Have you seen those commercials where companies advertise that they will build your website for free? You may be wondering, why some companies will charge you a fee and some claim they don’t charge anything… Well, I was wondering that myself. I decided to reach out to few of those companies in Tampa Bay area. For the purposes of this article I will not share any names, but if you are curious check it out yourself.
So the main promise I heard from one of the companies: “With this package we will build you a professional, fully optimized web-site and Facebook business profile and set up your online marketing campaign absolutely free!” Ok, sounds great, right? But wait… So I asked – “what is the catch”. The response was – “there is no catch!”. You just have to pay “small monthly fee”. The fee they quoted me was over $300. They also told me: “You do not pay anything until 7 business days from now when everything goes live!”. So in reality you pay over $300 each month for your website. I would not exactly call it “free”.
Here is the thing that got me upset thought. So they promise you there is no contract. But what if you decide to leave that company and want somebody else to manage your website? You have to pay another “small” fee – which they are not able to quote you upfront because like the lady told me: “The fee depends on how large a website we build and how long you’ve had the service for.” So you either loose the website, ranking and everything you have been working for or you have to pay unknown fee and rebuild the website yourself, or pay somebody else to do it. The problem I had with that is, that they don’t really tell you that. I had to ask about it twice, before I got a response.
So how does the “free website” sound now?
Please let me know if you have had any similar experience you would like to share. We can all learn from each other.
