This is a sponsored article/review
I am writing this review as a client for SEO Semantic XHTML. I recently hired them for PSD to HTML conversion projects I had. After the completion of the project I was asked to provide a review for them. So, in appreciation of professional and quality work they provided, I agreed to share my experience during the project cycle.
Let me first thank them for the superior work they provided at a reasonable rate ($89 for homepage and $44 for every inner page). Last month, due to holiday seasons, seems like every single person wants to have this site built. Lots of night outs and pizza for dinner was becoming a norm. So I decided to take a chance and outsource some of PSD to HTML work.
With hundreds of conversion companies, it turned out a real challenge to find the right one. So I went through the profiles of 20-30 more visible companies’ profiles and evaluated them based on their availability, clientele, available packages and turnaround time. Based on these requirements, I gave SEO Semantic XHTML a chance. I asked them to convert a home page for me. I must say I was impressed with SEO Semantic XHTML work. They delivered the home page within 6 hours and were always available by chat and toll free number. Code was pixel perfect and worked like a charm on all browsers (including IE6).
I am really happy that I decided to use them. Based on their earlier performance, I have tasked them to convert 2 more home pages and 15 inner pages.
In conclusion, I must say that they are very professional, talented and are one of the best in the business.
I had hired SEO Semantic XHTML twice in the past to work on the first page of my website. Both times they did an excellent job. I was pleased and had no reason to think they wouldn’t do as good a job on the rest of my website.
The third time I hired them, the coder did an extremely poor job. I will only give some examples.
First, it took them a month to do the job. They claimed my e-store’s (Big Commerce) servers were slow. When they were finished, I couldn’t open the website under BC’s temporary URL. The logo wouldn’t download in the browser. They claimed it was a cache problem so they emailed links to the web pages instead.
The first page was a disaster. I had asked them to remove the contact email and LinkedIn links. LinkedIn was still there and the margins between the two divs had changed. The second div was a slide show with a gray background. The div shifted to the edge of the white container and the images were off-centered.
The Shop pages divs were supposed to be white with the active tab highlighted in white as well. The active tab was not highlighted and the div was a grayish color. The fonts on the active tabs were supposed to be larger than the fonts on the inactive tab. They weren’t.
The coder reduced the size of my images and renamed them. The images were also not in the same order as per my submitted example.
I had wanted the terms of agreement and policies pages to be pop-ups. Big Commerce does not support the type of pages I wanted. Did someone from SEO-Semantic inform me of this? Nope. The coder simply placed these pages in the middle of a website page. It looked awful.
Dido for my product page. I did not know BC’s product page had to be set up in a certain way. Again SEO-Semantic said nothing.
I could go on, but you get the picture. I wanted a refund but they claim it was just a minor CSS problem. So I put together a pdf comparing what I submitted versus what I got back. They made some of the changes, but the margins on the web pages were still uneven and things were not properly aligned with the left margin. I also had to repeat three times that I wanted the shop divs to be the same height on every web page.
And I still could not open the entire website on BC’s temp URL. BC’s support staff said it was a problem with the coding. I asked SEO-Semantic to fix this because I needed to finish placing my products on the website.
SEO-Semantic told me to redirect the name server under my website name. Little did I know they were going to put my unfinished website online! I was furious. When I finally got the website down and opened on BC’s temporary URL, the footer div collapsed into a long dark gray box and some of the tab pages still did not work. I gave up. There was no way I was going to deal with that company again. Buyer beware.