Our company recently decided to rebuild our website, as the old site had become outdated. We soon found a web development firm that appeared highly professional. Their own website looked polished, and they seemed to boast extensive industry experience.
We quickly scheduled a meeting to discuss our required features and design vision. The sales representative from the agency was an eloquent speaker. Repeatedly, they convinced us they could deliver a flawless website within a tight timeline.
We then signed the contract and paid an upfront deposit for the agency to commence work. Problems emerged shortly afterward.
First, we noticed the agency’s designers relied on a single design template, which we simply referred to as the “borderless box” (named after its box-like layout without borders). Whether we put forward custom requirements or reviewed their proposed concepts, they only made minor tweaks based on this fixed template. We later learned this limitation stemmed from the constraints of their template-based website building system.
Second, their developers clearly lacked sufficient experience. The code they wrote was unstandardized, with minimal comments and documentation, making future maintenance extremely difficult. They also made many obvious mistakes, such as storing user login credentials in plain text.
Communication with the agency was consistently frustrating. Their replies often misunderstood our questions, or consisted merely of one-word “yes” or “no” responses. At times, they never replied to our emails at all, leaving us deeply disappointed.
Over several months of collaboration with this developer, we encountered countless pitfalls. In the end, we decided to request a refund of our deposit and hired a far more capable web agency to complete the website project. We were thoroughly satisfied with the new vendor, who delivered excellent design and clean code.
Although this troublesome experience left us worn out, we gained valuable lessons on how to select a reliable website development partner that can fully meet our project requirements.