Daisy May,

I almost swallowed my gum when I saw how much you are paying for your "rebuild-overhaul". Unfortunately, value is subjective, so written project specifications might be the only thing you have to fall back on. You said you were quoted £5,600 + VAT which converts to $10,634 USD (+ tax).

Looking at your site (quickly), I find that in some places they simply copied and pasted the exact html source code that you had on your original site. The home page is one such place. It looks like your original site was constructed with a Microsoft product like Word (is this correct?). Word is not known for producing quality html, and these shortcomings have been reproduced in your new site.

When they did bother writing their own html, they seem to do an 'okay' job. Nothing fancy, but it is clean.

Not to disagree with an earlier post, but while some stylesheets (CSS) have been used to specify the look of your site, (which I do agree, is an improvement in design approach), the use of font tags and similar display tags have also been preserved with the copy and paste approach that these "designers" took.

As far as general (subjective) impressions go, I feel they improved the look...some, but not enough to warrant what they are charging for this change. The changes they made are "lipstick and rouge" to what you already had. The layout of the pages content, where all of the links are in three columns, forces the width of the page to exceed over ~80% of the monitor settings in use today (the page layout is too wide for the majority of visitors to your site), I forget the exact monitor-settings statistics I read recently. I recommend limiting page width to under 1024 pixels.

I feel it is an improvement that they added a 'Featured Products' box with photos, to your home page. The general effect of the makeover is one of improvement (the site does look better). I might have narrowed the pages and left-aligned much of the written copy, but that's my opinion.

As I mentioned earlier, I do not know about OSCommerce. In theory, packaged software is often a better choice than home-rolled (custom) software, because the developers and community of users of the packaged software can devote more time to features and stability than can a small team--just for one site. The bottom line is, does it do what you need it to, does it have the features YOU need... otherwise you could debate forever which package or approach is better.

Finally, I feel you were quoted a price for them to develop custom software for you. No other reasoning could explain why you paid so much. I would guess they tried to write it and got bogged-down or discouraged and changed over to packaged instead (they should have started with it). This is not, in my opinion, a problem as far as functionality--but it is a huge problem that you paid for something you didn't get. Since you did not get what was agreed on (and it seems unlikely they can even produce what they said), I feel you have real leverage to get a huge portion of your money back, if you were to fight this.

In all types of project design, it is a process of continuous refinements. You could ask for changes to what they've already done. However, this may be a bad tactic for you to take, because it implicitly states that you feel the basis of what they've done is worth what you paid (what they charged) and I feel it is not. You would do better getting your money back (broken contract on their end) and starting over--a wiser person. Once again, just my opinion.



Good luck again,


Kevin