We hired Union Street Media to create a website in 2010. We were a start-up service based business…read morewith limited capital - initially we spent about $20,000. As a service based company we explained our needs and were told that our needs would be met. Aesthetically, USM did a good job, however the back end of the site was very difficult to manage, the site was extremely slow, incompatible with certain browsers, and full of glitches. We were paying $250 a/mo for hosting and support. To say the least, it just wasn't meeting our expectations.
Over the course of the next two frustrating years, we spent in excess of $10,000 struggling to make our website, and relationship with USM work. Union Street Media finally proposed to convert our site to Wordpress to solve the issues they couldn't fix. This courtesy was offered to us for free. We were told the conversion would take a couple of months - we went over the full scope of work with their team and everyone signed off on what needed to be done. A contract was signed to this effect. 8-10 months later and we were still waiting for the conversion to be completed. Finally, they sent us a mock site to review. Not only did it not solve the issues we were having, it had LESS functionality than our current website. Meanwhile, they were consistently pushing us to sign off on the new website and send it live.
We sent an email to the owner of Union Street Media, Ted, expressing our frustration. He called back telling us that this whole project was taking too long and we would have to start paying Union Street Media to complete it. Not only the that, Ted explained that all of their sites were moving to Wordpress and they would no longer be able to service our website if it wasn't transitioned to wordpress within a reasonable time. In short, if we did not pay them to continue the conversion THAT THEY PROPOSED, our site would be shut down. It was hard to believe that someone would intentionally put us in such a position in order to extort additional money. After several more conversations with Ted we realized he was uncompromising and we decided to terminate our relationship with USM, and ultimately terminate our business.
Towards the end of this, just as an exploratory measure, we decided to try to build a new site ourselves, using Wordpress. With no prior coding experience whatsoever, we were able to have a working mock site up in less than two weeks. Ted told us it took them over 300 hours to convert our site.
Six months later, after our business is folded and we've moved on, my business partner gets a call from a collection agency telling him we owe Union Street Media $1500 - FYI it costs $3,000 for USM to make our site interactive for cell phones, ipads etc - we paid half of that and refused to pay the rest when we saw that Ted was extorting money to complete our conversion.
I couldn't believe it.
This is my first negative review here on Yelp and my submission to BBB will also be a first. I believe yelp and similar sites are meant to help expose these sorts of unethical business acts.
On behalf of most of the USM staff we dealt with, I can say they were always pleasant to talk to and their support team was was always responsive. I think most of our initial problems stemmed from USM taking on a project they weren't capable of handling. While I am sure they are successful real estate website developers, I can't say they impressed me with our website.
