End Product (Website): 4 out of 5 Stars
Communication and Customer Service: Began at 5 out of 5 Stars, but ended at 1 out of 5 Stars. A detailed explanation is below.
The key factor for my 4 out of 5 rating of the website: after several rounds of revisions, when I kept finding errors and inconsistencies, I was told the resolutions were "not in the budget." I understand that endless rounds of revisions aren't possible, but the problem for me is twofold: 1) these are the types of errors I hired a professional to not have to worry about myself, let alone be told about some sort of limited budget to address; and 2) the guidelines for the revision process weren't established and clearly articulated. I did my best to batch my changes together to be respectful of the developer's time, but I believe I fell into a process gap and experienced an incomplete service in the end. What I didn’t know (and was never communicated to me in clear, concrete, quantified terms) was that extra time being used for revisions was being taken from other agreed-upon features of the website. For instance, the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn links at the top-right of my webpage don't go anywhere. After digging further, the "Scope of Web Development" document (i.e., contract) states that Appture will "setup client accounts" (19 are listed, including the ones associated with those dead webpage links) "for automatic posting." Many of these accounts were never created. So what I now understand is that the time and money associated with creating those were partitioned instead to revisions on the website itself. I was never given a detailed accounting of the referenced budget to let me know that I was running out of this budget, so I never knew where I stood on this basis.
This leads into the second aspect of my rating: communication and customer service was 5 out of 5 in the beginning, but dwindled down to 1 out of 5 at the end. In addition to the communication issues I already mentioned, I have asked more than 10 times what the specific date range is for my 12-month webhosting, and how to go about transitioning to other webhosting service at the end of this period. These 10+ instances have occurred over a span of more than 2 months, and have been via phone call, voicemail, text, and email. At this point, I still don’t have an answer to my questions. For this reason, I don’t see how I could rate the communication from Appture at this point as anything other than 1 out of 5 stars. The lack of communication also coincided with the above-mentioned “out of budget” comments, too. Once I reached the “out of budget” status, I was offered more development time at a cost. I declined because my budget was exhausted. After me declining, the communication from Appture was minimal, only occurring after repeated attempts on my part, and still missing the key information I was asking for: “What is the webhosting date range associated with the [fee] I was charged?” (verbatim from my repeated communication to Appture). To this day, I still don’t have this information.
