In June I engaged Red Diamond Digital (RDD) on a project that involved the design, construction, and deployment of a small Shopify ecommerce website to sell t-shirts. Specifically, I dealt with Bartel Welch, the CEO/founder of RDD for the duration of the project. During initial calls prior to actual engagement, Bartel said the project would take approximately one month to complete and would cost $700 total. I agreed and promptly paid the required deposit of $375 to get the project started.
It wasn't until two months and many insistent inquiries later that I was finally shown the site in RDD's local test environment. Throughout this time, Bartel became significantly less responsive and increasingly vague with status updates and ETA's. Often times, several days would pass before I would get responses to some inquiries. The test site was presented to me through a pixelated join.me web conference meeting Bartel hosted, so I was not able to directly interact with the site myself in to provide any meaningful guidance and feedback to RDD. Instead, I instructed Bartel to simply publish the site "as is" to the live Shopify environment so I could interact with it directly and be able to give better feedback. Bartel acknowledged and said it would take about a week to publish the site to Shopify.
Two more months passed before the site was published and demo'd to me. During this time, Bartel's lack of responsiveness and ambiguity with status updates and ETA's persisted, and if anything got worse. Bartel would tell me that the site's "really coming along" and reassure me how "great it was looking" and that his team is "going above and beyond the defined scope" (even though there was no official, formal scope documented). Realizing that he was just telling me these things to pacify me, I asked Bartel for screenshots of the live, in-progress site just to make sure he wasn't blowing smoke. Bear in mind that the site-publishing was three weeks past due at this point. Finally after two days, he sent me a single screenshot of the site's home page as it existed in the local test environment, although I didn't catch this at the time. This strongly suggests that Bartel/RDD had not even begun the process of publishing the site yet.
This also begs the question of why a so-called professional web design company missed the mark so badly with the predicted ETA of one week for the site-publishing task. This was a margin of error of seven weeks, or 700%. The only possible explanations for this is that they, RDD, weren't really working on my site at all, or they had assigned it far fewer resources than it required. Both explanations are unacceptable.
When I was shown the final product, it was a virtually empty site/Shopify template. My logo and a few other basic site properties were present, but 99% of the rest of the site properties were not. In other words, I essentially waited four months to be given a blank Shopify template. I expressed my dissatisfaction to Bartel on this matter and that I was going to explore some Shopify templates on my own, mainly to verify whether my suspicion of being handed a blank template was accurate or not. Turns out it was. Needless to say, I was able to my site up and online using a free Shopify template, product catalog and everything, all by myself in one week. Why it took a professional web design company over four months to deliver an incomplete product is beyond me.
The missed opportunity from unrecognized sales during the four to five months I worked with RDD far exceeds the amount of money I'm asking to be refunded, which is just my initial deposit of $375. I think this is an incredibly generous request given the trust I had placed unto RDD to build a site in a month's time.
Save yourself the angst, frustration, and money, and steer clear of this incompetent web design company.
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