Frontside and Philip Acosta are untrustworthy, unethical and unfair. Fair play seems to be very challenging for Philip, not to mention actually creating a good site without the help of a template or offshore programming talent. To exacerbate these flawsmatters he is dishonest about his technical skills especially in the area of coding websites for search engines (this is very important if you are looking for a website). I know all this because I am his ex partner.
After starting a business with him founded on the very principle of building websites with search engine optimized code architecture, it became apparent that Philip's coding skills, specifically in the realm of building sites for SEO, were greatly exaggerated. The plan was for me to discuss projects and sell them to potential clients, and then he would build them. The site he built for us never gained any significant presence in any of the search engines, which meant no client leads for me. That meant that we could not generate leads without spending a fortune on pay per click marketing, a fortune which neither of us had.
Fast forward about 18 months, and it was clear after only a single project laced with problems due to project/client management incompetence, that this was a failed partnership. Nevertheless, we decided to keep the site up in hopes of eventually getting some traction. At some point, Philip decided unilaterally to dismantle the site without so much as a phone call. I remember seeing a one or two line email some time well after the fact that I had missed, saying that he was going to kill it because he was tired of paying the roughly $30 in annual fees it cost to keep the site up. I would have been happy to pay them with proper notification, but it was too late by then.
Despite all of this, I tried to stay diplomatic and cordial. Eventually I developed a relationship with someone in my professional network who had a good source for large web design projects. I made a deal with Philip that I would forward these opportunities to him for a finders fee if he landed any. I found out later that they were just wasted, and he put very little effort into trying to actually go after these proposal and project requests. I then decided there was only one way I would ever get any benefit out of my relationship with him and asked him to build a simple 3 page website for me in return for what amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of project opportunities. He agreed.
Here is why I finally got fed up and resorted to this (complaint) as my only practical means of recourse. He agreed to do the site and agreed to a deadline. He even asked me to spend a lot of time getting the content right so that 80% of the work was already done for him. After agonizing over details and getting the content exactly as I wanted it, I got the stone wall. Calls and emails went unanswered literally for weeks at a time, and when the email replies did come they were full of attitude. Basically they amount to: If you don't like it, go f yourself and find someone else. This is all after I had already forwarded at least 6 or 7 potential projects to him of course.
I finally lost my temper and got angry, and I sent some pretty scathing emails expressing this anger. He has threatened to post a couple of angry emails stemming from this ordeal to make me look bad when his site starts showing up on ROR. That of course is no problem as I will post them all from end to end and in context so that the truth will be plain and obvious. Do not let this or something similar happen to you, stay far away from this person. There are many good web designers out there who give you what you pay for, and are capable of designing your site so that it actually shows up in search engines and looks good when it does.
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