Psychoactive Studios

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the founder of a Qigong online academy.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Psychoactive Studios, and what were your goals?

We hired them to design and develop an entirely new website and branding.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Their previous experience and enthusiasm.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Branding Webflow website design and development SEO migration

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

At least 5 different people worked with us. Developers, designers and hard to know what their other positions were.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Psychoactive Studios told me how great of a website they could build for me. They did a great job on design. They built a nice template and made big promises, charged a high price and failed to deliver many of the promises. First off, their product pages were all the same generic design. We had designed beautiful product pages on our old website and they said they would not redesign individual product pages or even migrate the actual design after we had begun developing the new site.

We were left stuck with all these generic product pages with the same bland look and feel. That was the first big disappointment, but then came much more. Even though they agreed to do the entire website including product page migration, they decided they "did not have time" to migrate the product pages because they "made a mistake in thinking the Wordpress pages could be exported automatically into a spreadsheet."

They broke the bad news and the agreement to me two days before the website was supposed to be completed by. In fact, the website had many missing items by the deadline which was already weeks overdue. They left me and my staff to do the migration of the product pages ourselves which was a huge slap in the face.

They had told us how they loved to create icons and then when it came time for the actual design of the website only 4 super basic ones were made and they said the reason for this was they did not think the site needed it, despite the fact that our product pages on our old website had tons of great ones made. There were many emails that we sent as we needed crucial information. They ignored many of our emails which was so frustrating.

Overall this was the most frustrating web development experience I have ever dealt with. I would not recommend this agency as they lack integrity, do not honor commitments, use leverage of payment as they ask that all payments be made upfront and then deliver and respond to you when it suits them. There is no clear leadership as you have sometimes 5 different staff members emailing you different things and they lay responsibility on those staff if something is amiss or not delivered on time.

The icing on the cake was that Webflow did not have a very basic thing we needed which was recurring payments. They claimed they told me this in the beginning, but there was zero evidence of this in any communication and it is also hard to believe because they designed our pages which had recurring payment options on many of them. We had to hire another developer to migrate the website from Webflow to another platform which cost a lot of money and time.

They left us with a website that still had many flaws and was far from ready, yet we still had to pay all the money for a complete website. In short, I absolutely do not recommend this agency to anyone and would never give them another dollar of mine. If you do end up working with them, record every conversation as they will say things and then claim not to remember or that it was a misunderstanding on your part. Do not pay them upfront except a small partial deposit and do not pay any more until the site is totally complete. Better yet, save yourself the headache and find another agency.

They do not respond to many emails so you must track what they do not respond to They do not follow what you request even if they agree verbally-everything must be in writing and must be in a contract as they will not honor anything else Do not pay before the website is complete They do not respect timelines or deadlines, they work at their own pace regardless of the agreement They cannot accept any criticisms and will ignore you for days if you give any They will shirk responsibility They will try to charge you for any little extra thing and even things they originally agreed to do

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Their project management seemed very good at first, but then unwound and I saw how flawed their project management actually was. They used email primarily to communicate and also video calls.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their design capability.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Communication Respecting agreements and deadlines Completing work