Still As Life

Maybe it's just me, but when you are paying hundreds to thousands a year on a website, you expect it to work, and to get a response about problems quickly.

I have come across a few web companies that only work like this if it is the easiest thing for them to do. Most recently, the company that owns the system that the store I work at uses for our website.

As I do the majority of the website content maintenance and general store IT work, and as a fellow web designer and developer myself, I understand their situation, however, I do not think they have handled it well.

The content management system that they have written, while it is a good idea as there are few good systems in their area that are also easy to use, has had some problems.

It is a nice, simple and clean system, but for the past 5 months, almost as long as I've been working at the store there have been unresolved problems constantly springing up.

Some of the user updatable things on the website do not save to the database, we have been asking to have this fixed for 3 months, but none of our emails regarding this have gotten a reply, ever, when we have spoken to them in meetings or on the phone once we have given up emailing them about it and not getting a response, we have been told it would be fixed within the week, it still isn't fixed.

Another problem sprung up about 2 months ago where images would occasionally get mixed up and an entire category would display the same image, an image that seemed to be randomly chosen from the database. Again, whenever we emailed them about this there was no response.

About 2 weeks ago, after they did an update on the system, a problem sprung up in almost every link from a product page where a forward slash was missing from the URL's. This is a major problem as customers can then not get back out of a product page without going back to the root address manually, or by using the back button. This is a big issue. When we had a meeting with them on a Friday, we were told it would be done by Monday and they would call us to confirm it was working properly.

We did not receive a call, and the problem still is not fixed.

This is very, very poor service and I do not think it is acceptable in any industry.

We have been speaking with them for a couple of months now about redesigning the website as the template has been the same for a while now. As of last week, when my boss wrote them a somewhat angry email about all of the problems with the website, they finally replied, after a couple of days, to tell us they were not going to fix the problems, as they were redesigning the website anyway, so they would just do that and sort out the problems then. This is all well and good, except that it has taken them a week to start to implement the new design, and now that they have started, it is full of glitches and they have not given us an ETA on when it will be all sorted out.

It is less than a month until Christmas and we have alot of customers through the website, so a working website is vital, especially at this time of year.

It's one thing to have a bit of a wait before things will be completed, but leaving us completely in the dark and not even acknowledging our complaints is no way to do business.

I wonder if they treat all of their customers with this much disrespect, or if it's only us since they knew our store owner prior to us starting up a website...

It is very frustrating not knowing if the company that is supposed to be fixing the problems has even received the problem note. However if it's something that won't take much effot on their part, they respond within an hour, which one can only assume means they get the problem emails, they just don't want to deal with it and thus behave as though they have not received them.

I'm not going to mention the name of the company, but if you are getting this treatment from a web design firm, you should be treated better.

Labels: design, internet, work