alwaysontime Posted March 11, 2010 Report Share Posted March 11, 2010 Hi Guys, I need a little help, I am so sure that I have been conned by my web designer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krillz Posted March 11, 2010 Report Share Posted March 11, 2010 Review you contract, or your verbal contract if you have it recorded or a credible witness. If you came to an agreement that you were buying a costum design, that is a unique design built from scratch then contact him and tell him that he has violated the terms of the contract, make him refund the money paid or build you a new site that follows the contract directions. If this doesn't work contact a attorney and sue him, for contract violations, false marketing/advertisement, suffering and pain, lost business revenue (if you are making money of your site) and I bet an attorney will come up with a few more charges as after all they get a cut of the settlement/verdict. Hopefully you have not made the mistake of not having a valid contract accepted by both parties regarding the issue and can do that. Otherwise it might become a quite expensive lesson learnt. I myself always have a contract that I use when outsourcing design work, you would be suprised how many that get weak knees and back out of their claims after reviewing it and hearing what the consequenses may be if they in any form try to trick me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alwaysontime Posted March 11, 2010 Author Report Share Posted March 11, 2010 Thanks for the reply. Well all this afternoon I have been having an email convo with the designer, and he has offered to make changes to the design. However he has also mentioned in his last email that the design is a standard Magento theme.! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
newseed Posted March 11, 2010 Report Share Posted March 11, 2010 Not trying to defend the web designer but the price being charged is about right for what he has done. However, I have not seen the site nor have I had any experience with Magento. Typically, a complete custom design website cost a bit more than the agreed price you have just paid. Here again, without seeing the site its hard to say if you have been jilted or not. Nevertheless, the web designer did agree (per your input) to produce a custom design and you should be given something unique. There are literally millions of sites in which some designs may look similar to another even though they are custom made but from your post it seems that this guy obviously used a theme which does not define it as custom. Yes, he did some customization of an existing design but the design itself was not custom built. I would suggest you visually compare the Magento out-of-the-box pages to your new site and see if he done some rework like restructuring the product layout, checkout process, etc. All this can take time. Again, it's hard to say if he done a lot of work unless you can compare the original theme to yours and the original ecommerce (Magento) to yours. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krillz Posted March 11, 2010 Report Share Posted March 11, 2010 Still if an agreement is reached, there is no rightous explanation to breaching the agreement, something he must learn sooner than later. As this alone could have ended in a disaster for the "designer" if he had pulled that trick on someone else than alwaysontime, who is very understanding about it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
margaux25 Posted March 12, 2010 Report Share Posted March 12, 2010 Again, it comes down to if you asked for a custom design. Using themes or templates is usually an acceptable practice for building websites. Even if he used a theme it takes alot of research to find the correct theme for the client, and to put it all togeather. Is it a content site. Were there articles written by you or the designer? 1500. is about right for a website, that maybe takes about three weeks worth of work. Are there any records of how many hours were put into building the site? Are there tons of links and pages and catagories that had to be done by hand? If you already know how to use themes or templates, and you could have put that togeather yourself, you could have saved a bundle. So, I'm figuring that you thought it was going to be a custom layout. Your customers surely are not going to know that it's a theme. It's the content that your customers are coming to see. How much aggravation is it going to take, to start all over with another designer? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lm Posted March 12, 2010 Report Share Posted March 12, 2010 So obviously the designer has purchased this template and just integrated it with Magento and Paypal! I am IT savvy enough to learn/know how to even do that myself... and he obviously thought that those processes were worth ?1500!!!!! Seems like a fair price ( and even on a low side) you paid for the e-commerce website. You are forgetting logo design costs, integrating template to the shopping cart, getting it working with your content. Did the designer spend 30 hours on your website? And even more than that? I think he did. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PicnicTutorials Posted March 12, 2010 Report Share Posted March 12, 2010 (edited) Yeah he should have been honest with you as to what exactly he was doing, but rest assured you did get your moneys worth. It's not a hard guess to assume he still spent many hours integrating all that functionality for you - that's not easy. So, if he is willing to customize the site for you a little bit, that sounds like a fair (meet you in the middle) type of trade. Edited March 12, 2010 by Eric Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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