Don't do this and don’t put up with it!
I came across a school website in Chippenham yesterday that had been designed and built by a company advertising themselves as a web design agency in Wiltshire who delivers creative effective web design for clients in Salisbury, Wiltshire and Hampshire. This school website was being used by the teachers, parents and pupils and had many errors in it and some areas didn’t work at all. But the school is just putting up with it because it cost them thousands of pounds. ArrgghH!
If you have a website that doesn’t work as you need it to, or throws up errors - Don’t put up with it. Go back to that web design agency and get them to fix it. Assuming it’s been built within the last 12 months, it should be fixed for free by your website developers.
We would never dream of handing over a new website to a client without rigorous testing first and to hand over a website that doesn’t work! Well, the so-called ‘web design agency in Wiltshire’ should be ashamed of themselves.
It pains me to see new websites that have been created by other website developers that are riddled with errors. Perhaps they don’t get fixed by these ‘web design agencies’ because they lack coding knowledge and experience? Perhaps they flashed a smile at the client and promised the earth but when it came down to it just lacked the necessary skills to create a website of their own that actually worked. And sadly, seemingly, have no pride in their work and no respect for customers so errors get left as they don't know how to fix them because it's not their code.
Not surprisingly the website in question - with all the errors - was a WordPress website. This website horror story is not new - it happens on a daily basis (thankfully not with aprompt I'd like to say) but I’m not sure why it would have cost the school thousands of pounds because WordPress is free! WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are thousands of people all over the world that write 'plug-in' code for it (unchecked and therefore requiring constant patches). Even the designs are free or at the very least under £100! I know one of their pupils and he could have done a better job.
Don't use WordPress for Business Websites
Professional website design agencies who know how to code a website properly shouldn’t be using WordPress as their template for their customer’s business websites. And if they insist on using WordPress they should at least know how to fix all the bugs that will eventually crawl into that WordPress website.
The moral of this website horror story is:
When employing a web design agency, ask them if they code their own websites or do they instead use WordPress/Drupal/Magento/Shopify/Joomla, etc or at the very least know how to code, without relying on OpenSource software. Also (and really importantly) ask them if any bugs found will be fixed free of charge in the first year, without quibble.
But to put your mind at rest, so you don't get nightmares, there are good website design agencies out here (like aprompt for instance) that do know how to code, don’t rely on OpenSource templates like WordPress to get them through and will deliver a fully-working, thoroughly tested website on budget and on time.
So if you want to get started, don’t put up with your error-ridden website, call aprompt – we are professional website developers in Wiltshire.
Written by Kirsty Paget
