A web design company that seems to not understand web design!
Around 26 months ago, I wrote about why I dislike working with third-party web developers, and 20 months ago, we, that is, the company I work for, decided to refresh the design while upgrading the website to a WordPress backend, and the design is still very far away from being ready for prime time.
Our requirements are bespoke, as our back office software is integrated into the website, being ported from our previous website with this company, one of the reasons, we stuck with a company that I really don’t like working with, read the blog linked above for information about why I dislike this company.
My specific issue is with the designer on the project, who despite multiple requests for changes, the design has somehow gotten worse. We have issues with how our data is displayed, displaying incomplete data, and sorted in the wrong order, different from the set backend order, not to mention the crazy inconsistencies of layout and design. And, the mobile version, all I can say is what the actual f**k.
The more I dig into the design, the more it seems that webdesign 101 coding has not been followed, building the whole website in a WYSIWYG editor called WPBakery, which don’t get me wrong, I use on our property websites, but I create a template, including CSS layout for WPBakery to work inside. This allows me to make wholesale changes sitewide with simple changes to the CSS stylesheet.
The limited use of CSS, and redefining the core HTML tags creates inconsistency, some areas have the correct spacing, while others do not, and some are wildly off how they should be rendered.
The initial brief for the photo gallery was to have an apartments.com style gallery, but what they created was not even close, and when questioned about this, the response was “we cannot do that”, so we asked for changes to make it work better, as it looked terrible. Upon getting access to the WordPress admin, I realized why, they’re using plugins, and not custom code as we were led to believe. Then still messed up the fix we requested, everyone else understood what I wanted, but not the web design company.
And, despite being months behind schedule, this company basically abandoned the project for 2 months, and only picked up the baton when we called them out on their lack of forward progress.
This whole situation stinks of we don’t care, to present a product with so many layout issues, looking like a complete amateur created the website while learning how to code is not acceptable. I have been designing websites for 20+ years and would never present a product like this to a client.
There is more, but I won’t bore you, suffice to say, I’m close to saying f**k it, I don’t want to work with these people anymore, and if anyone asks me about this company, I would tell them to run away as fast as you can, especially as this company is not exactly a cheap option, I expect better for that sort of money.