We strive to give great service to our clients and have a great track records of giving our clients exactly what they want. Despite our best efforts we do come across business owners that are offered different / cheaper website design services from other companies after we agree to complete a website project for them, the following situation happened recently and resulted in a disagreement with us and a previous client, the ‘take-away’ from this is that all of our Essex website design clients must now sign a website work agreement document once we agree terms as it seems a handshake is now not enough it business if the business owner is of dubious moral fibre. The following information is a generalisation of the situation and our attempts at helping the client to come to a satisfactory agreement.
In summary The website owner believes we have done work on his website when he didn’t ‘authorise it’ Due to The website’s owner deciding on us to do the redesign work then changing his mind We haven’t completed or invoiced any work that he initially verbally agreed on (the website redesign) but have simply done ‘essential’ work that is required to make the website work / operate and look correct after we transferred it.
His website was hosted with us from 5th March 2011 to the 24th May 2011 it worked / looked and operated correctly during that time due to the essential work we performed after the transfer otherwise the website navigation (buttons to other pages) wouldn’t work and the contact form wouldn’t send emails to him. See Image 1 for a view of the corrupted site.
Despite repeatedly stating and explaining this essential work to the website owner in great detail The website’s owner had difficulty understanding this essential work (despite showing him a screenshot of the corrupted display) and his website transfer,
It’s worth noting that his previous website company have complained to us that the client verbally threatened them leaving them frightened. This was concerning his unpaid outstanding payments, which is still owing to the previous website company over the website owner’s ‘website hosting’ that he refused to pay. I also have found the clients demeanour threatening he is aggressive and uses of the phrase ‘suffer the consequences’ inferring that he always gets what he wants. I have experienced this phrase from him when I spoke to him in person, on the phone and in his letter on the 14th June 2011.
At our initial meeting the website owner approved the website transfer and associated tasks with this process verbally on the 2nd March 2011.During this meeting I showed him our charges by directing him to a list and to a page on the website that clearly states our charges. (See printout Reference 1). The website’s owner viewed the sheet and the website page but declined to take the ‘website charges’ sheet when offered to him on the 2nd March 2011.
The transfer tasks were confirmed by ourselves to the website’s owner in an email on the 5th March 2011 (reference attached email 1) Where we told him his previous website design company had failed to supply the correct files to allow us to correctly transfer the site and get it working correctly. The website’s owner did not instruct us not to stop these transfer tasks at any point.
Further emails to his previous Essex website design company failed to get a response and a telephone call to them confirmed that they couldn’t supply the correct files to enable the website to work on our servers after transfer. This resulted in his website being transferred but visually and operationally incorrect (reference image 1) the resulting website had duplicated navigation / banner.
In an email received from his previous website design company (Reference email 2) It acknowledges there was an issue with the supplied website code and acknowledges we had to resolve these issues.
The transfer work required to fix the corrupted website was indicated to the client on the 5th March 2011 (email 1) and we confirmed via email that the work had been completed to fix the corrupted navigation. Further confirmation of these transfer tasks and another email was sent to the client on the 10th May 2011.
To give some measure of the lengths we have gone to help The website’s owner with his multiple questions and setup problems concerning his email / website hosting / transfer and website redesign project we have recorded a total of 37 emails to him, all of these are available for inspection to demonstrate the quality of our support and the integrity and transparency of the processes.
