who has suffered some set-backs when building your website. Please tell me it took a long time for you to finally be pleased with it. I am really bummed at the moment. I've been using an Indian company to develop my site and they have done a great job, but when I requested them to correct a mistake it was like pulling teeth.

Sorry, I just needed to vent. :(

Anyone else had set backs with your website?

How long did it take you to get it complete to the point that you were satisfied with it?

EV

I think it's a good practice to constantly evaluate your website to see what modifications need to be made. We are constantly adding or taking away things on our website. I almost believe that you should never be satisfied with your website because you should always be looking for how to improve it. Having said this, you will obviously have to be satisfied with it to some degree before you make it public. Making it to our satisfaction before making the website public took a lot of planning and re-doing for us, which was probably about 3 months or so.

Just curious, what kind of a correction did they have to make that they were pulling teeth over?

Hi Mindy,
Thanks for the response. It was adding sub categories to two categories. I requested sub categories in the design phase back in March and I thought they had incorporated them all, until I noticed this week that they weren't there when I began to upload products. So I brought it to their attention, and it was almost WWIII. They didn't want to do it because it was additional programming at this late stage and they weren't sure it would be covered under my current proposal.

However, I pointed it out to them that I had requested this months ago and had the emails to prove it.

Please refer to my post "Starting a Website" in the "Tips and Tricks" forum.

Good luck!

We have all been there before. I lost half of a $2000 investment in a local web designer who never finished the job in 5 months only to find out that I never would OWN the site if I wanted to take it somewhere else!
I rolled up my sleeves and learned everything I could and surpassed the point of site construction where she was when I fired her.
Since then, I have found at least 4 or 5 EASY sitebuilders I used to create sites until I settled on the easiest of all. When it came time to put a "real" shopping cart on my site and get less dependent on PayPal, I bought a template (the next site I just used the free one--just as good) and away we go! I am very pleased and can honestly say that I could set up a site for someone else, teach them how to do their own pages after the setup, and they own the site and the domain name--not me.
If interested, let's look at what you have in mind.
Julia
http://www.123MonogramMe.com
http://www.BabyBouquetsandBaskets.com

EV - I feel your pain!

Have you ever had a bad experience with an off shore call centre? The analogy works well when it comes to software of web development.

Your technology partner needs to communicate regularly with you at every step of the way in order to avoid scope creep and they need to be across your entire business strategy or at the very least your online strategy.

We are currently seeing a trend in Australia where some of the larger companies are coming back to us to 'recover' some of the failed projects that they have attempted to off shore.

This doesn't mean that off shoring is always a bad idea but you need to be aware of the pitfalls.

As far as ever being satisfied... What works today is outdated tomorrow. Have the site built in a way that is highly adaptive and scalable so that the lifetime of the investment is extended.

Have fun, regardless its all part of the adventure!