This is a good example of why you shouldn’t be attracted by other ‘cheap’ website designers that approach you via cold-calling or spam emails. This demonstrates the fact that if you put your business’ website in the hands of an amateur you may think you are saving yourself some money short term but long term you could be possibly putting your whole company at risk as the website is now the ‘face’ of your company and your primary new business lead generator.
This is a good long read but if you want to jump to the end you will realise that the site had 5 days of being offline during the redesign and after 5 months the unique website visitors (users) were down 27% over a two month month (compared with the same two month the previous year). So by saving a few hundred pounds the company has now lost 27% (which amounts to hundreds) of website visitors. You decide if thats a good ‘website deal’.
[Website Owner] Hope everything is going well. I am just emailing with regards to our website. It needs updating as you know so it’s compatible with tablets and phones which it isn’t at the moment. I have been contacted by another company who said they will do it for £700, that is under what you quoted and i feel i’d be a fool to let this offer go.
I would like to thank you for all your hard work to date. The website has gained us lots of work and we have had lots of positive feedback. I am only moving to another designer for cost reasons which i am sure you can understand. Please let me know if we have any outstanding payments with you and please can you supply the new website designer with anything he needs to take over the site. Once again thank you for your work and sorry to go. Hope there are no hard feelings. All the best and good luck with your business,
[Website Designer] Would be very unhappy to see you go, is there anyway I can do or say to persuade yourself that you are doing the wrong thing? I will consider two things here and I hope you know I have your best interest at heart:
Firstly the new ‘£700 redesign’ and the company offering it. The reasons I ask are I have knowledge and experience of people being offered redesign quotes / SEO projects that are ‘too good to be true’ and have first hand experience of businesses losing massive customer numbers due to this, see the analytics report above. I assume they are a company that contacted you via cold-calling or email marketing. I will also assume they haven’t been around long and you don’t have a working relationship with them. Take it from me that what I previously quoted you for is worth every pound of it and more and to claim that £700 will go anywhere near the design / work that we can produce is fantasy. You are putting your website / business at risk in trying to save a few pounds and think this is a mistake.
Secondly, I have reviewed what we have done for you and how we have grown the website visitors and helped you and on reviewing the emails I see that:
1, We potentially saved you from a £2000 legal fine for using copyrighted photo after you gave us a photo to put on the site.
2, We have a business relationship of 4 years.
3, Your website has increased its visitor numbers 63% since last year (based on last 30 days)
4, Since the start of last year. the website visitor numbers have noticeably improved compared with the previous years.
5, website visitors have improved year on year since we built the site.
Happy to look at what you have been offered / promised and to see if I can tweak our quote for you but must re-emphasise that I believe anyone promising a site redesign for £600 at the level you want and need is either chancing it, deliberating underquoting, incompetent not knowing what is involved, unaware of the SEO consequences of redesigning a site or not going to be in business for long.
Hope you appreciate this note, and know I have your best interests at heart. If I haven’t persuaded you of what I think is a mistake I can give you the updated invoice and create a ftp / control panel account for you (this is a chargeable function) to give to your new website designer (I didn’t reply to him just yourself). I will then continue to help / support you even if you have another design created.
Just had a good idea – For your information we may be able to offer you a mini-grant (available from the ERDF) European Regional Development Fund, we have completed 50 projects for them recently and some companies havent replied to us with the forms required so with that in mind we could be able to offer you a discount as part of this initiate, you may also want to look at some responsive sites we have created recently does this make a difference.
All these are responsive and content managed and done within the last 4 months, some are being worked on currently, some are budget sites and some are ecommerce sites. They are mainly local sites and hope you will appreciate that we are a local company helping other local companies by both growing together. Additionally we are now over 7 years old and have taken on 2 new staff recently so have the capacity to do any type / style / class of website or website promotion / marketing.
We really don’t want to lose you and want you to get us to build your new website that will keep your website visitor numbers improving and reflect your business now and in the future
Additionally don’t forget that we wouldn’t just create a new design for you we would discuss what improvements you want and tell you what we can do / recommend, previously I assumed that you would add more services and then we would have lots of services and their related galleries as well as a new news section (unlimited categories and posts) along with making it fully responsive and CMS.
There are loads of improvements that we could also incorporate including:
1, new image slider / graphics
2, facebook feed integration
3, Responsive Drop down menus
4, New FAQ page
5, New Testimonials Page
[Website Owner] Thank you for your advise and points. I have taken everyone on board. Your opinion does matter to me. Over the years we have been approached my countless web designers. Cold callers. All pesting us to update our website. I have always batted them away. I didn’t just crumble on the first approach. I even passed my friends to you to get their sites built. So it’s nothing to do with me not rating you or valuing your work. What I have done now following your pointers is said to him show me what you got. I’ll see what happens. We have never doubted your copmany’s work. It was purely the price that swayed me. It seems too good to me true! But he assured me he can do it so let’s see what visual he turns up with. How much would you charge me? As we just haven’t got much.
You have now offered us a very good price and thank you for trying so hard to keep me but it’s still more then the other company. I feel bad and i don’t know what else to say. The other Director who runs the business is leaning on me. He just wants the best price. He is a business man. I was happy to keep as is but i’m being pressured to use the other website design team. This guy has popped in off the cuff. Offered a good price and sadly money talks. I appreciate you coming back but sadly it’s a bit too late
[Website Designers] Ok I can create the final invoice for you and as long as my warnings about what could happen to your website visitors / rankings are understood I am of course happy to help you move. Reference the website visitor drop shown in a previous screen shot of live website stats. I will state that I this is a mistake on so many levels and having looked at their website again today this has been re-confirmed by the fact they cant be bothered to link up their facebook page with their facebook page (actually they don’t have one). Happy to try to explain myself in front of you and your other Director, as trying to save money on a company with no real history with you / that is not local and surely cant demonstrate SEO success like we can seems like the wrong thing to do for me.
I hope this doesn’t come across as being desperate as we have 15 projects going on currently and as you can see by the recent website designs you can see we have a huge amount of work on, I am more concerned that I don’t want to lose an existing client that has explained that their website is bring in lots of enquiries / work and is trusting their new website to an unknown company on the basis of cost alone
[Website Owners] I have understood everything yes. Without getting into he said she said here are a few things.
They have now got a facebook page that is linked to their site. Along with twitter, google +, you tube etc. He is going to keep all our existing URL structure so therefore no rankings should be affected only improved as will be obile friendly.I don’t want to end on a bad note with you it’s not personal. I like your company and work and our website does do well.
If being with the new website designers does drop in rankings and affect our business i’ll come straight back to you.
[Website Designers] This morning the link from his website to his facebook page didn’t work – maybe my mistake but it didn’t link anywhere, works now though. He says Your website ranking for ‘your primary search phrase’ doesn’t make the first page of Google and you aren’t even on the maps.
This may seem bad but this shows his ‘knowledge’ is the same as 16 year old student. Concentrating on one search specific term is never good. We have world wide ranked sites that have over 100,000 visitors per month and some that are in the top 3 worldwide for very competitive search terms and currently have 5 out of the top 10 for the search term ‘essex builder’ (and all the top 3). He is ranked top spot for ‘their primary search term’. This sounds good initially but its not competitive and Google reports that search term is used 140 times per month the same term for the County ‘Essex’ has over 1000.
Will give you the Google Analytics code for you to give to them and will ensure to start your monthly website visitor report again if its stopped. Your hosting is paid in yearly periods (actually its normally 2 yearly). You can decide not to transfer to the other company (I see they are on budget hosting in Germany where you are currently with an Award winning hosting company on a Dedicated fast UK based server) and continue to let us host your website / email. If that’s the case I will amend the invoice to 2 years and give you the ftp details for your new website developers. Keeping your website hosting with us wont affect the other company and as a bonus you will get a better / faster server but we will need to create an account for him and give him access details.
[Website Owner] It is sad to say goodbye. You have always been on hand for support etc. I do hope you continue to do well. Keep an eye out for our new site. Should be up within 7 days. If it’s not rubbing salt in the wounds feel free to comment. Your opinion would be welcomed. Did you get that code I sent you? That’s to transfer over the site or something. I am happy to remain hosting with you. Saves me updating all my settings across all devices and computers as well. Will that cause any problems with the other website designers or shouldn’t it affect him?
I’m happy to stay with you. So no need for the tag now. Just send him FTP details or the host login details. Whatever you feel best. I’ll settle your invoice today so should clear tonight or tomorrow.
[Website Designers] Just to make you aware your website is down and has been since for 5 days, its really bad for Google / SEO and obviously terrible for website visitors that get to your site to be shown a ‘website maintenance’ type message If I can help please ask.
Glad to see you got your website back online but your new company has forgotten to add your website stats code to the site. Its really important to put it back on the site as it gives you a monthly overview of website visitors and if anything is going right / wrong with the site, this is vitally important after a redesign to ensure you can see if you are losing visitors and the report will help you work out why
[Website Owner] The site is still working progress. He is very slow to be honest. Pages are still missing. The gallery not full of the images. However I do like the look. We haven’t had any email enquiries though since its been up which is concerning me. Thanks for the code. I’ll pass onto him now.
[Website Designers]
We have now reviewed your website after 6 months of you moving to a new website designer, as we agreed, and as you can see your website visitors are down by 27% over a comparable 2 month period. What do you want us to do?
We can take the website design and SEO back easily and quickly to start to repair the damage done by them.
[Website Owner] We noticed this loss of website visitors ourselves last week, we have been talking about company back to Delicious Webdesign and your message about the amount of visitors we have lost has finally made our minds up, We want to coma back, what happens now?
[Website Designers] Its a pretty simple process as the site is still hosted with us and we shall now take steps to remove the damage your old website designer has done to your site and we will work hard to ensure that your website gets back track and shows increases in visitor numbers.
