A Website designers blog|All website content copyright of Sims Designs

Running a blog appears to be quite a time-consuming job…

As well as having to find the time to make posts to it, you also need to have something to say every now and then! I guess if you are Carry Bradshaw (Sex and the City), then the words would flow out freely every day, but I “couldn’t help thinking”…What do I write about?

Well I have come to the conclusion that it’s time for a bit of self promotion, with a view to getting some feedback from ‘you’ about some of the recent projects we  have been working on.

In recent time our design outlook has shifted to more of a web 2.0 look & feel for our client sites and we have had some very good feedback on our recent designs. With the added value we try to give all clients, such as free domain names and web hosting, our newsletter signup discount and great web design prices, we hope we are serving small businesses and individuals to the best of our abilities.

Our latest website designs

The following is a quick list of some recent website launches for clients. Please feel free to leave your comments to this blog entry.

Motorater - This is a cool new car rating website
Liscombe Park - A redesign for an equestrian centre in the UK
Devon Holiday Home - A startup website design for a holiday home
Second Skin Surf - A redesign of a UK Surf shop site
Electrical Recruit - A recruitment website for the electrical industry
BV Recruitment - A new design for a recently established recruitment agency
Nurserywork - Another recruitements website, this one is for childcare jobs
Natural Origin - Skincare products as nature intended
French Villa Holidays - From Yourcotedazour, seo work in progress
Will Registry Direct - Register the location of your will with this website
Forces Supplements - An ecommerce website for body building supplements
Last Minute Tee Times - Book a golf tee off time online
Memory Foam Mattress - Buy a foam memory mattress online
Memory Mattress 2GO - Affordable memory foam mattresses and pillows
Natural Organice Skin Care - from Mollycoddles

So, what is it all about then? You are happily plodding along using your favourite website, thinking how fab it is and why no one else is using it…And then you have a problem.

Whatever that problem is, have you noticed how many websites don’t have usable contact details on them..? As the owner of a web design business, we always ensure that the site owners contact details are listed on their site, granted like ourselves due to meetings, other phone calls and the odd crisis, you may not always be available to take your clients phone call, or return their email, but you do reply to any such enquiries as a matter if course.

However, what happens if you really DO need to contact the owner of a website, or at the very least a team member of that site….and despite your best efforts you can’t. This post was inspired by an advert on the gumtree.com website, or to be accurate I should say adverts. These adverts requested that the reader email a Gmail account for more details about a job opening that was available. The reply respondents received was as automated reply, in which our own web design company was cited, as well as a link to a fake website, with the intention of fraudently obtaining users credit card details…

Suffice to say, we wanted to contact Gumtree to put an end to these adverts appearing on their website, but low and behold the only way you can contact them was by a random email address, which resulted in an automated reply, advising us that they take enquiries very seriously and that we can email them via their online contact form (I thought we had already done that?). We eventually sourced a phone number for an account manager at Gumtree from one of our many industry contacts, but if jolly old 118118 don’t have a number for them, what chance has anyone got of getting hold of someone?

Anyway, to cut a long story short it appears that the Gumtree site is full of scam artists and dodgy adverts. If you take a moment to read thier forum (I won’t give them the pleasure of a backlink by mentioning the url), you’ll see that it is full of complaints from disgruntled users. Being a member of the ebay family, surely they can’t be allowed to operate in this manner..But what can you do? Stop using the site for sure, but how does that help the next new user of the site? How does it help you get your money back from a scam advert you have just replied to? It doesn’t.

I hasten to add that we are not in the habit of lambasting websites, but the above observation does beg the question :

When websites go bad…What can you do?

The floor is open, all comments welcome.