For prospective clients looking to either get a new website produced or to have an older one updated with a fresh design, finding a good web developer is difficult. What’s become more challenging is finding a real developer or development team that’s not one of these new, fangled fake web developers that we’ve seen cropping up on the internet these days.
Fake developers are a risk factor for people because when they take an upfront deposit, there’s a real risk of not getting your website or your money refunded either. Some of these fakers are good enough at what they do that they find ways around PayPal and Payoneer policies to avoid chargebacks and make off with the deposits from many clients before eventually being shut down. What should you look for?
A Website
A fake developer may still have a website. Likely they will have. However, they will have a portfolio that wasn’t created by them. Ask them to put you in touch with several of the clients listed in their portfolios. See how they react. Get the contact details for each site in their portfolio from Google, not from them. That way they cannot give you the number of their friend pretending to be them.
Call Them Up and Check Online Reputation
The website likely will have only a few points of contact. See if they’re reachable. Ask for proof of their ID, so if they do rip you off, you know who they are. Run them through Google with their company name or their name and “scam” after it to see if they’ve been reported anywhere.
Check Their Business Address
The address likely won’t be given out or it will track back on Google Maps to a place that doesn’t make sense. You can check the owners of the building and call to verify all the tenants of that building. See if they’re really a tenant or have just put their business address on their website to look legitimate.
Did they make the Portfolio?
Verify whether the company made the websites they claim in their portfolio. Search Google for a company’s name or web address and add “+portfolio” to find results from other web designers who have listed this site as part of their portfolio too.
It’s possible that another designer produced the previous version of the site – a duplication is possible – but not with the same web design for deep information check here for the right information about the right developers .
Almost No Visitors
Use AHRefs.com and SEMrush.com to look up the designer’s website to check what traffic they receive. While a web designer isn’t going to receive thousands of visitors if they’re small, they shouldn’t come up with close to zero or no data either.
Check Where They’re Actually Located
Quite often, foreign web design firms claim to be in the United States. They even using a VPN to hide their true location. They go so far as to have redirected VoIP US calling numbers out to their location.
By calling, you can see how long it takes to connect and whether there seems to have been a redirection of the call. Also, consider what accent they have and whether it matches the area they’re supposed to come from.