Black Widow Internet or Crystal Clear Global Solutions, in my experience (and of many others it seems) put all of their efforts into the initial sales pitch. They know exactly what to say to make them sound like a good choice. However, they're not.
Once you have parted with half of your money everything goes down hill. On my contract I was given the ETA of 3 months for completion. Well over one year later, the website was still not complete and I was continuously being asked for the final payment.
I told them that the 'finished' website had so many bugs and things that simply didn't work and they said that these would only be fixed after the final payment had been received and I had signed a form saying I am happy with the website. The thing was, I wasn't happy with the website but Black Widow Internet put me into a catch 22 situation. If I didn't pay the rest and sign the form, I would never get my website. If I did sign the form and pay the money, I'm signing a form that says I'm happy when in fact I'm not.
Well, in the end, I was forced to sign the form as i couldn't afford to simply throw away the 2500 I had already spent.
The bugs were never fixed. Well, this is to say, once one bug was fixed, another appeared. The coding was such bad quality that it was impossible to salvage the website. The end result was a terrible, unprofessional, non-functioning excuse for a website.
Half way through the project I also received an email from an ex-employee of Black Widow Internet. Please see below:
Hi +++++++,
You are being chated by BlackWidowInternet (Crystal Clear Global Solutions). It's playing against you!
Your work (if you have given any) has been done in India, by the poor India guys. There is an office at India for BlackWidowInternet and BlackWidow's complete software division is located there. Only the sales and marketing departments are in UK.
Here are some proofs if you can't believe this!!!
1) The Indian branch is knows as Crystal Clear Solutions Pvt Ltd and the website is http://www.crystalclearsolutions.in
2) Ask Scott about one Mr Prabhul Sankar who is the CEO of the Indian branch
3) Check the owner of the domain crystalclearsolutions.in http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=crystalclearsolutions.in
4) Check the strength of the BlackWidowInternet (count of employees)
5) If you have a website done by BlackWidowInternet, ask them to enable the statistics
6) Checkout the statistics and the hits in India (there wil be country a graph shown).
Please contact me at blackwidowinternet@yahoo.co.uk if you have any queries!
Thanks,
So, this would explain why they take up to 3 weeks to respond to an email - because they have to wait for their coders in India to get back to them. I was told that all of the coding was done in their Uk office. This would also explain why all of the writing on website was in terrible English!!
The way I see it, this company was probably started by a couple of Uni friends who thought they could make some quick cash by 'designing' websites but actually have no knowledge of how to do it.
Another strong clue that Black Widow Internet do not know what they are doing is if you search for them in google, under their search listing where usually the description goes, theirs says "0% loaded"...they can't even format their google listing properly let alone other peoples'!
I have now lost over 5000 because I was sucked in by this company. Never again.