Many things go into managing a successful website to ensure that your message reaches its intended audience. Along with top-notch website design and awesome marketing ideas what is important for
We initially tried to make an in house build of our platform with a six man team. The progress was slow and the results were not meeting our expectations. After 4 months, we cut our losses and hired Momentum. Over the course of 3 months, they rebuilt the platform from scratch and also took over our entire marketing and business development operations. Project was finished on time without any complications.
I initially approached momentum web consulting with a implementation request that two other web developer struggled to implement. I expected a long and expensive development process to implement all my requests, but they were able to implement it for much cheaper than expected and delivered incredibly quickly. Thanks Momentum!
As an online business, a quality website is essential. In the early days of my business when I was just starting out, I didn’t have a budget for a custom website so I coded my own from scratch. It was simple but it worked and let me focus on the content and core business services. The checkout was a series of Paypal “buy it now” buttons. We didn’t have a cart, pages were static, and all changes were a nightmare to implement. Later on, one of our customers redesigned our website for us and made the website responsive, but we were still missing a cart, and with our growing business needs it became clear that we needed to upgrade our platform. This time I decided to hire a professional to bring our site up to modern standards.
After extensive searching, I hired a local US company. They had an attractive price and they seemed easy to work with since they were local. We started off with a phone meeting, I outlined what platform I was interested in implementing, what features the website should include, and timelines. Soon after I got a design proposal which visually looked good, and we started the implementation. Getting the site to work in practice was a nightmare I did not expect. I spent countless hours checking for bugs and reporting them to the developer. What I got was a simple skeleton, and I was left to do the rest. I installed and configured dozens of plugins myself to get the functionality I required, and continued to work out bugs with the developer. Every time a plugin was updated, the website would crash and need a new bandaid. Some agreed upon features were never finished, and eventually the developer stopped responding. I questioned if my time would have been better spent brushing up on my web design and making everything myself. Though I had spent as much on this website as a used car, I figured the price must have been too cheap for a US based web developer and I got what I paid for. Not happy with where the website was left off, I began my search again for a developer.
The second time around, I looked globally. Since I never ended up meeting with the local developer in person, I figured my money would go further internationally. My request this time was simpler, instead of a new website on a new platform, I just needed an updated design of the existing one, and to implement a handful of features that were never finished. After several quotes and consultations, I settled on a company in Bulgaria. Their portfolio was excellent and the price was about the same as the previous build. I figured that for a simpler project at the same price as I initially paid for a complex US website, they would knock it out of the park. We had a skype meeting where they outlined their development process and timelines, and I outlined very clearly the things that were required. After a few weeks, I got a mockup of a homepage design, and everything looked on pace. Then everything fell apart. When they tried to implement the new design, everything fell short. There were more bugs than last time, and besides a fresh homepage, they did not touch anything else. At this point, I referred back to the original requirements that we agreed on and started talking to the owner of the company. It quickly became a story of how we were quoted too low of a price and promised too many things, how the websites that I was shown in their portfolio were $100,000 websites and that I should have not expected results like that. The original website was so poorly designed apparently, that they refused to continue upgrading it, and would not even quote me a price to do it right. They dropped me as a client, but not before demanding more money to release the design they had put together, essentially holding my currently operating website hostage.
Discouraged, I started my search a third time. This time I decided to look based on the reputation of the developer, not what the company offers. This search led me to Miroslav, who came highly recommended. From the start, this time was different. We had a good discussion on where the website stood and what my vision for the website was and we were able to see eye to eye. It quickly became apparent to Miroslav that the design I just paid for could not be implemented onto this website, the website was held together by rubber bands and bandaids at this point and needed a ground up redesign if it was going to be functional. His insistence on a stable upgradeable website was refreshing compared to my previous experiences where the companies only wanted to get something out the door as fast as possible. He quickly found that the initial website had been contracted out to developers in India, and that the “local US developer” was just a coordinator. The second company had left a hidden note in the code apologizing to any future developers who had to rescue this mess of a website. Despite the uphill battle, Miroslav did a fantastic job. He approached design with a focus on speed, security, and customer experience. He implemented countless upgrades that I would not have even known to ask for. During the course of developing the website, he has implemented a multitude of custom modifications to our existing plugins and optimized both our public website as well as our backend that has made processing orders more streamlined. Along with these changes, he has implemented much needed SEO improvements that have significantly increased our Google ranking. He even built a custom application for our website that showcases our customer photo submissions (something the previous two developers did not want to touch). My experience with him was so far above and beyond the service I have seen from other web design companies that I have partnered with him to launch a new web design company.
