Pixels Are Bad Mmmkay?
New Member
We were recently approached by an agent of hibu, formerly Yellowpages, and were sold an advertising package. We bought another listing in the phone book, as we had purchased one from Yellowbook the previous year. Then the guy pressured us into search engine optimization and web design services. Now, we've had our own website up for two years and I had spent countless days and hours to create a website that kinda sucks, but it's really not terrible, and with a little work it could be something decent. I'm not a web designer and have never claimed to be, but when you code something by hand from a template that's decent and some salesman comes in and tells you that his company can do much better, well you think "maybe we should give them a try because I'm not that great at all this here web design stuff". We mainly just figured we really need hits on the search engines and the mobile site they offered would be nice, too. Since I have no idea where to begin building a mobile site I thought maybe the web design package would be worthwhile at $800 for the year. Not only that, but the guy says "you can cancel if you don't like the looks of the site we build for you". It's really that simple...or is it?
I've been reading reviews of hibu by everyone from employees of the firm to business owners who purchased their 'quality' services. A majority of the reviews pertaining to many, if not all of their products and services are horrendous. When your company has 85% horrible reviews a guy like me tends to think "maybe there company is the one that needs help, not ours". Most of these stories also state that getting out of a contract with hibu is near impossible. Some people are even getting sued by hibu for failure to pay for these faulty services that they have been unable to cancel, as reaching hibu by phone also seems to be near impossible.
So yesterday we got our first sampling of our new website, not uploaded to our domain yet, of course. Frankly, it sucks. If possible, I will post a link to it tomorrow so you can all see how badly it sucks. Not to mention, half the stuff we asked if they could do, like leave our current portfolio page the way it is, they failed to do. It's a crappy website built from a crappy template and it looks like a 15 year old built it with Microsoft Publisher or some equally challenged software. The photos don't even match some of the products. One representative of hibu asked my business partner if a photo of some dimensional letters was a photo of a banner. Are you kidding me? I'm pretty much convinced that we should put a halt to this as soon as possible (today) and hopefully we didn't get scammed into paying for crap that we don't want, or that isn't up to par.
Has anyone else here had any experience with hibu and what is your opinion of them?
I will try to post a link to both our current site and the hibu sample site for comparison tomorrow so I can get some honest opinions on both and let you guys be the judge.
Thanks for letting me rant.
I've been reading reviews of hibu by everyone from employees of the firm to business owners who purchased their 'quality' services. A majority of the reviews pertaining to many, if not all of their products and services are horrendous. When your company has 85% horrible reviews a guy like me tends to think "maybe there company is the one that needs help, not ours". Most of these stories also state that getting out of a contract with hibu is near impossible. Some people are even getting sued by hibu for failure to pay for these faulty services that they have been unable to cancel, as reaching hibu by phone also seems to be near impossible.
So yesterday we got our first sampling of our new website, not uploaded to our domain yet, of course. Frankly, it sucks. If possible, I will post a link to it tomorrow so you can all see how badly it sucks. Not to mention, half the stuff we asked if they could do, like leave our current portfolio page the way it is, they failed to do. It's a crappy website built from a crappy template and it looks like a 15 year old built it with Microsoft Publisher or some equally challenged software. The photos don't even match some of the products. One representative of hibu asked my business partner if a photo of some dimensional letters was a photo of a banner. Are you kidding me? I'm pretty much convinced that we should put a halt to this as soon as possible (today) and hopefully we didn't get scammed into paying for crap that we don't want, or that isn't up to par.
Has anyone else here had any experience with hibu and what is your opinion of them?
I will try to post a link to both our current site and the hibu sample site for comparison tomorrow so I can get some honest opinions on both and let you guys be the judge.
Thanks for letting me rant.
