We hired Guaranteed SEO to design a new website for our company.
They convinced us that WordPress was the way to go; that it would be the easiest website ever to update/change, even though we had no experience with WordPress and expressed weariness with regards to CMS.
The designs we signed off on were very general (when I tried to specify details, I was told that details would be worked on later). 8 weeks after signing the contract they took full payment, without having anything to show for it. Another two months after that they finally had a homepage ready, but the rest of the site was far from ready, and really quite a mess, with pages inserted into sections they had no business being in (when all they needed to do was follow the structure of our old website).
Granted, the homepage looked great: clean and modern. But what good is that if the rest of the site is not ready/does not work? Even after pointing out the problems, they were not corrected. Pages were shuffled around randomly, changes were made that only changed things, but did not correct them. Basically there was no attention to detail. We spent countless hours pointing out the problems (the same ones over and over again), but even when literally drawing them pictures (creating mockups in Photoshop) to point out problems, they were simply ignored. In the end it turned out that some things simply could not be done (because of WordPress limitations, supposedly), but rather than communicate this to us, they ignored the repeated e-mails asking for these things to be changed. Other things that could be changed, they simply ignored as well. Just like their attention to detail, their communication is atrocious.
When finally we demanded that we receive some money back for all the time and effort we had to put into it, and I spoke to Eric ("founding partner") on the phone, he screamed at me, called me a bully, and hurled some more insults my way. He claimed that they did far more than was agreed per the signed-off drawings, but could not come up with specific examples. He also said that I kept changing my mind, when all I was doing was to keep pointing out the same problems over and over again. They deviated substantially from the design that we signed off on, and from there I could do no right. If I tried to work with it, but asked for it to be modified to work for us, then that was not what we had agreed to. If I asked for it to be changed to what was in line with the design we signed off on, then I was changing my mind. Of course he also didn't care that I had tried to clarified details before signing of on very vague drawings (vague enough that I specifically made a note before signing that I was only signing off on the general design). On the flip side things that were specifically noted to be included, like a search function, they only installed a useless free plugin, and then demanded more money if we wanted something that actually worked. They did end up changing the search function to something usable at no cost, but not without a fight.
We ended up figuring out and making a lot of the changes ourselves (many in the code, despite this being supposed to be a CMS site where everything would be sooo easy to update/change), to finally get the site ready to launch, but even now we still have problems with it.
Most recently our contact forms did not work (we had the same problem before, when the new site was just launched; a Google search indicates that this is most likely a conflict between the free contact form they used and the custom theme. Guaranteed SEO blamed this on MailChimp changing their API, and told us that next time they would charge us for working on our site at the rate of $150/hr, since we did not sign up to their $1000/month SEO plan, which would include upkeep of the site, but upon contacting MailChimp they confirmed that their API had not changed...
To summarize: Guaranteed SEO came up with a great design, but working with them has been a nightmare. read more