Read all the 1 star reviews of this business. They are accurate.
While I'm sure this company has made websites for people who are happy with them, do not engage this company on any sort of serious business endeavor.
I am currently in the process of cleaning up the unbelievably expensive mess they left behind at one of my clients websites. They completely gouged this client for upwards of $20,000 dollars for a website that is completely generic, and now that I've accessed it, a jumbled mess.
I will state this, as I believe it contributed to the poor execution and exorbitant price. Unfortunately, the person managing the build of this website at the client company (the CRO who has since been relieved of his position) was friends with Nick and AdLava and has worked with them before, so I'm assuming this is why the price was so incredibly high without any internal questioning, and the project miss managed. But I also don't doubt that Ad Lava took advantage of my clients lack of experience/knowledge about website value and the budget they had. They figured they could get away with it. And unfortunately they did.
I sat in on one meeting (the first one), and everyone working there is all very nice, and they are great at talking the talk. Spit-balling about how to incorporate the company message, referencing very cool successful websites for inspiration, and that they only custom build and code everything, no plugins or generic themes yada yada yada. Then comes the execution...
The amount of money they are charging for the work they are doing is despicable. Unfortunately I was only present for the first meeting and then came back after the full build was done and paid for. The build requested was a basic, static, company website with about 10 pages. The website delivered was built on Wordpress as requested. But rather than a custom built theme, the build was completely minimal. There is absolutely no functionality, and there is no ability to manage or change the website internally (clearly they wanted this company to keep coming back to pay outrageous prices to make simple changes to the website). The website might as well be on the basic twenty-seventeen theme from Wordpress. You would have more control over the website, and could achieve the same aesthetic that was executed (and incredibly basic content bar/parallax style build...like a million free themes). The cost of doing that, is around $34 for the hosting and free Wordpress install and theme. Then you just need to have someone add content and make minor CSS changes. That shouldn't cost more than a few thousand dollars, maybe ten if it's a lot of content.
They even disabled the regular Wordpress menu functionality. And the extent of the theme options allows you to change a few logos throughout the site.
Upon further research I found that this "theme" they created, isn't even unique. While it is awful, and anyone with theme creating experience could whip it up in a day, they didn't even create it unique for this client. It is currently deployed on 4 live websites...
So they are recycling despicably simple themes, executing extremely generic html & CSS changes to them, loading in a clients content and charging them $20,000 dollars. No basic company website should cost that much in this day. At that price tag, there should be custom animations, modules and functionality, SOMETHING. Where is the value? Completely nuts.
Oh, and they also were charging a monthly hosting fee of over $300 dollars...turns out they were simply hosting in on WP Engines basic hosting package, a cost of $34 monthly...
And I won't even get started too much on the actual design/build out. There are numerous broken links, images with incredibly poor white background cut outs, and they also "developed" a "custom plugin"...that turned out to be a free wordpress plugin that they simply installed and set up.
It's a shame, and I'm taking the time to write this review because I think it is awful what AdLava did. It isn't even my money or my website, I simply watched from the side as it unfolded to my client, and I can't help but say something.
Be warned. read more