My company contracted Carl Reid (a.K.A. Carlos Reyes) of New Idea Web Design for website design services several months ago to round out our website design staff, starting back in April. While Carl is a very talented designer, we had constant issues with:
1. Constant late projects: He would give deadlines and was never able to keep to them, on average he was late by 100% of his original estimated time frame. There was always some excuse from him as to why he was unable to complete a project. The most common included:
A. He didnt realize his domain for his website had expired, so he never got my emails. Yet he wouldnt pick up the phone or check in with me. Ironically a month later he gave the same exact excuse, even though his domain had already been renewed for a full year and what added insult to injury was the fact that the email in reference was sent to his GMAIL accountnot his @newideaweb.com account.
B. He was out of town, or just coming back on a flight and would respond once he got back into office the following day. This excuse was used at least half a dozen times.
C. He didnt have access to the internet from his location. What kind of a website designer doesnt have access to the internet in this age where you have smart phones and tablets to receive emails on from anywhere in the world?
D. He misunderstood instructions, and asked me to resend themmultiple times.
2. Complete lack of communication: When he needed work or was quoting a new project, he would pickup the phone. Otherwise when a project was late or incomplete, he would never pick up the phone and it would take roughly 6-10 emails for him to respond even once.
3.inability to follow instructions: On majority of projects, he would not follow the specific instruction set given to him, typically resulting in weeks added on for him to do revisions to match what he quoted for.
4. Constantly loosing emails: He would constantly request for me to resend emails to him that included original quotes, instruction sets, revision requests, etc. Whenever I sent him a new detailed project writeup, he would respond back with nothing more than price and exclude the original writeup. I had to ask him almost every time to ensure his quoted price was sent back in reply to the original writeup.
5.incomplete work: The last several projects leading up to us having to release him from contract, he was prepaid in advance for, which he NEVER completed. He was given well over a month to complete said projects and always had one excuse or another. After close to a month when he finally did respond back and say he would be back in town and finish up on Monday, he never responded back and I had to pay other contractors to finish his work. The end result of the final project was I had an complete website design in hand, which had WATERMARKED images on it, content he was paid to add into the clients new website was never done, several incomplete template pages including one particular template page with a photo scroller which was never done. When I asked him to please send me back over the revised design with UNWATERMARKED images, he ignored all requests for this.
At the end due to his lack of communication and not completing the open projects he was paid for, I had to file a chargeback against him for ONE of the several payments to cover my costs to have someone else finish his work. When he responded to the dispute he lied and told them that all work was completed, and I never got my money back.
At this point all of the work he left incomplete, had to be done by other people. Very disappointed, especially after communicating to him for months that these issues need to change or I would have to release him from contract work. I was more than generous in my time and patience, in trying to get to a resolution with him, and ultimately he refused to communicate back, complete the incomplete work, or give a refund.
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