Complaint Review: Interative Villages - Kingston Washington

Interactive Villages was also paid for a second module that was NEVER delivered; I was told constantly it is because their workload was too heavy, even though they were PAID IN FULL MONTHS PRIOR and mentioned nothing about their inability to deliver at the time.

I also paid for other modules that Interactive Villages did deliver and they were so full of bugs they were useless. These mods actually went LIVE on my site like that and remained that way causing loss of business and reputation in my niche market despite weeks and months of begging them to address the problems with it.

Despite the extended waiting period, which was almost a year in total, I continued to try to be supportive, patient and encouraging because I was petrified Id never get what I paid for, well, I didnt.

I paid for items I was told specifically, in writing, would be a solution to certain problems. After paying them, they then decide to give me the real truth which did NOT satisfy my needs at all and only lead to further problems or more expense.

I paid Interactive Villages to have my artwork implemented into the design of my site, I asked SPECIFICALLY to implement the design to expand and work with the content which is something I think should be a no brainer for someone who is supposedly an expert at what they do.

This request was totally ignored by Interactive Villages. My designed was chopped and fudged in with no consideration for expandable areas such as category columns, ad columns or content area sections. I gave them all graphics in PSD and PNG format there is no excuse why he could not have properly implemented my design or at least discuss issues to give me options or a chance to revise certain elements.

I think their biggest issue is that they can't say "I can't do this".  Instead, they lie to you and say "sure no problem" take your money and then gradually drop the bomb on you.

There was content that ran clear right off the background, overlapping ads and categories, chopped non-seamless background areas etc and instead of working with me to fix this, Interactive Villages did not attempt once to address this before it was implemented and acted like I was wrong for asking them to fix the errors, not to mention wanting to charge me even more to fix it!

Instead, Interactive Villages kept sending me bills to fix work that was not done properly in the first place.  I was accused several times for causing errors, being told I made changes with no regard to their work when I never even touched their mods or coding.

Bob Melecki was very rude on several occasions and disrespectful to me as a client.  He accused me of errors they made on their end before even researching what happened. 

After months and months of promises from IVillages that never happened and after begging them to please put some time into my project that I already paid for, they never did. The whole time I watched my site fall apart before my very eyes while complaints constantly rolled in from end users complaining about all the bugs in their mods and the design Interactive Villages took my money and never looked back.

They told me multiple times it was basically my job to constantly ask for updates to encourage time spent on my project. I thought the encouragement would have been the money I paid up front and the contract we had to have this work completed in the first place!

I was forced to literally SCRAP my entire investment with Interactive Villages and start over fresh.

There were over 240 html errors and 100 warnings on the front page alone. It was so bad MAC users could not even use my site. When I questioned Interactive Villages about why my Safari web browser traffic was reporting problems he basically blamed it on code from the core application and said that it would cost me extra to get the site compatible, even though the site has display problems in IE and Firefox as well.

Interactive Villages didnt even get my site 100% with one browser let alone Safari or any other.

Their other excuse was that not enough people use Safari so they dont consider it important enough to make sure those browser visitors could use my site. So I basically was told in an email that I was not going to get business from MAC users and that was that.

After paying Interactive Villages handsomely to implement my design, which is MY ORIGINAL WORK despite what his portfolio seems to claim, I was told in order to get my categories and other content to work with the design, I'd  have to do an overhaul which of course he planned to charge me for.

When I had my site re-evaluated I was told that Id be lucky if I were not thrown out of Google for the way they had my RSS feeds setup. It is sad that they dont take any time at all to help their customers know what they are doing.

Interactive Villages kept me in the darkness knowing I was not familiar with these issues at the time at all and I would never suggest going with them! They pray on ignorance, they dont educate their clients at all and they do not take care to be sure their work has value to it.