Web Development Horror Stories

As a web designer and developer, I have heard many horror stories from people who got "real bargains" on their web sites done by other web development or web design companies. On the one hand, remedying bad or unethical web development done by other companies is a source of some serious job security for 1-2-Wonder. We do a lot of web site redesigns. On the other hand, we wish many of our clients had NOT to learn about "bargain web sites" the hard way before they found us.

For instance...

• One client received (after a year of waiting) an incomplete web site with nothing but Latin filler-text gibberish on half the pages from his former web developer.
  
  
• Another got a CD -- JUST a CD -- containing "the web site", with absolutely NO help or even information for obtaining a domain name, hosting, or even any help to get this "web site" uploaded or online.
  
  
• This next horror story unfortunately happens a lot (we see it at least several times a year when frustrated potential clients come to us for assistance): The unethical web developer purchases a requested domain with the client's money, but registers it in the web developer's own name. This removes ALL control of the domain from the client and makes the web developer -- not the client -- the actual owner of the domain. If the client wishes to switch developers and/or hosting companies, he/she can't. If the web developer wishes to sell the domain name to a higher bidder, the client has no recourse except expensive and lengthy legal battles.
  
  
• One web design client paid for a commerce web site to be developed by another company, only to find out hundreds of dollars later that the developer had set the order process to go through her own (not the client's) PayPal account, and insisted on keeping it that way "because the client didn't know anything about computers"! The client had no way of knowing when orders were coming in or when payments were received for products purchased on her own web site. (Oh by the way, this same web developer was also one of those who registered the domain in her own name, not the client's.)
  
  
• Failure to "get it in writing" has resulted in total loss for many web site owners who hire unethical web developers. Many web developers are happy to take clients' money but fail to deliver any workable web site at all. Lesson: always, always get a signed contract!
  
  
• Others received web sites that were incompatible with different browser types. They looked and worked OK in Internet Explorer but were disastrous in Netscape, or vice versa.
  
  
• Still other web sites looked awful in different screen resolutions other than the ONLY one for which they were designed, with huge scroll bars across the bottom of the screen, and/or the page either jammed to one side or worse yet, cut off on the right.
  
  
• One web site had so many JavaScript errors, every page locked up as soon as it loaded in the browser window. The "web designer" who did that web site simply copied the code from another web site (a copyright violation as well) but had no understanding of JavaScript or how to make it function properly.
  
  
• A few web sites were dead in the water as soon as they were launched, because the web designers never bothered about making the pages search-engine-friendly, and/or never submitted the sites to any search engines. The clients didn't understand why nobody ever visited their sites...
  
  
• Some "professionally designed" web sites could have been done better by an amateur with a crayon... full of jumping and cluttered little animations; blurry, pixelated, or broken images; huge-filesize images that take ages to load; unreadable text; third-party hit counters; "This site best viewed in" announcements; frames and scrollbars everywhere; cutesie or busy backgrounds (save 'em for the e-greeting cards, folks); banners and third-party advertisements all over the place; and awful background midi's looping endlessly -- all of which are considered by any true professional to suffer from the "tacky annoying amateur homemade page" syndrome. With web sites like these, is it any wonder that their hapless owners have no online credibility and are unable to convert visitors into customers?
  
  
• Of course there are also those wonderful little illiterate, illegible, incredibly AWFUL and unprofessional sites full of typos, bad spelling, and worse grammar. NEWSFLASH: Spelling and grammar DO count! An unprofesssional web site is tantamount to being rude to the customer: It says you don't really care enough about your customer to pay attention to the details.
  
  
• And then, last but not least, there's the *YAWN* factor. 'Nuff said !!

Examples like this are why 1-2-Wonder offers a SATISFACTION GUARANTEE. We know a web site should be an investment, not an expense. At 1-2-Wonder Professional Web Design, it's an investment in quality and service.