http://www.Freelance-Websites-Designer.com

Dude, quit telling people to “walk away”! Seriously, if anyone listened to you, it must be because you’re guilty of ripping people off like these poor souls!

If someone paid for a service they don’t get, then they have every right to get back their money!

Sorry, but you’re a fecking idiot!!

Small claims court, get your money back.

More spamming I see.

“The only CMS he/she should be using for a €6,500 budget is WordPress, which I highly recommend and will do everything you need.”

Did you not bother to read other comments regarding WP? Or did you simply miss the memo that clearly stated WP is no longer the better option? (Personally, I don’t believe it ever was!)

And for that kind of money and no doubt recurring payments, I’d want a designer who can code my site and have it make me a sandwich if I asked it to!

Time for you to stop spamming your own services by trying to BS those of who actually know what we’re doing!

So not!

Likewise. WordPress blows.

Were you able to get a refund or find another remedy? I am going through something similar and not sure what I can do. Website now live but not finished, some links not working, looks bad and now web designer not responding.

Thank you!

You covered different aspects. I can conclude that.. you get what you paid. Higher rates obviously gives you quality works. But it is still important to check various things before hiring a website design company like their portfolio, reviews etc

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If you worked with a contract, this should be explicitly written on it. However, as you’re asking, the most likely is that you didn’t sign a contract in the first place, in which case, the best scenario is that you both agree on what percentage of the project is already done and you pay only that percentage of the total price and get the rights to use what is done.

A good approach could be to pay only for the design and then hand it to a professional programmer, though if you’re looking forward to fire your designer, perhaps it isn’t only because of poor service, but also because of poor design skills.

Whichever the case, always bear in mind that it’s better to loose a little (with your current designer) and them invest on a pro that guarantees you a good ROI, than to loose the entire price and be left with a website that doesn’t produce any results.

Hope you find this helpful 🙂

“If he/she is building a custom CMS be cautious, you may be stuck with that developer for life.”

So true

Hello Brendan,

I feel sorry for your experience. I hope you have already found a solution for your problem. IMO its always important to sign necessary documents before and agree the SRF accordingly along with fixing up the deadline. Sometimes the requirement may changes but how it will be handled and how the delay would be handled should be discussed from the beginning accordingly. If you need any specific help you are free to email me anytime at rkmohajan@oxytechbd.com

This article has a lot of good things which you can consider from next time. I wish you all the best your endeavor.

Try using periods in your communications.

A CMS is a solution to a specific problem… not the solution to every problem…

it should be

#19 every site designed uses a CMS
If your designer says that all the sites he creates uses fantastic (specific CMS) or all the of the sites in their portfolio use (specific CMS); run for the hills… Reason see #9

The market is satiated by so called developers/designer who have zero design skills (everything is a template), zero basic web skills (HTML/CSS) and zero programming knowledge (JS/PHP)…. in fact you can pretty much guarentee that they will fail most or all of these 20 points…

There are also many back-end developers that are highly skilled in PHP (or more specifically WordPress’s messed up way of using it)… they can spit out WordPress sites like no-bodies business, and even create custom plugins for you, but 99% of the time, designer’s they are not…

Don’t get me wrong, there are many great times and places for a CMS… but it is not needed for every project and as ‘Mays-Media’ commented, it comes with many problems of it’s own…

Nope, not even close to my previous design, customers partnership ended, and actual business Owner opted to DIY website, 2 months ago, so I no longer host that in my server .

But thanks for the input ! Will post here my latest website in a few days . Thanks

Hi Leo,
My first thought was its good considering you said you did it for a fraction of the cost so naturally I did some digging, I found its a WIX website and your URL’s do not look over user friendly e.g: http://www.hmunveiled.com/#!hair-portfolio/b03vi.

So are you saying you charged for a WIX website?

Hi Brendan,
I have seen so many design agencies do rubbish work, but
regarding your question yes you can fire them and go somewhere else
however they may ask for you to pay the amount outstanding with that
said if they have delivered a product or whatever you agreed to be
delivered at a certain time then you are in the right to go elsewhere, I
am no lawyer so dont take that as legal advice.

I create
websites myself and have done so for around 15 years and have had to
pick up design agencies mess for a while. Regarding your question how
long does it take to build a site, it can take a while but depends on
how big the site is, the functionality etc required, perhaps you can
email me more info to gbarnes@bbdimension.co.uk so I can
take a look at what they sent you out of curiosity of course.

Usually someone would agree the design at your company like the marketing
manager or the boss and once approved that would be developed. I hope that helps

As long as he/she is using WordPress you will be able to create your own pages. But yes it will create an empty page with your theme applied to it and you need to add content by adding structure. Find out the name of the CMS being used and post it here…

Even though they sent a sample form of the website within that 1st week, we discussed the client application from the beginning in detail which was our main concern, he said no problem, from our initial meeting we told them the whole point of our website was to navigate the clients into completing the application and we wanted an updated streamline app, then they stated issues with the internal application in January. They added plug in something or other no one discussed it with us copied the old form of the app we had since 2008 and now we receive 6 attachments duplicate applications and it is just a mess. its worse then the old application we had on our site from 8 years ago.

The web design company went through incompetent employees and now almost 8 months later, we have a new arrogant web designer, i had questions on the site about corrections that still needed to be addressed, and still no response so i asked out of frustration last week, as they just sent us an email saying the site is live so i responded

Where is my design team? Shouldn’t we be having a conversation about Social Media, SEO and how to start getting us organically ranked? what about administration for WP we were suppose to receive training on how to use the software, where is my team finalizing the site we just launched? Not sure what to do they seem like smoke and mirrors they just downsized their offices and no one returns our calls

We are not responsible for the people they hire and we are always initiating contact as sometimes we have gone weeks without conversation. We own our own business and would never treat clients the way we have been treated, What is the normal time frame to build a website can we fire them even though we owe money? I don’t even like the design of the new website anymore its been so long any suggestions? My apologies this is so long

Great points. I have not used a CMS in the past for very simple sites, like my own site http://marvinrussell.com

“I can’t think of any good reasons why your web developer wouldn’t build your website on a CMS (content management system).”

How about:-
The most prolific source of hacking attacks.

“Not using a CMS is not going to save you money. In fact, it could be more expensive because a good CMS like WordPress is built on a framework that has prebuilt functionality saving you time and money.”

How about:-
A client accidentally alters a part of the system they shouldn’t have, how much time will that take to correct the problem?

How about:-
Constantly updating all the required plugins for each WordPress site to try to keep them slightly secure?

How about:-
A provider for one of the plugins drops out or fails to update causing incompatibility issues?

Any of the aforementioned will cost you more in the long run #BeenThere

Budgeting a new website is like budgeting a new house. There are a million options and ideas. Because of that I always required a budget so I didn’t waste my time. You can build a website for 5k or 500k.

Think about asking a contractor to quote building a new house. Should he/she spend hours on a 300k quote? What if the buyer gets frustrated because they actually wanted a 5 million dollar house?

Honestly, I would give a budget, because there are so many options. Either way could work, but I’ve seen providing a budget work far more often than not providing one.

The entire point of a CMS is so you can manage your own content w/o a developer, meaning create, edit and delete new content, pages, etc. In 2016, a CMS should create anew pages, YES.

The only CMS he/she should be using for a $6,500 budget is WordPress, which i highly recommend and will do everything you need.

If he/she is building a custom CMS be cautious, you may be stuck with that developer for life.

Does a designer really need to know the budget or can they just provide pricing based on our needs and wants?

Sorry to hear that. But at least you learned the lesson.

Sorry, but cut your losses and walk away. Your designer, like many designers, is not a good business person. Your designer doesn’t understand how to control the project scope so he is hiding from you.

I can refer you to my former agency, The Ocean Agency in Chicago. They work with small businesses all the time and know how to manage a project with project managers.

Best of luck to you.

We contacted him because we were getting ready to have a meeting with our Board and wanted to show the progress so far. Within 2 days the site was designed to our specifications.

After that he went into the programming phase. He explained it would take approximately one week to program and we would be able to load content prior to our next meeting, which is on Tuesday.

We have not heard from him after phone calls, leaving voicemails, and emails. We have paid our second deposit for the programming phase.

He has a good body of work, and many local companies and churches have used him to design their sites. I’m just wondering if we will ever see it to completion.

We are actually under a time crunch because we have a major educational conference coming up for our members who have to register.

Any advice on how to deal with this?

1. SEO is an entirely different field than web design.

2. A CMS just increases costs for the client. No need for it at all. We got along without them before. We don’t need them now.

Walk away. Otherwise, you will lose more money and time. Working with an agency should not be this big of a headache my friend. Walk away. Consider yourself lucky to only lose $1,200.

I may write an article soon, on how to vet a web design company or contractor. I will post it here if i do.

Iv found a new host I’m just trying to get a refund on the hosting fees when my site is not even up. They are refusing to give me a copy of my contract. I’m thinking I will have to su.

Bella,

Move on. You are losing more and more money chasing these guys. They are amateurs. Next time vet your team. Demand dates, milestones, and good communication. Tell them communication is your number #1 concern.

Good luck.

Please check our website http://www.convertbetter.com/ We Make Website ConvertBetter. I need some feedback about our website. Please let me know your thoughts! Thank you so much!

5 stars for this blog!

I hear you. Even the most simplest thing such as Trello is confusing to most of the small to mid-size business clients. With those clients I use a very simple way of communicating with them and that is through a Project Hub (https://24ways.org/2013/project-hubs/). You can link to Google Drive or OneDrive documents which they are comfortable with or to anything you host on your own web server like wireframe documents or design comps, so no more sending attachments back and forth over email

For starter, I was looking at a loader for 10 seconds, so there you lost already some potential clients (imagine how long this will take on a smartphone). Regarding the design/theme I see them on Themeforest all the time… slide-in content, running counters, etc., so no originality. And the content is not accessible when JS is failing to load or is disabled.

I love using themes as a starting point. There’s no reason to start from scratch 🙂
https://moz.com/ugc/10-reasons-custom-web-design-is-dying

Question from my side.
How do we differentiate our selves?
Do this web designing still have market?
What about using themes for building website?

working with crowd sourcing,
Do you think is that good idea working on spec works all thought i am platinum designer in 99designs but not finding it interesting and most of my work goes use less.

Please check out my website, works and let me know weather I am Terrible web designers or pro.
http://www.pranetor.com

The site is week with content part (looking for a Creative content writer) i want to make it more creative regarding design as well as content and out of confusion for target audience we missed lot of points to cover.

I appreciate any suggestions for my website regarding UX ( Targeting high end clients who look for quality over quantity) I know it takes time mean while to survive i will go with low end clients too.

Well not bad then , talking about the horizontal awards, I know is one entire image , not several .

Same as the duplicate 2016 awards on the bottom , is all at customer request , since this is what they want , I made it happen, it doesn’t matter if I like it or not.

Same with the 4 pictures across showing the black spacing on sides , originally , theme width could only handle 3 images across , but they wanted 4 images across, I managed to adjust width layout . But contradictory to desktop view , those images across with the spacing looks even on mobile view, because appears as a column instead of a row.

Functionally wise , website display the message efficiently.

I will fix that broken safari link , that is a hidden Stat counter , that only see it on mobile view.

But thanks for the constructive criticism , glad to see the website I designed for 1/3 of the price , work just as well 🙂

As you know WordPress saves time and money to both , customer and webmaster , could you image doing all these html coding / javascript and php straight from notepad ? Is exactly what I was doing in 2002
Thanks to wordpress / Joomla

Since you asked,

My first observation is that It’s a bit generic, and a bit rough, but kudos for keeping it simple.

You need to pay closer attention to spacing. I can’t get specific, since spacing is a huge topic and there are lots of ways to handle it. It’s not quite working in this site, though.

Next, you should pay attention to the widths of paragraphs throughout the site. In most of them line lengths get awkwardly long when the page stretches and in some the columns get too narrow as the page width shrinks.

Also, you should try some different fonts. In most places the plain helvetica looks like the type was just overlooked in the design.

There should probably be a little padding between each of the awards in the awards section. They’re looking very cluttered.

On the accolades in the page footer, it’s redundant to show the same icons you just showed in the awards section, so take out those two and leave in the “United With Love” and “Virginia Bride” icons. Also, you can fit these in two columns at the mobile device size, so do. There’s also a broken element in this section. I don’t know what it is, but is showing as a blue box with a question mark in Safari.

In the bridal images on the home page, There’s a black line on either side of the section of four images below the first image, and when the page width is at desktop sizes there’s also a black line running beneath the last three images.

At mobile size, the social media buttons at the top of the page turn black making them hard to see against the dark gray background.

I don’t know if you designed the logo, so I won’t get into it. If you did, it’s not the worst I’ve seen, but it’s not working well, either. That’s all I’m going to say.

There’s more, but I have somewhere to be right now, so I’ll leave it at that. Good luck.

http://www.HMunveiled.com

any improvement ideas ?

I am very glad you liked it!

Hi Ashley,

It does scream newbie, unless the business owner is a newbie as well.

Perception has a lot to do with whether or not people will hire you. Way under $1000 for a full site screams “inexperienced newbie”. You should raise your prices at least to market rate (for now – market rate pricing is, in my opinion, a terrible way to try and make money in the freelancing world) and build an incredible website of your own to showcase. Perception is nearly everything – the image you project will dictate the type of work you get (or don’t get).

Just a bit – it’s tantamount to sorcery!

Thanks KIm – it appears I was right… makes a change! 😀

Can’t help but notice the patterns in behaviours related to “small-budget clients”.
You need to be an amazing communicator to work well with that type of clientele.

Hi John, It’s a tough road but you will get through it. You are on the right track.
As Tom mentioned, I highly recommend organising time for hobby projects. That is. Make a website for a fictional company.
When starting out freelance, the hobby projects are the projects which sold me to more clients.
It gives you the opportunity to really show off what you can do and what you’re passionate about!
And that is what people are willing to pay us for.

Craig, I totally agree and great point… A CMS can also be burdensome for both the customer and designer especially if never agreed to use. This should be a direct question, right off the bat if the customer wants to deal with the costs and/or maintenance… I normally let them know/show right away about the possible vulnerabilities and for the most part, they opt out…

Marvin, you do have some great points, too and I really love the fact that you focused in on how one can down scale on clientele while up scaling the pay increase.

Many web designers are caught in this circle, especially being brand new “entrepreneurs” and/or as new developers and do not know how to close or “shrink” the the circle.

Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the comment.

It sounds like this list is made by a mediocre designer (which, judging by your copied and pasted websites is exactly what you are) who is trying to justify exorbitant fees for shoddy work.

Agreed that creativity shouldn’t be THE primary goal, but it should be A primary goal. Let me break it down for you – emotional investment is an historically accepted measure of conversion – higher emotional investment means higher conversion rates. If you are presenting stagnant, been-there-done-that designs and imagery to web site users, they aren’t going to be able to make that emotional connection to a website, which will in effect turn your website from a potential conversion vector into a targeted search landing page (Which means that you’re only going to convert individuals who are performing targeted searches for a specific product… you won’t get much impulsive conversion).

You don’t have to be an artist, but you should be at least attempting to present a unique experience that is memorable and exciting.

Oh and, you should update this list to include “Don’t publish content with click-bait titles” (like ’20 reasons why…’ or ‘7 things you wouldn’t believe!’) because the recent round Facebook, Google, and Bing ranking algorithms punish spammy content.

And the reason I’m commenting on this is because these sorts of inane lists are detrimental to the high-end web development industry… they boil down to an authoritatively-worded opinion piece which provides no real, workable information and only serves to confuse people who are genuinely trying to educate themselves about how what web design actually means.

I also hate designers who come up with 3 cookie cutter designs that they ripped from WordPress themes and try to market them as “ultra high end effective SEO enhancing lead generating piles of AWESOMENESS!!!!!!”… it really cheapens what the individuals who do excellent design for my clients do.

I’m glad 🙂

Agreed.

Let’s see if im a terrible designer. HHAHAHA

Just a suggestion if its a simple 3-5 page website and the customer will provide the copy pics etc do the site but ask for a fee every time they get a lead that is generated through the site or a commission. It’s worth a shot and you will now begin to have websites under your belt and in your portfolio.

Pretty funny that these web pages have an almost invisible sliver of a low-contrast slider for scrolling.
Far and away the biggest problems I see are tons of nonfunctional elements such as blank space or huge pictures, yet almost never is there an intuitive linking from one function or page to another. It is as if the developer simply decided that since he knows how to navigate to complete a series of functions, ten screw people who can’t decode his obscure process.
As an example, my company uses SAP for employee time-keeping, yet has a separate web application for time off (duplicates SAP info), On any usual screen, the link for this is the size of a radio button with the half the screen a useless picture and most of the rest blank. The link takes you to the actual screen used, but they won’t let you navigate directly to that screen.
Another example from my company, it is only through painful past learning that we can navigate to find our pay statements since you have to already know how to navigate through eight pages to get to it (including two pages to confirm your smart card even though you are logged into the company already), and then the final link title doesn’t intuitively have anything to do with “pay statement”.
Finally, are we not all worn out with web pages we hope will let us do something only to find the pages are overwhelmed with animations. More and more if a web site is slow and messy due to too much automation, I simply leave it. AM I alone?
Perhaps web designers should be required to have the use of their design be tested by non-technical people? Yes, I know it is human nature to focus what is important to ourselves, but do we really have to ignore what is important to others?

Just saw this graphic! 🙂

Haha never noticed that! Fixing it.

The problem with next to nothing is when I do it people expect that I’ll do it 100% for free and for the amount of work and things they are asking I don’t know if free is worth it. The guy I made a website for took me months of work some nights I had to stay up until 3 in the morning just to meet his deadlines and it was horrible. When the website was finally done he trashed the site and called it garbage. Months of work and I was doing it all for free and just like that my work dumped. Some people don’t appreciate what you do no matter how hard you work and that’s just it if you make them pay you for the work they take you more seriously since they are paying you especially the more you charge.

fo sho!