- Do your research before paying a web development company.
- Don’t put your email address on your website, use forms
- Make sure you have virus protection for your computer
- Don’t reply to suspecious emails EVER
- Block all the BS immediatly
Web Development Company Scams
When you check out a website design or development company, there are a few things you should definitely look at.
- The about us page. If they don’t tell you who they really are, chances are they are not real company. Links to verify the company owner or founder should include a Linkedin or Facebook reference. If they are hiding behind some fancy words, they are being misrepresentative to you.
- The Portfolio: Look up the companies they say they did the work for. See if the actual live website matches the image and see if they are referenced on the bottom of the website. Most professional webmasters and development companies will “tag” their company with a active link to their company. Look on the bottom of this page to see ours. We tag all our clients websites with UNIFIWEB.
- Check Reviews: This is a good idea for any business you want to do business with. Google Reviews are the best. It’s hard to remove bad ones. I like to see the poor reviews and see if the owner responded. Sometimes the response are the best part. Every business will have a customer who you can’t make 100% happy. How they deal with this is what’s important.
- GREAT DEALS: Be careful of great deals, they always come with a downside. The reality is that a custom website takes time. Yes there are people out here that will do it for minimum wage but they won’t be in business for long. We charge $95 per hour, have very low overhead and staying in business is still a struggle sometimes. You want someone that is good, fair and reliable, you won’t receive all this on the cheap.
Search Listing Services Scams
I don’t see these as much as I used to but I would get REAL mail that was in the format of a NOTICE or WARNING that my website listing was expired and I need to renew my search engine listing. Usually, for a hundred dollars sent, I could keep this valuable service. This is a HOAX, there is no such service by mail.
Also via email, I constantly get emails telling me that I could be getting much better ranking and they will offer a free trial or something. Sometimes these are real companies but many times they are just fishing or Phishing emails. Their intent is to just get your email address and sell it into a database so you will get tons more junk email. Don’t fall for this. I always look at the email address it’s sent from. A real company will not use a GMAIL email address for marketing materials. It would only look suspicious. A scammer doesn’t care. Also, look for typos and strange assemblies of words because that usually means it’s coming from someone in another country and the translator did a poor job of translating into American style english.
For all PINWILZ Customers, I tell them to forward anything suspicious and I will investigate and let them know if it is important or a scam.
Fake Hosting Invoices
When you run a business, it’s hard to keep track of all this technology stuff for your website and hosting. There are three things that you should be charged for:
- Domain Name (www.yourname.com)
- Hosting (Where your website is kept on a server)
- Special services like; Maintanance, updatines, SEO or Blogging (These are optional)
It is common for scammers to send you invoices that always look very important that request you pay to renew your service, usually hosting. The fee may not be much so some companies just turn it over to accounts payable and not think another thing about it.
For all PINWILZ Customers, I tell them to forward anything suspicious and I will investigate and let them know if it is important or a scam.
Pretend Guarantees for top placement in Search Engines
This is the most common scam email I get. I actually like to read these because they are somewhat entertaining but then I’m a little funny that way. I always think, if I’m so hard to find in search then how did you find me to send me this ridiculous email?????? There are thousands of people in other countries constantly trying everything under the sun to get American business. The one they are successful with is scamming companies over SEO. Read my blog posts about SEO and learn how it really works. There is absolutely NO special trick to it. There are no Cheap ways to succeed. These companies are only looking to take your money and leave you wondering what just happened. SEO takes work, time, technology and persistence. You won’t get that for $50.00, I’m sorry.