This is the 3rd part of a series of sample correspondence between a website owner and website design and SEO company that demonstrates, among other things, how a website design company and a business owner have different options on SEO / Website Design.
[Website Designers / SEO] Regarding the links, they potentially could be negative and potentially could have harmed your progress, there are loads of opinions on how to handle situations like this with some saying that doing nothing is the best course of action as by using the Google Disavow tool you could potentially be seen as admitting you made the links but like everything regarding SEO it comes down to common sense and we think by disavowing them this can only be best long term solution.
There will not be any sudden changes and indeed if there was a penalty created this penalty won’t be 100% lifted immediately. The disavow process for the 150 spammy links has been created and now we just need to wait and hope this gives a positive benefit.
If you think we took too long to identify and disavow these links then I apologise but if the last guys had created a report of all the steps taken we would have spotted this and remedied it earlier, I cannot remember being told that a link building program happened and if I was told I apologise and should have identified these earlier perhaps.
The fact remains is that we have now completed a huge amount of work (Webdesign / SEO) on the site (attached updated list) and the positive SEO recommendations that are given should be completed to ensure we give the site / business the best chance. Therefore I strongly recommend we use the full postal address. We have just seen you have used your house name on your free directory listings so will assume you are happy with this being used and will update your site with this. I now urge you to urgently update your Google Plus page that will feature on your Google places listing in the search engine results page.
Regarding spending money, please don’t think that is what I am only suggesting to move your website forward, you should know we are not out to rip you off and the fact I haven’t presented a final invoice should emphasise that. A combination of intelligent choices and hard work is what we need (with a clever use of a money if available). I am suggesting that it’s a great idea for you to renew your domain hosting / registration in advance as it will ‘save you money’ and may positively affect your ranking, I believe this is a ranking factor now and should be taken advantage of.
For illustration, your website ‘history + future’ is currently 4 years ( created June 2011 set to expire June 2015 )
Compared to a competitor that has a website ‘history + future ’ which is currently 17 years (created April 2003 set to expire April 2020)
This is an ‘extreme’ example but by renewing in advance this will ensure your website is ‘trusted’ more by the search engines.
Leaving the suggestions to have your site made responsive and with its own e-commerce system allowing you to upload your work which was both initial suggestions and great SEO options for the future I think we are at the limit of the SEO work possible on your site apart from creating content and sharing it via social media and think that’s what we now need to do.
Another good suggestion would be to yourself to contact friends / colleagues in the photography industry that may want to ‘link swap’ which is a minor but possibly a positive SEO factor as long as we only have a couple of good quality links from them and link back to them accordingly. If you want to do this I can create a links page for you, this is the code you can send to friends / contacts / colleagues in the wedding / photography business.
So here are my immediate / short term suggestions to improve the site / SEO:
1, ensure all listings include your house name
2, Renew the domain in advance
3, Continue to add news and add content via social media
4, Provide more testimonials (with areas and event type mentioned in the testimonials)
5, Request other website owners swap links with you (link swap)
Updated work list:
completed the following tasks:
1 Resized / Optimised all Gallery images (6 galleries / 140 images) Each photo is now under 100kb
2 Removed 3 corrupt images
3 Corrected Twitter Corrupt link (replaced with new / correct link)
4 Added new testimonials page / added testimonials – linked this from the home page
5 Added new FAQ page / added link to it from front page
6 Contacts changed to Contact on all menus (including news section)
7. The link buttons on home and other pages are different – Changed the ‘image’ buttons on the front page to simply text links with a mouseover effect – will make them all uniform and consistent
8. Added 25 Photos to Gallery (photos resized / optimised / renamed and uploaded)
9. Added 15 Photos to Bride and Groom Gallery (photos resized / optimised / renamed)
10. Re-name menu items “Portfolio” to “Gallery”, “Blog” to “News” and “Wedding” to “About”
11 New pages created called –
FAQs, Services, Weddings, Packages, Testimonials
12 Multiple HTML (code) improvements and tweaks (loads of presentation improvements and fixes to things not mentioned specifically)
13 Fixed the ‘prices’ menu link to work correctly
14 created a new Google map that specifically shows your business
15 added links to the site from our websites (7 links)
16 deleted redundant themes / delete redundant plugins
17 created and installed image upload resizer (all future uploads will be resized to 1024*800px maximum)
18 As you have uploaded very large photos on the news section this will potentially reduce the page load speed and reduce the overall SEO ‘score’ so we resized all your uploaded images in May and June to max 1024px wide (saved 30MB !!)
19 Page load speed evaluated and reduced (now loads much faster)
20 Front page slides all optimised (reduced from 350kb to 100kb typically)
21 New Anniversary page
22 The Anniversary and Vows Pages now linked from the wedding page
23 All pages had to be changed so that the H1 (Main page heading) from being the top logo to being the main page heading (code / CSS changes)
24 Headings on each page are now updated to make them more relevant / search friendly
25 Front page qualifications section removed and replaced with a ‘Why you should use us’ section.
26 Site optimised for local places (Thurrock, Southend, Chelmsford, Colchester and Brentwood)
27, added website to Google Webmaster tools
28, identified and corrected HTML improvements including duplicated meta descriptions and short meta descriptions
29, resubmitted site to Google’s index (so it picks up the changes / new pages)
30, worked with webcopy team to get them to create two promotional pieces of text for the website (results pending)
31 We have a really great link here on another wedding photographers website.
32 Have reduced the image upsizing to be a max of 800px wide as the ones you uploaded I think were too big
33 Have put in ‘technical’ measures to redirect your site back to the home page if an incorrect page name is typed
34 Have redirected the non www version of the site to the www. Version of the site
35 we have identified matched text from your news section and your Facebook page. DO NOT copy text from one to the other and please rectify
36 External link with promotional text about your company
37 We ‘tweaked’ / updated more of your meta descriptions to ensure they are long enough and relevant – all meta information on all pages are now updated and complete.
38, Address added to pages (home page / contact page / news pages)
39, Removed unused plugins on blog
40, Changed spacing on mobile number and made them touch dialable / clickable
41, Added alt text to social icons (home page, contact and news pages)
42, Set Alt text on Gallery photos (181 Photos)
43, HTML / CSS – Ensured the page containing your ‘best link’ is now live
44 All HTML / CSS warnings and errors (24 of them) removed from index page (home page, about page, prices page and testimonials page) This took 3 hours !! Lots of errors removed from other pages also.
44 Gallery Image Orientation – have reviewed the images and assuming you mean badly sized then we have resized the photos to suit their orientation
45 Some of the images are missing or come up with an error code – There was quite a few originally but we have re-checked and removed another two that although they had thumbnails they didn’t have a matching main image (2 were found and removed)
46 Added Google Analytics code to the news section then re-submitted the pages to Google.
47 Identified different twitter links / missing links – corrected by putting the correct twitter link onto the twitter links on site / news section
48 Duplicated google plus account to be deleted, the one now used is the verified local business so the other one needs to be verified.
49 The Current Google Places listing uses the old Google Plus page, this should be changed, you have access to your Google Places entry we assume. (this was done prior to us starting work on the site)
The following were after a fresh pair of eyes reviewed the site (Our new SEO assistant)
50 ‘Get social’ is not on every page – is missing on the Prices page – Corrected
51 Alt text on Gallery page should be individually edited to describe what is in the image to greater enhance chance of coming up on Google image search (agreed – have renamed the non-wedding photography to be specific to what it is)
52 Aim for Google reviews from previous clients. Ask those who give good feedback to do so via Google reviews. Edit Google+ page – as looks bare (have already requested this)
53 Needs to update social media pages, looks dead to users (Twitter needs some posts although the facebook page is well used with recent posts)
54 Sign up to more online directories (like the freeindex type of directories that are online)
55 YouTube account – as the world’s second largest search engine, a YouTube account should be linked to the website and regularly updated with the businesses learning curves, latest projects or top tips as a means to drive more traffic to the website.
56 Home page text changes from third to first person in parts – Corrected
57 Some grammar errors in text such as ‘My aim as you Essex Wedding Planner’ – Correct
Some further changes
58 Installed SEO plugin for news section and have no-indexed the /page lists for the news section (to avoid duplicate inclusions)
59 Submitted to Bing Webmaster tools / submitted to Bing search engines.
60 We have created a favicon for the site (small logo that appears in the browser tab)
61 We have noticed that since the middle of October Referring pages / domains has become consistent (the numbers of both have both been falling since March) assume this was Google disregarding lots of spammy links that may have been created. Also since October the pages indexed from your site has risen to 57 (from 6 at the end of last year)
62 Noticed that some ‘spammy’ or low quality sites are linking to you, can you identify any you recognise ? (full list attached) have released the links we have created and the ones we know are ok
63, Google Webmaster tools used to Disavow the spammy links
Suggestions
1 change your email on facebook to your info@ email address (not your personal one)
2 The next news posts please use the ‘local places’ within the text and page title.
3 Can you get some ex-customers to give you a review on Google+ (which integrates with Google Local) This can only happen once you verify it
4 advice on post titles – Like the fact you are adding loads of news that’s great
I would say you should keep the titles smaller
5 Get at least 5 reviews from ex-customers from different locations / accounts on Google, Perhaps send an email to them and ask them to click ‘write review’
6 add yourself to a business directory and then start to get referrals (ensure you get them from real customers and don’t let them do them from your Location / machine)
7 Add videos to your YouTube account
For your information we went over the website updates and SEO yesterday and today again and confirm all the actions are ‘positive’ and should be SEO enhancing but two updates:
1, The disavowed links file submission was successful –
The file containing disavowed links has been updated. Confirmed that we successfully uploaded a disavow links file with 150 URLs
2, The page with the ‘great link’ on the essex photography site doesn’t seem to be indexed in any of the search engines still so we have re-submitted the page and have made some other changes to ensure its more likely to be indexed.
[Website Owner] My business colleague has forwarded onto me the”ideas / suggestions with new ‘Christmas’ and ‘sharpened pencil’ prices”. Where the referral of payment is concerned, I’d obviously like to set out some sort of agreement in writing of a point in the future when we’ll both be agreed that the work has been successful for the deferred payment to be paid (further to our previous phone call, mainly regarding your surprise and my agreed disappointment at the lack of inquiries received through the site so far, after the previous / current work that has been done. So maybe some sort of agreement around the success in this area, as it obviously goes without saying that anything regarding sales past this point, basically “closing” any inquiries/jobs, would not be your concern).
Since we would be overhauling the site, I’d also like to look at how we could, and the best way to integrate the new Google Business View service I now provide too (as I mentioned in our phone call)
[Website Designers / SEO] As I have said before success is subjective and looking at your website visitors now the monthly figures compared with last year show me that you have had 326 unique visitors to your site compared with 58 last year (a 462% increase) which is successful metric by all standards of SEO.
The deferred payment is the second part of the project payment for the ecommerce system and the redesign of the site to make it fully CMS and responsive so when that work is completed by us and tested / agreed by yourself that will have been successful and completed. Any agreement of numbers of enquiries that you are suggesting to enable the final payment to be made is not something I can see myself agreeing to, if I was ‘dodgy’ I would simply agree to this and get people to email enquiries to yourself (FYI you can buy facebook likes, twitter followers, website enquiries, website visitors and more !)
As I have demonstrated with other website design / SEO success examples we have the knowledge and skills to get your website working how it should be and giving it the very best chance of being ‘recognised’ further by the search engines but we can guarantee Google / Bing / Yahoo will reward your site as you expect. Saying that my future business depends on my success so you have my ‘word’ and assurance that your site will continue to be worked on as if it was my own.
The last part of your email is the most important to the project and the best use of our time and efforts and that involves you deciding what ‘services’ you want to feature on the site and I would urge you to offer as many ‘services’ as possible, look at other photographers to see if they offer anything you want to offer then we can start to put a website page framework together
[Website Owner] Right, Ok. I’m gonna say lets go ahead with your proposal, based on your strong reassurance and belief in it’s success. I’m not going to lie, I am concerned about the possible lack of result I could / couldn’t see from this investment, as the “small investment / initial cost” isn’t so small to me personally. Of course, however, it could definitely be argued that it was if the results from it are what you are sure they’re going to be. My reluctance has come from the fact that you cannot in any way guarantee these results for me, as such, I suppose I must trust your reassurance and take that as the only guarantee that I have available.
[Website Designers / SEO] Thanks for the message and sorry we cant ‘guarantee’ results or re-assure you more, but think you are doing the right thing and now we must work (and there is loads of it ahead of us) to ensure the site is redesigned with everything you want / need on it and the ecommerce system is built correctly for you to be able to use it asap to build your business
So can you give us a list of pages you want / need on the new site, the current site has these pages
[Website Owner] Well one thing I really wanted to do was to have a home page like the one I gave you when we had our website design meeting, where we can clearly separate weddings and commercial / google business view. Oh and by the way, here’s a link to my colleagues active Business View which can be embedded in his site, obviously you’ll have to talk to him regarding it. You can also choose the “starting point” from anywhere on the tour by using the chrome app “embedder” specifically for Business View, which generates the coding.
[Website Designers / SEO] Yes we like that type of ‘full page’ website and we can create you a website like this that incorporates the news section and the ecommerce system (but yours will better and responsive). You now need to start thinking about what photos to provide us to be displayed on this site you obviously need a landscape orientated photos for this. Send all images to us in a folder that clearly mentions your website name.
What we want to avoid though is a ‘landing page’ like that page that isn’t search friendly and can be confusing for visitors, we need a standard navigation website and can you complete the page framework from this list below (I have added commercial)
[Website Owner] I was wanting to use that kind of “landing page” to try to keep a clear separation between wedding and all other work if you see what I mean, I wanted to avoid having a gallery page that then had all galleries on it, as I feel this is a little messy and too much if you see what I mean?
Does this mean I can send you only landscape for the site unless they are photos for the gallery?
I think that the page framework is correct, where will the e-commerce system be accessible from?
Basically I’d like to make the site simple-ish and sleek, in a similar way to the one I sent you a link to is, but maybe better looking, and I’d also like the page tabs/buttons to be accessible along the top from no matter where you are on the site so people can navigate to any, from any.
I was thinking of changing my Facebook page name, do you think this is a good idea/beneficial? Will it change the link you need to put on the site?
[Website Designers / SEO] Regarding that landing page – we don’t want to use that but your site will have ‘clear separation’ between your services and indeed we want that to ensure each page / section has its own content to attract the search engines as ‘efficiently’ as possible.
The Gallery page will be a ‘master gallery’ unlike your existing one so you will click on galleries then get a list of all the galleries (better for SEO / better for customers to see what they want)
Landscape images will be required for the website ‘main’ images (to show and revolve on your actual website main pages like your example website) any image orientation will be fine for the gallery (although consistent landscape photos seem to work better)
I believe your Google results may be personalised giving you incorrect ranking information. If you agree to extend your hosting period as discussed previously, keep adding news, keep adding news and sharing via social media, use your ecommerce system after we have relaunched your site with its ‘responsive’ redesign you will have a much better chance of improving visitor numbers and improving website rankings.
Yes, I guess its more generic and relevant so perhaps it’s a good idea. I think there maybe a small general SEO benefit to having wedding photography in your Facebook business page name and if people searched for a wedding photographer on Facebook it would help but not sure people ever really use Facebook as a search tool for services.
Received only 22 photos so far, when you name them just be ‘natural’ what you have is great as they are all unique but by adding ‘essex-wedding-photographer-photography’ to every description makes it look not real, or natural and will possibly affect you negatively.
Months pass…
It seems we have been talking about this for so long but not achieving much, but if we are to proceed will need some decisions from yourselves:
Can you give us a list of pages you want / need on the new site, the current site has these pages, suggest we can add more services?
Additionally will need the invoice settled from the SEO work and deposit paid for the ecommerce / new responsive website design project
Here are your updated invoices:
Invoice 1 – News section / Hosting – paid in full
Invoice 2 – SEO / Website Updates – outstanding
Invoice 3 – Responsive Website / E-commerce System – 50% deposit requested
I am happy to accept a deferred payment (monthly payments) on Invoice 3 of £250 per month for 15 months, hope that sounds fair and reasonable.
[Website Owner] I am a little bemused if I’m honest. As far as I am aware, the total of what I have spent / owe is below
Blog / 2 years hosting / Extra pages / fixing website / 3 Month SEO program
I have paid the blog and 2 years hosting. With regards to the combined cost of the 3 month SEO and extra pages / fixing the website, a total minus the deposit would leave me owing £x.
Now, The blog, hosting, extra pages / fixing website I have no issues with, it has work that has been done and the work is to be seen on the website.
However, after our phone conversation and emailing, I was under the impression that the SEO campaign / program had not been anywhere near as successful as you were expecting (and certainly not even close to where I thought it would be either), this was evident to me when I mentioned the extremely low number of contacts I had had through the website and your reaction was one of a bit of shock and even disbelief and then concurred with me that this wasn’t good. As a result, I am a little surprised that you are requesting the payment for it.
You have mentioned that we may well have been held back by the prior link building campaign when you said: “Regarding the links, they potentially could be negative and potentially could have harmed your progress”. These have now finally been removed after about 7 months, in which time, work has been done whilst these were in place. You mentioned that you “cannot remember being told that a link building program happened and if I was told I apologise and should have identified these earlier perhaps.”. I’m afraid you were told, as I have said before, as when we had our first meeting,
I told you the whole story of my nightmare with my previous SEO and website guys. I’d also like to add that you have managed to find them when now, I imagine through the use of a piece of software and I do feel that you “should have identified these earlier perhaps.” as the situation of the SEO work carried out so far (of which I would like to stress that I am in no dispute that there has been a great deal of) seems to me to be likened to, for example; if I were to conduct an entire day’s wedding photography, BUT I had had grease on my lens all day and I had not noticed. As a result, the images were taken (although I would have been working hard on taking them all day) would have been of little success.
I am quite happy to have paid what I owe for the blog, 2 years hosting, extra pages / fixing website. I am, however, not, with regards to the SEO program. As I said, I am aware of the work that has been done, but if I liken it to the hypothetical situation I mentioned, I very much doubt my clients would be happy to pay for a lack of successful results, regardless of my work.
I do want to move forward if I’m honest, I am sick of this stale and, as far as the incoming interest to my business is concerned, fruitless, situation. The fact that we are about to proceed in a slightly new direction (once again with your absolute reassurance that this will be a success), with more investment from myself, but you are also asking for payment of a program that was basically unsuccessful, to me, would be like getting your car fixed, it not being properly fixed, you taking it back, and the mechanic saying “okay, so that didn’t work, we should have done this which I’ll now do” and then charging for both, even though the first fix of the car wasn’t successful.
I have no issue having paid you for the work that has been completed (of course! I will quite happily pay for any successful work I have had done in any sense), but minus the £800 for the unsuccessful SEO, as my intentions are to now spend another, larger sum of money with you in a new direction due to the previous being unsuccessful. I will however be willing to pay a portion of this, (which you already have had within the deposit) as I know much work (even if futile up until now, due to the oversight of harmful links) on it as I have said, and if the link you have previously mentioned that you obtained is as amazing an asset to the site’s SEO (although once again, we are months down the line and not seeing the benefits from it yet), then I think this should obviously be taken into account. But similarly to what I have said before in previous emails; what I am afraid of is, each time we embark in a new direction / on new program and I pay you a large sum of money, it becomes as unsuccessful as it has been so far, then you propose another, requiring another large sum of money, etc, etc. I mean, can you honestly say that you would pay an outstanding balance for a service that was unsuccessful? Say, for instance, a repair on your car, house, etc, etc?
Even if, now that the harmful links have been removed, the SEO from the past “blossoms” (I mean, will this be the case? Or will it now be “outdated” time-wise so to speak?) what about the past 7 months (even if you take out of that the 3 months SEO takes on average to kick in; 4 months) of my company’s website’s severe lack of success? I appreciate your apology for not remembering I had told you of the previous link building work, but like I’m saying, up until now, I’ve just been sitting around waiting for 7 months, in regards to the progression / success of my company internet-wise, which is different from when you said to me in our first meeting; you couldn’t guarantee search rank (saying “rank is vanity, sales are sanity”) and that any SEO / web designer who said they could, was lying, but you could guarantee you could improve the success of my company. I trusted you and took your advice (employing you to set up the blog, fix the site, etc) on this and your professional knowledge and believed that we / you were conducting changes and taking action to improve and create success, the lack of which has been very disappointing, frustrating and worrying for me.
I know you have said there has been a 400% increase in visitors, which is undeniably an increase, but lets be honest, both of us know that 400% is subjective, as, for an extreme example, a 400% increase on 1, would only bring it up to 4.
I think I am being reasonable under the circumstances, and am willing to square things up as I have suggested, money-wise. So if you wish to go ahead as I have suggested, then I will sort that out in the next day or two.
[Website Designers / SEO] We considered phoning you as we really cant agree or understand your thinking here but opted to draft this email. I really am equally frustrated by the fact you believe the SEO program isn’t a success and although I can see this from your perspective you can’t simply say something along the lines of.
‘I don’t think it’s as successful as I expected so will you accept £550 instead of £2000 for a 3 month SEO program and if you accept it I will happily pay for the next tranche of work’.
This isn’t professional or the correct way to proceed, we have completed your SEO program to the best of our abilities and have documented every step of the way, indeed on reviewing it just now we have completed more work that isn’t on the report including a new very important link. Regardless of that when we took over your website you had 15 pages indexed, you now have 65 (see attached graph), you have had increased monthly website visits resulting in a 433% increase in visits in November and December (114 visits compared with 608 in the period Nov 1 to Dec 29).
Therefore even though your SEO project isn’t results / performance dependent I am confident in reviewing the visitor numbers and changes / updates / work / fixes detailed that you have had the good value from our work and I am not willing to write off this work to any value. Additionally, if you review the invoice and pricing agreed for the ecommerce system and fully responsive website design there is a large discount applied.
Regarding the ‘quality’ link I acquired for you, this won’t ‘automatically’ give you massive increases as link benefits are gradually phased in now (to stop reverse engineering the search algorithm) but in my opinion that link alone is worth £1000.
If cash flow is a problem for you I am willing to accept a monthly payment agreement but cannot reasonably expect to accept that you don’t think you have full value and therefore don’t want to pay for the SEO work.
To help with cash flow and to include another discount I am also willing to remove the discount for the forthcoming e-commerce work / website work and ‘write off the SEO cost’ so the net result is that you would need to pay a bigger deposit for the forthcoming work and would get another reduction (on current invoice totals).
I feel the comparisons of grease on the lens of the camera or car repairs are not the fair or reasonable reflection of this situation at all.
We have completed a huge amount of documented work on your site and off-site for your SEO project (see attached list) and have shown you that the website stats are ‘healthy’ and increased from the same period last year but appreciate that you have not received a lot of emails / phone calls from the site but was never a pre-requisite for the success of this project. I am professionally disappointed to have invested so much time / effort into your website and giving so much help and advice not have you delighted yet but as we are dealing with 3rd party companies (search engines) and the ‘hangover’ from your previous SEO companies, that we can’t ‘force’ to react to our updates, I think the idea that you believe you shouldn’t pay the final SEO balance is unfair on every level.
After all this work that has been completed I would normally expect a gentle increase in rankings and the lack of that now leads me to believe that the SEO company you employed (that I acknowledge you told me about but didn’t hear specifically that they created hundreds of spammy links to your site) has been penalised and the penalty has yet to be removed. In my experience (to stop reverse-engineering the search Algorithms) there will be no sudden change when this penalty is removed but it will be a staggered removal. I am hoping that you are already on this ‘scale’ and the penalty is being removed and will then let you site rank ‘naturally’.
I look forward to going forward with you and will re-assure you that we know what we are doing and if your website was my own property / business I wouldn’t do or recommend anything differently.
[Website Owners] My main concern is quite simply that the money I am disputing is for work that has been conducted (and as I have said before; I stress that I understand the work that has been done) which has unfortunately very much fallen short of mine (and you have admitted your) expectation, seemingly most likely due to an oversight on your part (the “hangover” from previous “link building” work which should have been removed). Yet you cannot understand why I am disputing it, having seen no notable increase (by “increase” I’m referring to the website’s actual contribution to profit and bringing in potential custom)
How is it “unprofessional” to dispute a large amount of money spent, that I was lead to believe by yourself would be so much more rewarding that it has been? (at all, concerning customer contact, bookings, and income, which is undeniably where the success of a business ultimately lays) As I have mentioned before, even if, hypothetically, that suddenly changed and custom came flooding in, what about all these months since we started of being hindered and as a result, not moving forward at all? It’s not just money, it’s the time I feel has been wasted when I could have been progressing and building.
I don’t think you’d be saying what you have if it was the other way around somehow, and I wonder whether you would be encouraged by the results so far and be not only willing and happy to pay the money I myself am disputing after it falling so far short of expectation you were encouraged to believe it had, and to spend more money for “another go at it” so to speak.
With regards to your proposition price-wise in your last email, I feel that this would simply be shuffling payments around slightly? I currently (thankfully) do not have a cash flow problem, simply a problem with payment for a service which I was lead to believe would have yielded success before now. I would like to mention as well that I do really appreciate the generous discount drafted by yourself for the future work planned, but I was also under the impression that this discount was made after myself and you conversing via email for quite a while about the disappointment in the progress of the project so far, and this was added to re-encourage my confidence in the project’s new direction after such a disappointment.
I feel you have been quite offended by my last email, and possibly think you may think ill of me, however, I cannot believe that you were not aware that I may feel the way I do upon requesting outstanding payment for a service, when we have been in discussion about it’s lack of success (to the point where you came across quite shocked on the phone) over the past few months.
The short and tall of it is I came to you as professional for your expertise to hire your services. The service provided, in spite of the amount of work you guys have conducted, has fallen very short (producing little, if any reward) of your professional expectation, as well mine as a customer. This, as you have basically admitted, seems due to yourself overlooking previously mentioned negative links (that you were made aware of when we embarked) Therefore, I think that it’s very much understandable why I disputing the amount regarding this.
