company Badly designed / coded website our business website - want to get it sorted/cancelled

[Asif]

Hi guys,

 

I'm hoping somoene can give me some advice.

 

I'll start from the beginning.

 

Back in January 2010 my best friend and I decided to set up a website.

 

The website was going to be a 'dating' type website.

We did some research and found a company we thought appeared reasonable and who didn't charge too much.

They told us that the website would take approximately 3 months to code/design which we were happy with.

 

We decided to go with them and paid a 25% deposit.

That's when the trouble started.

It turned out that the company outsourced all their work to India and all communication was via email ONLY.

This was a shock but we went ahead as we had no choice.

The company turned out to be rubbish.

 

My friend and I did all the work and made all the suggestions and they took weeks to come back for each thing we needed.

We were both doing this while working full time.

When they did eventually get back the work was usually poorly coded or incorrectly done and always had bad spelling and grammer.

We then decided that we would also write everything ourselves and email that too.

 

Even then it took several attempts to get right.

This kept on going for 17 months. That's right 17 months!

 

Then in May 2011 it was ready to go live.

The company said they'd give us free hosting for one year and so we decided to go with them.

 

We've been live for 4 months now and it turned out that we've had bugs and other issues ever since.

Half the time the website doesn't even work!

 

We've tried to go back and get things resolved but we can't keep doing this.

 

The biggest issue is the fact that most of the time the website is VERY slow.

The designer/coder made lots of excuses about the reasons why this was the case, they even thought we were making it up.

Then finally I recorded myself logging into the site and playing around with it and then emailed that to them and they finally believed us.

 

The designed/coder has now come back and said that it is due to one of the functions not working properly

and that the only way to fix it would be to code the function so that it only updates on the website twice a day instead of instantly as it currently does!

We've now had enough.

 

Personally I suspect it's a combination of poor servers and a badly coded website.

 

There are other websites we know who have a similar set up and the same functions and they work perfectly.

 

We thought about moving to a different host but in the T&Cs they have added that we have to pay a £50 fee for leaving which is a rip-off.

I thought it was free for a year!?

 

We've got to the point where we want to take legal action as we feel we have been patient enough and the website just isn't working as it should.

However, we've never done this and don't know what to do / whether it will be worth the trouble.

 

We spent over £7,500 on the website so it's a lot of money.

 

Recently, after doing further reasearch, we found that there are thousands of people who have complained about them and some have even taken legal action against them!

 

They have no complaints department either and when you ring their head office in the UK half the time they refuse to take the call.

They are on the first page of google search so they are not a small company.

 

Can anyone offer some advice as to what we should do?

 

:x:x:x:x:x

[Conniff]

Would you name them Asif so we can take a look - in a pm if you don't want to put it on here.

[Asif]

Would you name them Asif so we can take a look - in a pm if you don't want to put it on here.

 

I wasn't sure if I could name here.

Their name is webcreationuk.

I'm more than happy to provide any more details. I have also kept 99% of the emails which were sent and received in case I need them.

[theghost]

have you reported them to trading standards? may be some criminal offences in there

[Asif]

have you reported them to trading standards? may be some criminal offences in there

 

No. What type of criminal offences?

[theghost]

misdescribing or misselling

 

it wont affect your own position but if they are doing things dodgy on a large scale then the authroties may take some action against them.

[Asif]

The most imortant thing for me is to try and get some sort of refund so we can use the money and try and get the website fixed.

I'm thinking of writing them an email and putting it to them, but I'm not sure what to say and whether I should list every thing that has ever been done wrongly and what still isn't working or whether the initial email should be shorter. Anyone know any templates or laws I should mention?

[theghost]

The main piece of legislation is SUPPLY OF GOODS AND SERVICES ACT 1982. I suggest you research it and send them a formal letter outlining everything and threatening court action for an amoutn it would take to rectify your website to the level you originally agreed.

 

you need to check with parts of the above law apply to business to business transactions.