Daisy May,

I'm not a web development professional, but for what it is worth I think your current web firm MAY have done a good job. First, I think your original site while obviously not done by a professional graphics designer is really well organized, easy to navigate, friendly, and all around very well done.

I think the cosmetic makeover was done well, keeping the character of your original site. It might not look much different, but as mentioned before just polishing off the original design can take hours and hours of work. Even more important is that it looks like your web firm followed best practice design rules for keeping content and presentation separate by using CSS. If you wanted to change the color scheme, fonts, or graphics it can be done very quickly and cheaply. I think in this regard your firm really did you a favour by making future changes a snap to implement.

It appears that you have also gained a lot of new shopping cart funtionality AND possibly a good database driven backend to make it easy for you to add a large amount of new items to your online store.

It's just my impression that you may be under estimating the value you have received in the new design. I also think your firm may have done you a favour by implementing shareware for the shopping cart and item catelogue functionality instead of writing it all from scratch. I do believe there is a lot of functionality that you cannot see right now that will save you a lot of time and money in the future as your site grows.

If you site was all programmed custom, if you wanted another firm to make changes for you they would charge you more to modify someone else's code that may be "spagetti code". Now, if you had to find some one new, you would look for someone with experience with what looks like a well known shareware package. They would know what they are getting into and could provide you a much more competetive quote.

IMHO.

Cheers,

James