Not all web design companies are the same and this especially true for the larger web design companies. These large companies bring in millions of dollars by over selling and selling at any cost to maintain their million dollar budgets. Their attention is often focused on their largest clients and they end up giving poor service to their smaller clients. Some of our clients have experienced this and so we will share a few tips on how to identify these companies.
Discovering this is often difficult, but not impossible. You should always read the contracts you are about to sign and look for:
- Do you own your web design and the graphics?
- Can you move your website to another server or are you locked into their servers?
- How many hours are they promising you for SEO?
- Have they detailed exactly what they will do with their SEO?
Another way to tell if a company is not in your best interest is if they try to hide negative reviews and complaints. If they don’t hide their bad reviews, then talk to them about why these occurred and how they went about solving them. If they talk about how they tried to solve customer issues, then they are focused on their customers. But if a company hides its poor reviews, you will most often find that they don’t follow through on dealing with their customer issues.
You can do a search for the company name and “sucks” or “review”. You will want to go five pages deep in Google. Many of the million dollar companies have staff dedicated to pushing down negative reviews. Another tactic is creating a review site that is dedicated to the business and on a separate domain name. All these reviews will be positive, which is a warning flag. They may produce articles that have “complaint” or “sucks” in the article and title and then market themselves. Finally there are postings on complaint and review sites which actually market the company and suggest calling them. All of these are warning signs that you should be wary of the company.
Other places that you can check are:
Rip Off Report: http://www.ripoffreport.com
Better Business Bureau: http://www.bbb.org