The "Agro America" Scam and why Inertial Zen Designs won’t be dealing with you if your communications are anything like this

One of the things Web Designers end up dealing with a lot of the time is scam and spam type situations. Inertial Zen Designs has on no less than 10 occasions ended up dealing with variants of a scam called the Agro America Scam.

Now, before I continue let me first state that this is nothing against Agro America and their website, but they seem to be being used as the “example” site for this scam. So let us go over just how the scam itself works.

Taking into accounts variations like who is sending the enquiry and how initial contact is made, the basic concept here is that someone makes contact with a Web Designer and asks if We make Websites and do we take credit cards as payments. Neither of these should set off alarm bells because, as a Web Designer, of course My company makes Websites and does have methods to process Credit Card Payment.

Upon first contact being confirmed, the person making the enquiry will respond with something along the lines of the following

(Screen capture of an actual email sent after this person first made contact via iMessage)

Firstly, word for word, this email has actually been sent to others, as evident by this link here

 https://www.market2all.com/security-tips/spam-scam-phishing-email-kola-nut-gacillia-nut-and-cocoa/

Secondly, you might notice a few red flags here, like for example the requested Website domain they want. In this case running a Whois on the website shows that it’s actually a domain owned by  7-Eleven, which means being able to acquire said domain name is going to be high cost to buy it off the current owners.

Next problem is that this contact person is not THE contact they expect you to work with, as they have referred to a as of yet unnamed 3rd party who will be “providing the images, logos and content” and they expect the Web Designer to do all this for a top end budget of $8,500 which one can presume is supposed to include securing them hosting and the desired domain name.

Now the most recent round of this scam that crossed my communications inbox, “Wilson Tandy” was actually declined by Myself on the ground that for what was asking the budget was lower than what I, as a contracted Web Designer, was willing to do the job for. As you can see, when this amount was not enough to entice Me to take on what I already know was a sketchy project, the user instantly attempted to sweeten the deal by claiming that his numbers was a “reference budget” and then when I declined that, you can see that this person went to accusing that I was being rude towards him 

(Screen captures of iMessage communications with "Wilson Tandy")

As this most recent attempt at this scam has failed, Inertial Zen Designs has implemented a strict policy that we will refuse any, and I do mean ANY client who uses Agro America as their reference site when it comes to a website project. 

Reasons why going local is usually for the best

Monday morning I recieved a email from a firm out of India who was making the claim that they could design My business a Website for a cost of $12 an hour.  Part of their claim was that they could 

Create Websites from Photoshop Documents using HTML and CSS

produce Wordpress Pages in a turn around of 5-10 Days 

produce a Magneto Site in 3-4 Days

Quality bug free sites

Well, My response to this email was to thank them for the offer, however I too am a Designer and code from the ground up using W3C Standard compliant, Responsive Design code. This actually lead to them offering up the propopsal of them doing Search Engine Optimization for My project.

Again, I thanked them for the offer, but declined. These two messages got Me to thinking about reasons as to why having a local Designer can actially be a beneft for a Company's Website Design Project.

Firstly, There is time zone issues. For a North American company, having a Design firm in india means that you are looking at w time difference of anywhere from 8 to 12 hours.  This means that if you want to conference with your Designer, you better bank on being awake at the wee hours of the morning.

Next, Firms like the one which contacted Me, advertise on the benefit that they are cheaper and you wont be paying taxes. Factoring in the time zones and the use of templates, sure your site IS cheaper but ask yourself the following

-Is the inconvience of time zones worth is?

-Do you have an expense that you can declare as a business expense?

-Have you taken into account the fact that the 5% GST in Canada paid on the project can be deducted from the GST your company pays?

Next, lets look at the options of having a Photoshop document turned into a Website.  This is actually something known as "Slicing", which is a technique that has boxes drawn around elements of the image and with the tap of a Menu command generates HTML code.

This technique is actually taught in Web Design course, but highly discouraged due to the fact that the code Photoshop generates is not W3C valid. This will be be explained a bit later in this posting as We look at SEO reasons.

A Photoshop generated Website also means that your site is image heavy and loads slower.

Next. lets look at the use of "Template Design". Your business is unique, you have your own logos, colors and business personality that you want to showcase to your potential clients. A template design tends to result in your Company's website looking exactaly like any of the number of competitors' Websites which you are attempting to stand out above.

And now lets get to Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO is considered this magical art that when applied to a Website gets it onto Page one of Google Results.  The facts when it comes to SEO is that there is a lot of factors Google weighs in the ranking of your Site. Over 200 Factors actually with some of the most important ones being

-Standard Compliant Code (This is where the Photoshop Generated Code factors in the first time)

- Textual content of the site (Google's spiders can not index text inside a image file, your Photoshop code just struck again here)

- Having Social Media Presence (Facebook , Goggle Plus, Youtube, Linked in all score you credibility)

- Mobile Ready Design

- HTTPS certified 

- Quality, Organic backlinks (You can lose ranking by buying links)

- Age of your Website Domain (A one year old site with a short term owner registry wont rank anywhere near as high as a 10 year old site with registry for the next 10 years of ownership)

Overall, in the Financial aspect of Website creation, yes there are services who can offer you up cheap design fees and quick turn around, but ask yourself if in the long run what do you end up losing out on with yournsite by going cheap?