Tech trends

Beware the shark-filled waters of web development firms

Three years ago we wrote to be wary of tech-less tech firms. And today, we were again reminded how important this advice is.

One of our clients had recently contracted with a local web development firm to create a site for her. We often host sites for clients as courtesy and we agreed to do so this time as well.

Grumpy old man.
Get off my [digital] lawn!
We called the folks she’d hired and when we told them we have our own servers, without the typical “point and click” type interfaces you get with the major hosts (like GoDaddy, etc), there was silence on the other end. Sure enough, within an hour, they said they preferred to host it themselves (thereby incurring more charges for our client).

This might be sort of “get off my lawn”-ish, but our firm has been around 10 years & our head tech guy has been writing code for 20 years.  Look, we like new technology and love automation.  But at some point, SOMEONE has to know how a web server works.

We strongly recommend that before you hire anyone to build a website for you, ask them a simple question: DO YOU WRITE CODE?  If the answer is “uhhhh,” we humbly suggest you call someone else.   And if you ever want a sanity check, feel free to call/email us.  We are good at sniffing out the sharks. 🙂