Complaint Review: Paddington Web Design

Honestly my first report was going to be my last one. We just wanted to warn people about that horible company. But ever since the owner of the company contacted me personally not to apologize but to threaten to sue me for writing a negative report about him and his company I figured we would continue to set the record straight.

Paddington Media is an overzealous company that uses their own content manager software called media suite pro. That software is their pride. They claim that it can take you to the moon and back. But you see that software in order to work with it yo have to be a programer yourself. Its very difficult to use if you are a non tech person. Why are they using their own CMS I have no idea. Wordpress is a lot cleaner and better and its FREE. So this leads me to believe that they want to make money off their customers by building their site around a propretary software that no one can use but them. Very clever but VERY unethical.Paddington ripped us clean.

As a result we had to rebuild the entire website, using woed press. No one even the tech people I contacted could edit or do anything with it. Paddington Web Media spent more than 24 hoursediting the website that they built. By the way it takes an average of 24 hours or less to build a website from scratch.

Because the site they built was so poorly structured none of the 4 companies we contacted to maintain the site could help us. They said that the structure was too complicated and would cost too much to maintain.

You see awebsitehas to be built with a certain structure,just like a house. First you build the foundation then you proceed. The wayPaddington Web Media built our site they had put the roof first and the foundation on top of thehouse.

These guys really have no idea what they are doing. However I have to thank them, their ignoranceforced me to learn how websites are built. I even took a website 101 class. But most importantly because of Paddington Iknow how to separatebad webdesignersfrom good webdesigenrs.

Webuilt a new siteand we are happy with our new web guy. We are not seeking money. Thisnew writingis purely informational.

I would highlyNOT recommend those guys.

Paddington Media would like to respond to the accusations in this report and clarify inaccurate statements made by Stephane.

We were hired to build this site using a template provided in September of 2007, which was done.  Several times, Paddington Media's CEO warned Stephane that using an unreputable hosting company could possibly result in the site being brought down by hackers/viruses. Depsite these warnings, Stephane chose not to go with the reputable host that Paddington uses for it's clients and instead used a cut-rate host to save money.

In December of 2009, we were contacted by Stephane because, as we had warned, the site was hacked and could not be used. His hosting company was not able to provide a copy of the site, which is usually standard practice for reputable hosts.  Upon reveiew, we realized that we did not have the most up-to-date copy of Stephane's site in our files.  Upon this realization, we immediately informed Stephane of this, apologized for our oversight, and offered to rebuild the site for free, only charging Stephane for the couple of hours it took to remove the hacks.  This work was completed within a few weeks.

In addition to rebuilding the website, we added our content management system, also for free, in order to allow Stephane to update his own site and to also have the ability to update his keywords, which would help his SEO status.  We updated all of his keywords, tags and descriptions as well as his site map, while explaining to him that in order for his SEO to increase, he must update these items frequently using the content managment system.  Paddington Media moved Stephane's site to our hosting account with a reputable company, and paid for the hosting ourselves; we continue to pay this bill each month, most recently on December 1, 2010.  Since moving to our hosting account, his site has been free of viruses/hacks.

At no point were we hired to work on SEO for this website.  Paddington did, however, spend hours upon hours on the phone with Stephane, explaining SEO to him and how he could use his content management system to boost his status. 

After completing our work, Stephane informed Paddington Media that he could not pay the $500 invoice that we sent him (for fixing the hacked code; all othe work we completed was done free of charge and spelled out clearly in the invoice).  Paddington worked with Stephane to come up with a payment plan over the next several months, which Stephane agreed to.

Months after completing the work, Stephane inquired regarding his SEO status.  Paddington looked at his rankings and sent the numbers to him, also explaining again what he could be doing to boost his status and explaining and offering our SEO services. 

Stephane then replied to tell us that, despite not having any money to pay our $500 invoice, he had given a California SEO company $3,000 to work on his SEO.  We researched the company that Stephane used for SEO, and upon discovering the multitudes of unhappy customers of the particular SEO company, we informed him that he should file a complaint against the company for all of the money he had given to them to boost his rankings, which they did not do.  We also offered, once again, an SEO contract with Paddington, which Stephane declined.

Despite declining to enter into an SEO contract with Paddington Media, Stephane sent numerous emails and called several times to talk to us about SEO, Google AdWords, etc.  Several staff members at Paddington Media spent time talking with Stephane and explaining, once again, how SEO works and what he could do to improve the SEO for his website as well as training him in how to use our content managment system to help boost his status on his own.  We also reminded him that if he had problems with his SEO rankings, he should take it up with the company that he paid $3,000 to boost his SEO status. Paddington Media gave hours of free tutorials on SEO ranking, all of which should have been done by the California company that was hired by Stephane.

Even after filing this report on October 19th, Stephane was continuing to correspond with Paddington Media as recently as late October/early November 2010 regarding engaing our services to assist with his SEO rankings. 

Paddington Media is proud of the high quality programming services that we have provided to our clients for 7 years and we strive to make sure each client is more than satisfied with our work.  We continually go above and beyond for our clients and proud of our long list of satisfied customers.

Paddington Media is more than willing to discuss any of this, answer any questions and provide references.  Please call us at 512.494.888 or email info@paddingtonmedia.com.

All statements made above are accurate and written evidence is available upon request.