AUGUST ASH INC

I hired August Ash to redo my website and develop an online training program as part of it. They had never done an online training project like this before, and they were happy to take on my project and work with my budget. We first developed a model of the first lesson, then I gave them the remaining lessons. Soon after that they informed me that they had used up the budget for my project. That came as a shock to me, as we had not discussed how to avoid this. But they continued with the work as we agreed. We had the bulk of the work done at that point, and it was just a matter of plugging the remaining lessons into the model format. That s when the circus began. As I started getting completed lessons back to test, I noticed many errors, which I was okay with at first. However, the more lessons I got back, the more I noticed inconsistencies in format, headings, and other problems, and that they didn t always follow the model that we agreed on. I pointed this out and found out that different people were working on it now, and they had forgotten about the model. I started putting RR for Repeat Request in front of all my submitted changes that they missed or did incorrectly or that messed something else up in the system, so they didn t think that I was coming up with all new changes each time. I dreaded sending a list of changes because it took a ton of my time and energy to have to test, re-write up missed changes, and retest changes again and again. Later in the project review, like I suspected, the owner tried to blame me for the project taking so long supposedly because I kept submitting many new changes, instead of it being caused by their lack of experience and poor project management. The owner admitted that they had been sloppy in their work. I told him that if they had not been so sloppy, it wouldn t have caused them to run over budget so much. It should have taken at least two months less than it did. They told me that once my project was over budget, it was tossed around to different programmers who had free time, so what happened with my project wouldn t happen with their other clients. That did not make me feel respected as a client. I also noticed inaccurate charges on several bills, which they acknowledged and removed from my bills. Finally they turned the blame on me and said, We are continually faced with having to justify to you the most trivial aspects of the work you request of us. They suggested I find another website host, which I had been looking for anyway. Unfortunately, because of how they have highly customized my online training program, no one has said that they can support the online training portion of my website, without charging me a ton to figure it out and get the right software tools first. The individual employees I dealt with there were nice and professional, and overall they did a decent job on my website, but I will not recommend them to any one.