In November after being awarded a business grant from a local enterprise Business start & Go. I found Black Widow Internet, who I found off approved webdesigners.com and I contacted them about building my digital publishing web site and was given a quote and a brief of what they could do for me.
I decided to go ahead with this company, and they was paid 2000 to start. The project was going to be in total 3080 in all and would take around 90 days to complete according to the brief. The design stage took longer than expected as I was not happy with some of the designs done, but it was finally completed and the development stage was started. It was said that the website would be complete in March which in that time I was awarded a business loan from the princes trust. The conditions of this loan were when the website was complete that the first tranch of money whatever was outstanding would be released to me to pay. In March, they wrote a letter stating that it would be finished at a specific date.
There was apparently some issues and this caused the website to not be ready in march. In April when the website was said to have been finished. I was asked to sign off and make final payment, it was then I refused as I hadn't been able to access the website. They then gave me log in details in order to access the website which I was still unable to see the site fully. However, I discovered that the subscription feature was totally missing, I told them about this, and they said I did not include this in my brief and I would have to pay extra to have this feature added. Even though I had it written in my brief and showed them, still they refused to add this feature, unless I paid more so I agreed to pay extra for this feature as I had waited long enough.
It then took months for this feature to be added in this time I had constantly been emailing and calling Black widow to find out why it was taking so long, I also had gotten my Princes Trust mentor to speak to them at this point to find out what was the delay as they started to ignore me. In this time, I also made the first complaint to the director of the company this complaint was ignored.
Around July-August they said they had finished the site, and again I should sign off the project and pay the final outstanding balance, again I refused because I had not seen the website fully to say all features was added and I was pleased with it. This is then when I received the invoices asking for final payment and the email about taking court proceedings against me. I paid the final amount but was still not given the website as I had not signed it off due to the fact that I could not see how it functioned. Furthermore, as I had seen it was still not complete. I sent several emails stating the changes I wanted done and to date this has still not been done.
I was passed around to 3 different account managers who I had to explain what it was I wanted the site to do as they hadnt bothred to check my brief to see what my requirements was. I was told that I didnt ask for these features and after demanding and persisting that I did and had it in the briefs they sent over they said that they had included it and that I didn't know how to use the site correctly and that could have been the cause.
In the end after waiting for so long I decided I wanted to just get another company to finish the site which is when I discovered the site had been poorly built and was unusable.
It has been now nearly 2 years and after giving up, I asked for them to just give me the site as it so I could complete the changes eslewhere. I was sent this on a disk and I was asked to sign off to say I was happy before I could recieve this. I have been to various different web developers asking if they would be able to apply the changes I wanted done to the site and to have it at a decent state in which I could use it. However. I was told the site was poorly built, and I would be better to start again due to the amount of work it would take to fix this.
Due to the time BlackWidow took to get to this stage the Prince's trust is no longer willing to give me the rest of the money I was awarded. I have no website, lost all the money that I made such a great effort to gain and absolutely in pieces after the battle, I went through with this company. All though all this they had a "I don't care" attitude
Emma
Luton
United Kingdom
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