I thought this would be the place to ask as there are many web designers etc on this board. I have had a website built for me ( I do not wish to give the name of the particular one at the moment) I believe I have been totally conned, I do not believe the work is very good, the website does not do what I originally asked for and instead of the 3 month work I was told it would take it has so far taken over 1 year and still not finished. I have already paid over 2/3rds of the money for the website. My question is, is there a ruling body or someone that if I got them to assess the site would be taken seriously in court if I went on that path. I do not want it just to be my word as that would not be fair as of course I could be totally wrong, I would be very interested to hear peoples views on how I can “officially” assess the website if it has been well done or not.
Do you have a binding contract in place with the vendor that details the technical specifications and outlines performance benchmarks?
Yes have a full contract, as I mentioned above not saying I will go to court but that was just a thought, more would like a professional association assessment to see if I am the one who is wrong or they are.
Just another note, I know there are loads of great web guys and I am more worried about the few that will give the industry a bad name.
in every business there are scam artists and people who think they know what they are doing, its not just the web business... but the internet makes it much harder for them to hide after they take your money
Well. If you have a clearly written specification, and easily measurable success/fail-conditions, getting someone to vet the current iteration shouldn't be too hard. One could look at functionality, measure loading time and amount of success / failures when doing specific tasks, and also of course look at the codebase, the general look and feel of the site, even do some random user-testing to see if users are comfortable using the site, or need guidance to get things done. All depending on what the site is about, of course. Measuring success/failure/errors isn't that hard - convincing the court that it's breach of contract IS, on the other hand. Do you, btw, have the estimated time for completion in the contract? If you do, you could withhold payment, or demand compensation for the time overdue. Without knowing more about the site / business, it's very hard to give better advice.