BUYER BEWARE! The Pitfall of Using Random Web Developer Companies Found in Social Media

We see them everyday. “We’ll build you a $49 custom website!”…”. The old adage is usually true, you get what you pay for, but those prices….they sure are appetizing, aren’t they? And they have a whole bunch of positive comments on the post, they must be trustworthy, right?

Obviously as a firm who is a direct competitor to these countless cheap website companies, we have a vested interest in denouncing them. We feel that the old adage IS true, that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. In this post we will posture what the difference is between what these cheap websites say they are, and what you are actually getting. It will even include some education on website structure and how a lot of them work. We will then have a second section that talks about what we found when we went digging on a handful of these sites.

What goes into a website (a.k.a what are you really paying for)?

So you want a website. You start looking at website options. If your Apple phone microphone is on and you actually whisper the word website, then you will most likely start getting several sponsored ads in your Facebook feed, right? (We have no evidence this really happens, but if definitely feels that way sometimes, doesn’t it?). The message is always the same: Get your site built for $49.99! “$50 Bucks!” you are probably thinking, “That’s a steal.” So you pull the trigger and use one of these companies you just found in a social media ad (this should already be tingling your spidey-sense of danger, but we’ll cover that later). Here are the issues with this route:

1. 1. 1. 1. Can anyone survive making $50 bucks per job making websites in America? What you have to think of in this moment is what actually happens when you are building a website, and can this possibly be accomplished and worthwhile for anyone for just $50? The short answer to that question is no, it cannot. So who could possibly do that? There are really only two answers to that question: first, kids. If this web design company is just a teenager in a basement, are they really going to have the full knowledge of how sites should be built, the importance of proper messaging, or do any research on your business model to make sure the site actually fits what you are trying to do? Unlikely. The other more possible suspect is these sites are built somewhere (think Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand) where the wage rates compared to the United States are so out of whack, that someone could conceivably build you a site in a day for $50 and that actually represents good money. They might even work for someone and only get $2 an hour for that and it’s still good money. So unless you want to be a known supporter of the equivalent of a web development sweatshop, you might want to steer clear for that reason alone.
         2. What do you actually end up getting for $50? These posts hawking these websites advertise a lot of things that are actually just built in features of WordPress. But here is what they don’t really advertise: Fully Custom. In WordPress and other content management systems (CMS), there is a background ‘template’ for a website called a ‘theme’. Using a theme cuts down on a lot of the work involved with making a website…it puts the same structure in all pages at the same time, it sets up the look and feel, color palette, etc. For many business with a very simple model, a themed website can make a lot of sense. But what happens is these themes are very simplified, meaning they are inflexible, and the more you want to ‘color outside the lines’ using special software, or you want a cool visual effect,  it takes a LOT more effort to specialize. We are a bit more expensive (not just to the digital sweatshop, but to most of our competitors), because we use a BLANK theme, meaning the entire site is conceived and constructed FULLY custom to your specifications. Obviously the more bells and whistles you want, and the more custom pages you want, the more expensive it becomes, but you will (almost) never hear us say that whatever you’d like your website to do is impossible (there are always some limitations, thus the ‘almost’). Although we have not hired any of these companies to ‘build’ our website, we can imagine that they are built within a tight set of parameters that are non-negotiable. And you likely don’t find this out until AFTER you have paid your $49.99. So you end up with an unimpressive website that really doesn’t differentiate you from the other guy down the street doing exactly what you do… and that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
         3. What happens after the site is built? The thing with websites is they are a lot like car repairs. The vast majority of us have only a rudimentary understanding of how each of the systems really works, so when we are told that we have something wrong with our car, we pretty much have to go on blind faith that it is true. The same is somewhat similar with websites. When you contact someone to build you a website, you know very little about what makes a good website or a bad website, and those criteria are many. When your site is finished, and it is given to you, do you have any idea aside from flipping through the pages if it’s any good? You may have an idea from looking at other websites. The site you get may even be ‘pretty’ but behind the scenes, it is like a house made with termite infested wood. It may be too slow to load, it may lack features that are key for your business model (but you aren’t really aware they are), it may not display well on mobile devices (an ever increasing place where people first see your business). It may lack in search engine optimization techniques. And worst of all, it may not contain any safety countermeasures or perform regular backups to prevent irreparable and irreversible damage or even loss of control over your site to hackers. Yikes. Do you get all those assurances paying more for your website? Maybe not, but we feel in most cases, appropriately priced websites are priced that way because they DO cover all those bases. There’s also the benefit that if you hire locally, or at least in this country, if you have problems after the site is finished, you will get support, or at least have some avenue for redress if you have been swindled. If you hire some generically named company that was started four months ago and may not even exist in this country, your chances of having your web developer ghost you immediately after finishing the site (if you get a functioning one, which you are paying upfront for) are HIGH.
         4. What’s the catch: we don’t have any specific proof of this (yet), but we feel pretty strongly that all these bargain basement deals in websites have some other profit center. There are a number of revenue streams that are legitimate if not a little unethical if undisclosed, and a few more illegitimate ones. The web developer could legitimately state that the promotional price requires that you buy your hosting and domain from them at increased prices from standard market cost. The lower price could require an ongoing management or subscription cost, there could be upcharges for building relatively standard elements into the site, etc. Illegitimately, they could be selling your data, holding control of your website and then demanding additional funds if you ever wanted to gain control of it… or transfer it to another hosting provider to gain control, or making a charge on your payment method or having someone else make one with hopes you miss it (or don’t miss, who cares, they get the money or items and you dispute the charge which the card provider eats anyway).  Do any of these companies carry that risk? We can’t say, but given what we’ll discuss in the next section, it shouldn’t really be considered outside the realm of possibility. But they could all explain the lower-than-low entry price to a site like that.

A Look into the Typical $49.99 Website ‘Developer’ from Social Media

So as we have covered, the low, low price of the advertised websites on social media outlets may indicate an unreliable and inexperienced developer, a vastly underpaid one in a foreign country, a poorly executed, website build that relies on shortcuts and templates with no flexibility, or a gateway to other legitimate or illegitimate revenue centers. But the listings are persuasive and some of the reviews seem on the level….even we were thinking, “Are we just too expensive? Is that what the customer wants?” So we decided to take a look at a sample size of them. This was what we found and what should stand out to you as red flags when considering one of these vendors.

1. 1. Bad grammar: One red flag that stared us straight in the face on a number of these company sponsored posts was broken English. No one expects anyone to write perfect copy, but when your ad title says ‘Fully Responsive Websites With As Low as $49’, that’s a major red flag. If they can’t even get their ads right, how much attention are they going to be paying to your website messaging? The last thing you need is to see “When you hire us your troubles are gong” on your main front page image after you’ve already paid.
   2. Location: Given that most of the time we see grammar or spelling mistakes that bad in ad copy or messaging is when the sender is clearly a non-English speaking foreigner, we decided to take a look and see where a couple of these companies were from. Most claimed they were from somewhere in the US. But we didn’t take the business address at face value. We decided to look on Google Maps and see if we could find that address. That was an eye-opener. Some of the businesses were in collective office buildings, some in WeWork type setups, but some were supposedly headquartered in some odd places (to say the least). One was at a run down global pack and ship corner store that looked like a converted pawn shop, bars on the windows and all. Another was at a inner city residential address. Not that professional, but they could be home-based, who knows? The one that really got us was located on an address that corresponded to a dirt lot. Those who were in some of the office buildings also were not listed in that building’s resident businesses. Conclusion: All of these high speed looking companies were lying about where they really are. Which took us to the next thing we discovered.
   3. Where they REALLY were: one of the companies we actually clicked through and inquired. We asked them where they were located (the dirt lot). They said they were based in Texas (that’s where the dirt lot was). When we told them we looked up that address and it was a dirt lot, the chat went quiet. Looking at their profile drove the stake home: page admin is located in Pakistan. Uh-huh. So there is an office in a dirt lot in Texas, and the page admin is reported from Pakistan. Got it. Conclusion: Most of these companies are located in dingy rooms in third world countries where they are paying their designers $1/hr (that’s just our conclusion, it could be $2, who knows.)
   4. But what does that mean?: Is it possible that a company from Pakistan could be completely legit and actually deliver you a quality website, and they are lying about where they are based because they just don’t want to have pre-judgements interfere with getting work they can complete competently? Maybe. But the lying leads to our actual pre-judgment: they are hiding something. The obvious and worst case scenario is that it’s all a scam. You sign up for the website, you pay upfront (hey, it’s just $50), and then crickets. No contact for a week, no one is answering emails. You call the number listed and it’s a chicken farm in Slovakia. How do you get your money back? You don’t. That money is gone. Aloha means goodbye. Another possibility: you are funding a terrorist jihad. Are all Pakistanis jihadists? No. But are a lot of them? Yep. Do you want to roll those dice? We don’t. Anyway you slice it, if the entity building your website is not REALLY in the US, you will have zero recourse if their product is terrible, only partially finished when completed, or it gets held ransom for an ongoing payment at sometime down the road if they don’t hand you full control.

   So what’s the big takeaway on the $49 website deal (or any of it’s variants)? The odds are strong that you are hiring someone to get an inflexible, simple (non-custom), and not very feature rich website in the BEST case- and in the worst, you are funding terrorists or get completely ripped off. In our book, that goes down as an unacceptable risk. Even if it only costs $49.

Don’t get ripped off (or have all your info hacked), by a shady website developer, contact us today for a free, no-pressure discussion on how we can build you a customized, secure and effective website with great support after the build!