So your an up and coming business, or an established business that is needing a web presence and you think to yourself, “Who should I get to design my web site?”.
It is a common question and one that should not be taken lightly.
When you decide to hire locally, your hit with a ton of advertising from radio, billboards, cold calls, and even the search engine result pages. The only problem is, most of the providers here in Kentucky are just plain charlatans.
I have a friend that runs a successful online ecommerce store and I can not even count on my hand how many web design companies he has been with in the last 8 years. I know he has spent tens of thousands of dollars on his site just in rework alone from where other local Louisville and Kentucky web design companies have really done a number to his site. His company is about to spend another 6 figures just to fix what these web design companies have previously done.
The most common problem I see is just plain incompetence. Sure, they do their song and dance to get you in the door and win you over with their complete attention of your project before you sign that 12 month contract, but once you get locked in it seems like your just another number in their billing department to suck a couple grand from you every 30 days with little to no work on your project.
I have seen it myself first hand as well. Not only have some of my friends and business partners been faced with it, but I also have partnered with companies in the past where I was their primary “online marketing” guy. These companies would land a client and promise the moon to them, then scramble to hire outsourced workers to complete the different tasks of the job, and then start collecting payments from you while not having 1 clue to what they were actually doing with your project. Needless to say, I no longer partner with those companies once I find out how they really are.
The simple fact is, there is almost no barrier to entry to starting a Louisville web design company. All you have to do is have a little sales knowledge, study some lingo, and get yourself a solid contract and your in business. Once you land a couple clients, you outsource all the work to a couple 3rd party developers and manage the project and skim a healthy % off the top of the budget for yourself. When clients call and ask questions just keep them on hold for a few days, don’t answer your emails or pretend to be on vacation, and always blame someone else until you can reach that next 30 day billing mark and collect a few grand more. Even better, when the client doesn’t like what you produce, you tell them you will fix it for XX hours more billing!
The best of these setups even hire their family as their employees. Unless your the Jacksons, the Osmonds, or maybe Will Smith’s family, the people in your family generally are not going to be experts in whatever business you set up. We see right through it, your just hiring your family to give them a job and help make your fly by night web design business a lot bigger then what it really is. Is it really in your customers best interest to have your uncle do their web design, your brother to do their paid online marketing, your dad to handle their back end programming and your step mom to handle their web copy?
A lot of these companies are just 1-2 man operations where the “partners” basically have no web experience and just want to cash in on what they think is a money train. Their prior experience actually resembles something close to selling cheap patio furniture or frozen meat from the back of a truck and generally almost always has nothing to do with anything online.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no hate for small Kentucky Web Designers or Louisville Web Design companies. I am only trying to warn you of those that pretend to be these huge operations with tons of “combined” experience that I loathe. When was the last time 70 years of combined online web design experience helped anyone? The web as we generally know it has only been around less then 2 decades.
Just do your homework before you hire out a local Kentucky or Louisville web design firm:
1. Browse their site and read over their marketing messages.
2. Browse their site on the “Way Back Machine” and see how they have evolved over the years.
3. Check up on their customers. No, not the list they give you, but look online for queries like “Web Design by ( insert company here )” or view sites such as ripoffreport.com for their business name.
4. Demand your contract have solutions that favor you when they do not finish your project on time, to your specs, or if they drag their feet on questions you have that need answers. Make them accountable.
Hopefully this article will shed some light on what goes on behind the scenes with local web development companies here in our state and how you can protect yourself.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice Article. I agree there is a definite lack of regulation in the industry and this is all too common in pretty much every city but I don’t think its fair to generalize over some bad experiences. Half that situation is just bad research on the clients end to begin with. If someone needed professional web services, there are a number of qualified businesses in the area to meet the needs of clients.
People just need to be smart about their decision making when choosing a “web professional.”
Wow.. You had the nerve to say publicly what I only say in private.
My small web design company is new and born of frustration.
I did websites back when the internet was new but took a long hiatus and got behind the times. I had started a small home service trade type company here in Louisville and needed a website so I bought a domain name and hired a local company to build me a small CMS based site that I could manage myself.
Over a 2 year period took the site up to 60 pages and SEO’d them well and was getting enough business so that I could drop all my other advertising. The website was getting me multiple calls a day and all was well.
Then I got thinking. Although the site was doing well it looked like it could use a major new look. So I call the guy that sold me the CMS and told him I would like to have all 60 pages to have a newer more modern look with some other requests and he quotes me $3000.00 and I said go ahead with it cause I was so busy with my business that I didn’t have time to do it.
8 months later after emails requesting why it this taking so long… After all he told me 2 months start to finish, the site finally is loaded up.
OH GOD it tanks in the ratings and drops from #1 google first page in local and organic to hard as hell to find. I called and he blames it on a high school kid.. Yes! A high school kid that he’d hired to redo it for me.. OH GOD!
I crack the cms editor open and start looking and all of the pages have been renamed with no redirects to the new pages. Why this was done I have no idea, and neither did he. There are no title tags for any of the pages. There are no meta descriptions.. And no meta Keywords.
When I call the guy and tell him thanks for screwing up my site and shutting down my leads he tells me not to worry it can all be fixed. I asked him when? He tells me as soon as you do this, this, and this… In other words.. You’re on your own sucker! If I wanted him to fix it would cost X.
It took me a month to repair the site and it still has 9 crawl errors in google. Business leads are just now starting to come back and I’ll never do any business with that guy again.
So I decided to start my own small web design firm, where I’ll specialize in small trade sites.
There are people getting robbed on the internet left and right, small business people that have great hopes when going online are getting hammered by them. It’s just not right!