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Our Internet Authority Program Can Help You Avoid Making A $7500 Mistake

Here is one of many similar experiences we have heard from our clients that lead to the creation of this program.

In March of 2011 a frustrated business owner came to us needing to get a website up quickly. Their budget for this project was not ideal for the type of website they required. The business owner filled us in on the details as to where all his budget had gone.

8 months earlier they had hired another web designer to build them an eCommerce website. The business owner had already paid $7500 out of pocket and the website was still not up after 8 months. They asked us to look into what was going and see if the original web design company was blatantly ripping them off.

The web designer had complete hour logs, that appeared to be legit, which justified what they had billed the business owner yet the website was still only 40% done and required another $4000 - $5000 in work to be completed. Because the work was well documented, the business owner didn’t have a really strong case to go small claims court to get their money back.

The business owner fired the original web designer, ate the $7500 and started over. In the end, they got the exact eCommerce website they initially wanted built by another web design firm we recommended for a total cost of $1300. The site was up and running within 5 business days.

So what went wrong? The issue is that the business owner hired a web designer that was not qualified to build the type of eCommerce website they were hired for. They told the business owner everything they needed to hear in order to get the job and the initial $2500 deposit and figured that would learn how to build this type of site on the client’s dime. The business owner did not know the proper questions to ask and took the web developer at their word that they could build the website.

Now to be fair to the original web developer, the initial estimate for the project was in the $7500 range but if the business owner would have researched the available web developers a little more they would have found plenty that would have done the job in the $2000 - $3000 range. The business owner even did their due diligence and got 5 different bids before they started the project. They threw out the high bid ($9,000) the low bid ($1500) and chose between the three in the middle ($4000 - $8000). When we asked what made them choose the web developer they initially went with they admitted to us that they didn’t really know what any of the web developers where talking about so they chose by the portfolio they liked best.

Here is the kicker. The company that ended up building their site was the one who initially sent the lowest bid. We called the lowest bidding web designer on the business owner’s behalf, asked some technical questions to see if they really knew their stuff and had them show us portfolio pieces that displayed the skill set required for building an eCommerce site (not just a cool looking brochure style website) and then made our recommendation to use them. Total use of our time was about 25 minutes.

We’ve run across this scenario so many times we have decided to do something about it. Call Digi Donkey today and ask about the Internet Authority Program before making a $7500 mistake.