Our non-profit corporation hired Isadora to design a site for us about a year ago. A main feature of our site was to be an "e-commerce" module to accept online donations.
Early in the process we gave Isadora three things that we needed our donation page to accomplish:
1. The donor should be able to type in any donation amount
2. The donor should be able to CHECK A BOX to make the donation recur monthly or yearly
3. The donor should be able to select a cause to donate toward
Midway through the process - after we had already agreed on the original donation page mock-ups - Isadora called to say that donors would have to select an amount from a drop down menu. She explained that her team spent the better part of a week researching it and there just wasn't a way it could be done.
I explained that that wasn't acceptable to us - we didn't want to pigeon-hole donors into pre-set amounts.
A day later she came back and said, essentially, "good news, we found a way to do it".
A week later, she came back with another problem: Now they couldn't offer a check box to make the gift recurring. Recurring gifts would have to be hidden under a tabbed page.
I questioned her as respectfully as I could asking, "Is this really a technical impossibility or is this some limitation on your knowledge/experience?" Because to me, for a custom website (with the donation page alone being billed at $3,000) it didn't seem like we were asking too much. She assured me that it just wasn't technically possible. Reluctantly, I accepted this answer.
Later, we went on to discover that there was even more that she wasn't able to come through on: we discovered that the recurring gift amounts would have to be preset - the donor wouldn't be able to enter any amount. These changes felt unacceptable to us.
At this point, the site was a month delayed (because of the donation page difficulties Isadora was encountering) and we were desperate to have it go live. Before it went live, I asked a good friend of mine who is a web developer (the functional parts, not the pretty design) if he thought that what we wanted was REALLY so difficult. He said that he was pretty confident he could find a solution to accomplish our three requirements - but that he'd need at least a week before he could look into it.
Isadora was ready for her final payment.
I told her that I had a friend who was pretty confident that he could find a solution to the donation page issue. She assured me that we could push the site live as it was (and give her her final payment) - and if/when my friend came up with a solution, she'd be happy to fix it at no charge.
My friend was, indeed, able to find a software program (that was already in existence) that would accomplished exactly the three things we needed. He told me that it took him a Google search and about 20 minutes to find the solution.
At first, Isadora denied that his solution would even work. Then he sent her a YouTube video showing her how it actually would work. She emailed him back, agreeing that it was a "great solution" and that she would contact me.
She did contact me - saying that my friend's solution would work well... BUT, because it would be a lot of work to make the change, she would have to charge me for it. Despite numerous appeals, she never relented from that position. The only reason it was a lot of work was because she had taken an different approach from the outset - resulting in the existing limitations.
I was incredibly disappointed that Isadora was unable to create the donation page that we needed. I was even more disappointed that a solution was identified in 20 minutes by another web developer. But I was most disappointed that she wouldn't make it right for us.
For these reasons, I cannot recommend this business. read more