. There are a lot of people out there that would take your design and put it on a different back end for you as a set fee. Probably for a few thousands pounds. You can then host it wherever you like and just run it yourself, if something tragic happens that you cannot fix then get someone to fix it but to be honest most things can be done with a spot of Google or just get someone on a one off for an upfront fee!
If there are essential updates that are to be performed so as to mitigate said Vulnerabilities then as a customer of them they are bound to advise you of the changes that they are making and why and also as to the effect that it would have on your system and advice of the cost that this will incur.
Most companies that are Hosting companies, inform their customers of any critical updates that may be performed and expected downtime, they also tend to rectify any issues that occur or at least advise that the change has the potential to cause an outage and the recommended fix for this outage. I would suggest that this person is basically someone who does websites (poorly) and I have not seen any websites that he has done other than yours, I suspect that the “many” clients that he has are in his imagination and I further suspect that he is perhaps doing some work here and there but not as much as writing the whole thing.
The service that he is providing is not that good in that the truth of it is that he alone does not do the updates, it is most unlikely that he owns the Server that you are hosted upon, he will be renting space from a provider like Amazon AWS or Rackspace or someone of that ilk and they probably do the updates and perform the maintenance. He is charging you a fee for maintaining your website and he is then adding extra cost in.
If they perform an enhancement to improve your website at your request then you have to pay for that, but if he is correcting something that has been caused then that is not an enhancement, that is BROKEN… sadly the OScommerce cart is outdated and although is configurable and has a large following, no significant changes have been made. It is one of those things that people are used to and do not really stray from. A good developer would have offered you a choice of a few carts and not just one. Oscommerce was old when I used it!
I know that you love your website and designed it and I know that you will hate me for saying this, but I feel that perhaps you have started off in the wrong direction, you need something that you can manage and easily upload pictures and make your own changes to the text without any reliance upon outside developers, then as you grow you can make the changes you like as you grow.
Perhaps in the long run you would be better off just getting a template and tweak it later on, for example this site cost me a grand total of 60 pounds or thereabouts and there is loads of modules and support.
The website we discussed is mobile friendly already, has loads of good content and ranks well and comes up very well on a phone.
If you like you can get a developer to bolt your landing page on the front at little actual cost. Your problem is that you are very dependent on this website design company to do work for you and this is costing you, quite frankly they are charging you for every little thing that you have done and although not exorbitant, it is a drain.
I will be personally closing my website as the oscommerce site is okay but is not very modern. I would also state that I use OScommerce on my old site and the updates that are done did not affect me. It does not look like they will be charging you now for the paypal issue.
I do feel that the use of “/” is very nice and is quite sarcastic, you are not a Techy and you should not have to take everything that he says at face value and should question.
