Heritage Web Solutions ripoff does not provide all as advertised Provo Utah
This company advertises that optimization is a very important part of your website, however, after you purchase you then find out as I did that unless you pay thousands more they only do a minimum optimization - not what they claim as advertised or lead you to believe when speaking to them. You can not access this area to do this yourself.
All the instructions for updating/editing your site are incomplete and after I bought this program I was informed that I had asked for too much to be done and they only provide so many hours of free work so I will have to pay them $60 an hour to do anything beyond that. The gimmick here is they never tell you how many hours it will take them to do anything. The bill could run into hundreds of dollars.
It is true I did not buy the biggest package from them, however, I would think I should be able to edit my entire site within reason. They have set it up so that adding an outside link to your page is often impossible or it comes out looking weird.
Often when they did the initial set up I would have to have them go back to do what they should have done to begin with - their incomplete work.
You never know who is working on what part of your site when you do the set up and it took a very long time to complete it. Phone contact with the techs is impossible at times so one has to wait for e mail communication - that was not really made clear at the onset.
I now have a site that I cannot finish without paying more for them to do the correct optimization needed for search engines like google. I also have very little support time each month.
I would not reccommend this company even though they brag that they are in the 1% of the top designers now. I suppose that is for the large corporations that can pay thousands of dollars.
Margaret
Cottonwood, Arizona
U.S.A.
4 Updates & Rebuttals
Anya
Springville,Utah,
U.S.A.
An employee responds
#5UPDATE Employee
Mon, August 13, 2007
Just like Frederico, I am not ashamed to say that I am working for heritage web.
I have a MFA from European University, and I have been working in Design Industry for nearly 15 years.
Just like Frederico, I am not ashamed to say that I work for Heritage web.
I can tell you that this is one of the not so many companies that I actually enjoy working for. Yes it does have some elements of stress but that's what makes you grow as a designer. If you can't produce quality work in a certain amount of time, then you are not going to make it in this industry. I agree that over the year that I have been working there, I saw several designers come and go, but the people who stay there have a fantastic talent. It is a little bit difficult to have a long distance relationship with a client. Sometimes it takes one or two tries to get a better understanding of what clients want. And sometimes it takes a while for clients to let us do what we do best.
I will be first to admit to a client my limitations. I will not recommend them any extra services if it does not directly benefit them. Sometimes I give my clients something extra for free, just to make there site more user friendly.
But after the site is done, it is 100% the clients responsibility to market the site and generate traffic.
Richard
Palm Bay,Florida,
U.S.A.
Ex-employee speaks out about Heritage web solutions
#5UPDATE Employee
Wed, March 28, 2007
Author : Alisa (E-mail : ----
URL : ---
Whois : ----
Comment:
I worked at Heritage Web as well. Like you said, the owners and many of the employees are VERY nice people. But it was one of the most stressful jobs I could have ever had. Most professional graphic designers only need to get approximately 2 designs done per week... but at Heritage we were pushed to get 4 designs out each day. They told us to spend no more than 30 minutes on the initial design. This was a very difficult thing for me to get used to - as I'm picky about the quality of graphics I make - and you just can't crank out a beautiful website in 30 minutes.
They can't keep employees because of the huge amount of stress involved in this job. They need to 1) hire a group of people to be solely
responsible for customer service calls (don't make the graphic/web designers answer random phone calls all day while trying to get 4 designs completed) - and create more of a professional environment with PROFESSIONAL
expectations (2 designs/week would make more sense) rather than having that sort of sweatshop feel. This is only increased by the fact that
they don't require that you know HTML or Photoshop very well (or at all) when hiring you (which might be because of employees quitting all the time.)
Anyway, I've blabbed far too long. I really respect a lot of the people who work there, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done before I can see myself working there again
Richard
Palm Bay,Florida,
U.S.A.
Heritage Web solutions lies
#5REBUTTAL Individual responds
Mon, October 09, 2006
In responce to the Employee who claims he is not ashamed to say he works for this company I say, how much did they pay you to write this pack of lies. What do you have to say about the numerous complaints the this company tooks five to six months to complete their site,or the many who claim the site never got done and they did not get a refund. How about those who wre charged for hosting month after month with no site on line.
Look at rip-off reports.com and other sites and the more than 65 complaints with the BBB. Not to mention all the sloppy work that is done. 3 minutes to respond to tech suport problems how about 3 day to never, and complaints never get attended to. you ratio of sales people to techs is 5 to 1. Either your new, stupid, or part of this companies scam.I speak from experience, my family was ripped off and threatened by this company.
sorry, allowing you to give a competitors name would instigate others to just file against their competition, to only come back later to suggest their company your comments on this policy are welcome! CLICK here to see why Rip-off Report, as a matter of policy, deleted either a phone number, link or e-mail address from this Report.
Frederico
Orem,Utah,
U.S.A.
An employee responds
#5UPDATE Employee
Thu, October 05, 2006
I am not ashamed to say that I work for heritage web. I am not in sales or in management. I would like to set the record straight.
YOU CAN:
Edit your website. We provide a tools that simplify this, OR you can access the HTML and make any changes you like.
Add hyperlinks to any text or image with out any ill -effects
Optimize your website. Again you can edit the HTML or use our web tool. We build custome websites, that means we put the content you asked for on it. if it is not optimized for websearching its because you asked for it that way. Some people think that just because we build the website we should be responsible for bringing traffic to it. That is absolutely wrong. You must market your own site.
it is very clear that with the base package you get 4 hours of revisions per year. (in reality we dont even track update time unless a customer is continually asking for updates) Dont act appauled at the $60 an hour for revisions, that is well below the market average.
Tech support has an average wait time of less than 3 minutes. And they can show you how to edit your website, optimize, send email, manage stores, chats, blogs, forums, gallaries, and many other simple tasks.
People who seem to have problems with heritage web are people that are extremely computer challenged. We can instruct even the most computer challenged person how to edit their website if they have half a brain.
Sometimes the websites take longer than they should, but the cause..... customers not sending in the content for the website. We will not write your website for you, you have to have an idea of what you want written on the site, what colors you want, you know the basic information.
I would not say were perfect, but we are honest and we do our best. we earger to help anyone to help anyone willling and able to learn.
Our biggest fault is that we are in a college town, so we have seasons of turnover wich can cause a bump in the road, but nothing too serious.