I see it all too often — Site owners invest their money with the wrong person and suddenly the designer they hired disappears. They didn’t vanish into thin air, they quit. They stopped returning messages. There are not answering phone calls. Work on the site has ceased all together. Now you’re stuck.
It sucks! I hate it when people get ripped off. When your web designer disappeared on you, they took something from you: it’s not only money, it’s time, trust, and that excited feeling you had when you first started your website. Now you’re probably wondering what to do next (and if you have any recourse).
What to do if your designer quit.
It’s not the end of the world. You’ve just been taken for a ride and dumped in the middle of nowhere. Now what you do will define the future of your website.
The first thing that probably comes to mind is revenge: getting even (or better yet, getting your money back). I have good news and bad… You may be better off, and you’re (probably) not going to get your money back – at least not anytime soon.
You should move on as a lesson learned. Do it right this time!
I see some poor site owner go through this at least once a week. You are not alone! People get ripped off on web design for many reasons, the biggest being they chose poorly when deciding how to build their website. You need professionals for a professional site. Period.
You can try to sue.
I’m going to be honest with you: it is probably not worth the trouble to sue your designer and try to recover your losses. You can still try in small claims court, but it will be months before you’ve had your day in court. Chances are, if the designer took your money and ran, it wasn’t a lot of money to begin with (under $1,200).
This may be a lot of money to you (especially if you have to write it off as a loss), but in the world of web design, this is pretty much the lowest a professional will go to create a good site.
Why your designer quit working on your website.
As much as I hate a quitter, I do get why some people quit on their clients. It’s rude, unprofessional, and harmful to your business… but so are some clients.
I tend to believe it’s the designers fault more often than the people buying websites. There are many inexperienced designers out there proclaiming “professional web design” when they have no idea just how in over their heads they really are. Once you start asking for simple things that involve complex code, the designer gets stuck. They either spend a lot of time they can’t bill you for to try and figure it out… or they give up, leaving you with nothing but a half-asset website.
1. You weren’t sure what you wanted.
The other side of the story is difficult clients. You jumped into building your website head first, you want a $3,000 dollar website for less than $250, and every other day you call up your designer with a conversation that sounds like “I was thinking… what if -“. In other words, you’re wasting their time.
2. Your budget was low, your expectations were high.
Anyone that promises a great website for under $500 is lying to you. If you’re expecting a high ranking site with great graphics, content, and multimedia for less than $1,000 you’re lying to yourself. Great websites take time. You need professionals from different specialties to really make it the best. You can go cheap, you can get online for less than $500, but you should know what you’re getting into before you start.
3. Your designer couldn’t handle the work.
Web design is complicated. If you don’t know it by now, you will soon. Becoming good at creating websites that can actually be called good takes years. This isn’t even accounting for all of the programming and back-end things, this is just how to make a website look good, attract visitors, and convert. Years.
If your web designer has been doing this for less than 2 years, your site is probably going to be mediocre at best. 4 years gets you an above average site. It took me 6 years to finally be able to create without limits (I learned everything about the software that makes websites possible). 6 years to know what not to do, what works, and how it all comes together. That’s a long time!
Here in my 7th year, I decided to branch out on my own once again. I like working for myself. Companies don’t always care about quality – I do. I choose my own projects, my own hours, and never have to worry about cleaning up someone else’s mess (except when I do remakes or consulting, but that’s another matter).
It’s never good when your designer leaves without saying a word. Hopefully you still have access to your site and can re-use at least some of what you’ve already paid for… if not, don’t sweat it!
Give me a call or send a message to tell me what went wrong and I’ll try to help you fix it. Worst case scenario, we start from scratch and build it how it should have been made the first time around.
I like helping others succeed; making and promoting websites is how I do it. You won’t need another developer: I take care of all of it. Everything you need to create a great website, all at one source.
My job centers around user interaction design, increasing traffic to your site using SEO and select forms of digital marketing (highly targeted, very cost effective), and helping you increase conversions by monitoring your site traffic to obtain useful data about how well your site is doing.
Am I the cheapest? No, but I am affordable. Much more affordable than bloated companies or throwing money away on half-asseted design. Hire me and be done with it — create the site you really want.