Appalling response from customer and competitor

I recently built the https://www.sydneyfinancepawnbroker.com.au/ based on the below free theme, which should be an exiting thing to share here. My customer has intent to sell items on the website in future.

http://wristweartheme.demo.themes.nopaccelerate.com/

However my customer hired an SEO company and provided below appalling response:

Hi XXX,

I was taking a closer look at how your website is set up and it is very frustratingly limited.

As you will see this is the theme the other developer used.
http://wristweartheme.demo.themes.nopaccelerate.com/

It is set up fully as an ecommerce site? Why on earth did he set it up this way, knowing you are not going to sell anything?

I was taking a closer look at the images and so far gives me no option to name them?
Google image search is another big part of bringing traffic to your site.

• If this site cannot allow me to search engine optimise and name each and every image, then how on earth will the google bots ever index them.

Anyway, sharing the first major issue with this platform.
Waiting for my developer to get back to me to see if he can find any other way to do this, as it is a platform we normally never use.

Once again, this is where the wordpress platform is far more powerful, as it has an entire media gallery section in the site that is much easier to work with.
Also give the ability to name the images and write up alt tags.

• I have set up both Google Analytics and Webmaster accounts today.

Just waiting for my developer to work on your site tomorrow and install the code into the site.
Anyway, he should not set up the website for you in this way, you should go to NSW fair trading to report this guy and ask for refund.
Thank you


Kind regards,

Senka Pupacic

"Buying a website without search engine optimization is like spending your entire budget on a commercial without buying any air time to show it to the world."


A: Level 14, Lumley House - 309 Kent Street, Sydney NSW 2000   P: +61 2 9569 6580    E: [email protected] W: https://top10insydney.com.au

It seems like Senka likes the wordpress way, or no way. I suspect he's a marketing type, and wont invest any effort to understand how nopcommerce works technically.

mortdale wrote:
Are you referring to this site - https://www.sydneyfinancepawnbroker.com.au/ ?
I don’t see many images - What images are you referring to ?
Any image that is on the website can have a title name and alt name

RE: "..It is set up fully as an ecommerce site? Why on earth did he set it up this way, knowing you are not going to sell anything?"
That comment seems to be directed to your prior developer, and not nopCommerce itself.


It's difficult to parse out what you're trying to say.  It would be more helpful if you (or your new developer) just ask specific questions about setting up SEO in nopCommerce.

Yidna wrote:

They don't know how to use nopcommerce, they are a seo company and trying to convince my customer dump the site I developed and use their WordPress solution. The most unbelievable thing is they suggested my customer to report me to fair trading. I have no idea what I did wrong, as a developer I don't know much about law, but I feel the seo company crossed the line and now it's  hard to explain to my customer why nopcommerce is not that bad.

New York wrote:

I'm the developer of the site. The customer has intent to sell online, so I chose the nopcommerce as I am a .Net developer. My customer has zero knowledge about technology behind the screen. Why it matters which platform is used to deliver the HTML.? I built the site as requested and got paid for what we agreed with.

The seo company don't know how to use nopcommerce, they want my customer to get rid of me and the site I built entirely.

It seems you have done nothing wrong. You provided the website, it looks good and you got paid so the customer must have been happy. It terms of the other service providers recommendation to report you to Fair Trading there is nothing to report so don’t worry about it.

I assume you have provided the client with the correct information about SEO and the services you can offer to promote the website. I mean of course your client wants their website to be immediately number 1 on google. But any client that thinks this can easily happen and any service provider saying they are able to do that without a lot of work is just plain dishonest.

Either way the client is within their rights to seek quotes from other service providers for the same service. If they want to accept a quote to totally redesign and rebuild the site on Wordpress without really understanding what it is they want or need than that is that is totally up to them.
Of course it is stupid and ill-informed but ultimately there is not a lot you can do about it. In the end the client will learn a lesson.

The best you can do is provide the client with correct information then it is up to them to decide what they want to do. If they want to continue to use your services fine. Otherwise forget about it and move onto the next job.

I understand now.   Then considering they said
mortdale wrote:

they either need to learn how to set up SEO in nopCommerce, or they should just specify the requirements and someone with nopC experience can set it up.

I am solicited every day by some wanna be SEO expert about how bad my site is optimized. I own, develop, maintain and do all related functions of running my site(s). I have been a Nop user since version 2.65 on my live sites but played with earlier versions than that, just because it is free its open source and generally it works well. I have used many other platforms over the years for other sites and the SEO crowd will always cry how bad your SEO is, its how they get biz. Convince the not so tech savy that the platform their using is so bad they need to scrap it, but go to a WordPress baffles me, why not Wix and then like you stated your going to need a plugin to handle the ecommerce side of it anyway at the point you state your customer will sell. I would not worry about. I do not know the laws of your land but if he causes you harm by what he is saying, you may have a defamation claim. SEO is a never ending project, it can always be better on all sites. Just because this guy can't use Nop and figure out how to configure SEO without accessing html markup to do it is his issue. Problem I think may be is your customer will need to allow him into the admin to do his SEO work, or the db directly.

mortdale wrote:

Hello.  
No worries, actually it's absolutely typical "normal" situation... But U didn't mention who in charge of content/SEO of the site.  So I'd say the SEO on your site is almost/just horrible... 1. no descriptions for any pages 2. Bad H1, H2, and etc. 3. I've visited https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=eng and checked your site
- First Contentful Paint
4.5 s
- Speed Index
6.6 s
- Largest Contentful Paint
5.9 s.
It should have been fixed before...;).
Best Regards.