Find the Right Website Design Vendor to Avoid a Nasty Digital Divorce

These website horror stories always end the same. Someone ends up on the loosing end.

Below are excerpts based on real-life business situations where I have helped to consul website clients and customers during these difficult experiences.

I. A Website Honeymoon Gone Wrong

The contract is signed, the wedding is done and this customer had a brand new website. The website vendor was attentive to their every need. They could not have been happier with their new website.

Weeks after their website went live, was when the digital reality began to set-in. Response times seemed to grow longer between phone calls, email requests for break-fix and addition website work. Days slowly become weeks while they waited for the website vendor to respond to their requests.

Finally they had enough. They had given their website vendor months to make things right to no avail. Now it was time for some extreme action and consider parting ways to find a better web site service company.

When this client finally found a great website development company they learned that the entire website had been built in a proprietary software application. The client had to start their website redesign again from scratch. Except for the stock photos and new logo they had purchased, they lost $11,000 in all.

Avoid the 'Bad Honeymoon' altogether by following these simple rules and steps.

"Perform a detailed discovery process from the very beginning. Write a very detailed web development plan and submit this to different website companies.

The goal is to get different quotes from a variety of web vendors; gauge their response and how professional they are.

Ask yourself; Do they respond the same day, or at least the next day when you submit your project inquiry?

Does the quote look professional?

Do they take time to answer your questions?

Just don't settle on the first low ball website bid that comes along. Avoid the extremely low quotations and the extremely high quotations. You should look at the middle tiered quotations. These quotes will be close in price; within several hundreds up or down of one another."

II. More Digital Honeymoons Gone Wrong

a. A large Mid-Atlantic company found that their marketing company was not about to relinquish their hold over their newly purchased domain names and their new website that cost them $50,000. The fine print in the contract indicated that they had to provide a 6 month termination notice or pay a buy-out equal to six months of web site maintenance support @ $2500 per month.

Do not under any circumstances allow your website vendor to register your domains or acquire your website hosting. Your domain name and hosting are the golden keys of control and ownership when it comes to managing your website.


b. An ecommerce website located in Southeastern Virginia depended on the Christmas holidays to drive 70% of their ecommerce sales for the year. On October 30th they receive a 30 day notice by registered mail that their Seattle based web developer/ hosting company was going out of business.

This client found a new web development company to get their ecommerce store up and running in the nick of time for Christmas, no thanks to the old company who provided them little to no support in this herculean effort.

Even though this web company had done business with this client for nearly ten years, they hardly lifted a finger to help! If this company would have helped to facilitate transfer of ecommerce database information it would have saved this client thousands of dollars.

If you depend on your website as your primary income driver or sale tool then you should have backup plan in the event catasrophy visits your website hosting company. Nowadays this is more easy than ever using cloud based services. If your primary website goes down them all your have to do is re-point your domain to your secondary website and you are good to go. Consult a computer technology company who provides cloud based technology services.


c. A mid-sized sign company in the U.S. hired a web development company to build them an ecommerce driven, online banner builder with all the bells and whistles. All folks has to do is design their banner online, get it printed automatically and the customer would ship it out. The ecommerce banner system was even configured to their UPS label printer. But the website interface was so hard to use and poorly designed the customer hand 3 banner sales totaling $37.00 over a 6 month period. The ecommerce banner website itself was a $21,000 investment.

When they approached another web design company to help them salvage their ailing website application they found out that the contract stipulated that they did not have exclusive rights to the database code that powered the web application.

Read the fine print and ask questions in advance of starting your website project. Most importantly ask about ownership of the website assets and website application code (or) software coding. Insist on having detailed documentation of your code base so any new developer can quickly understand and support your website programming tasks.


d. An international nursing association hired a web development company to build their new association website. After six months of waiting the web developer only delivered half of the website functionality as promised. When the client tried to part ways with the web designer, he held their domain name hostage.

"Ever try to wrestle a domain name away from someone who registered it, even on your behalf?' It is near impossible to do, unless you have unlimited financial resources and lots of time to spare". Treat your website domain name as personal and important as your social security number and birth certificate.

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About the Author
http://www.visionefx.net - Visionefx President Ricardo Vidallon has been in the creative business of advertising, cable broadcast, animation and the World Wide Web for more than two decades. His work has been featured on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Inc., Fox News and NBC Entertainment. His career track in Web consultancy includes the global companies of Reynolds and Reynolds, CMGI Solutions, and Automark, Inc.