Held our website for ransom when it couldn't be completed with UI on CRAFT CMS
The company's owner responded to our RFP in 2020 and since one of his developers worked on our old website, we trusted that Addrenaline Media (with two Ds) from Toronto would be a reputable company to work with. He also accepted the job to design a beautiful website that's optimized and can generate leads for us on CRAFT CMS (not WordPress). At the beginning, it was promising since the owner seemed nice to work with and he had verbally promised a project manager, which was never provided; but we quickly realized his promise of "great design" was not so great since his concepts were very outdated and feedback from people at our company was not so great. Our marketing team had to do a lot of work researching and providing the design concepts.
He also did not provide a wireframe when asked b/c he said he and his team create the designs and changes right on the .dev site and that it would not be any trouble coding on the go.
The project started going sideways when he missed the original deadline by 3 months and we started to realize there were some issues not with just the design, but he tried to launch the website without a UI after being pressured to launch the website 4 months late.
Out of good faith and wanting to get the website launched (now 4 months late), we paid for 2/3 of the cost, yet we were blindsided that the UI was never coded on CRAFT CMS yet.
It turns out that the developer who was supposed to work on our project only downloaded CRAFT CMS onto their development site and only had experience on Joomla and had declined working on our project. We were told earlier on during the project that the developer we knew would be working on our site.
The Owner held our website for ransom: Pay in full or they would not release the website, even though the website was not completed, nor was the UI.
We paid in full with promises of the website to be delivered within a couple of weeks. The website was finally released to us, but we still had so much work outstanding: form fills missing, poor design with text on white pages only, device optimization lacking, training on CRAFT not provided, speed optimization not completed, etc.. Also, there was lack of QA and training. We were also told that since we chose CRAFT CMS instead of WordPress, as marketers, we needed to know coding in order to add content to the website, which we knew was untrue since CRAFT CMS' UI is one of the best experiences for Marketers.
It took us weeks to find a new Agency to complete the failed work. Multiple Agencies who reviewed the codes provided feedback that the codes were "garbage" and some refused to fix the codes; they wanted to redo the project from scratch.
We wanted to support a local small business, but was extremely disappointed with the experience and outcome. It took us another 2 months to fix his codes and get the UI completed before we launched.