PixelGems Software

17 February 2015

http://moroccoexplored-com.sitepreview.ca

Reviewed by Robbin Yager
— Morocco Explored

Beware of Pixelgems.

We (luckily) pulled out before we published/hosted our website with Pixelgems because they breached their own agreement to create a fully functioning website for our company.

Here's what happened.

After months trying to complete our website with Pixelgems we began to realize that it will never be completed, especially after the designer insisted we publish the site in its incomplete state. Our concerns were that many issues - some of them quite serious and ongoing - had yet to be addressed.

Our website is our only business tool and needs to function flawlessly across platforms. We communicated throughout the design process that there were problems such as unfinished sidebar content, sticky pages that trapped the visitor, overlapping content and crowded text, wrong/missing menu links, and failure of the homepage to properly load onto iPad and iPhone (noted since the very early stages of building the site) among others details for example: we needed two sentences to be entered into a form page. The content had 5 typos when typed in by Pixelgems staff and it took weeks before they were corrected.

On the pages we could access to makes changes ourselves, we had to design and code the site content, otherwise it would have remained incomplete, with crowded text and overlapping elements on the page, including headlines. This process was incredibly time consuming for us to do, as they have no style sheets to work with.

In addition there was no response to questions about how our pre/post publishing services were to be handled, email, form functions, diagnostics, code validators, link checker, spell-checker, etc.

After months of exchanging emails with lists concerning the same uncompleted or malfunctioning designs, eventually Pixelgems made it clear that no further changes or fixes were forthcoming after which we determined it was best to discontinue our agreement and move along to another strategy concerning our website rebuild.

We requested that we come to a compromise by receiving a full copy of the website as built to date, along with all the relevent website documentation, and a refund for the amount charged for the yearly hosting package that would not be used. In addition we asked a partial refund because the site was never completed and launched as written in our agreement.

Unfortunately the files are locked into Pixelgems privately keyed Client Management System (CMS) not usable outside Pixelgems hosting service. Even if the site had been completed and we wanted to host elsewhere, this would not be possible as Pixelgems will not allow us to access their key files to unlock the codes for our website.

To date we have only received incomplete/unusable website files and no refund.
We are in the process of taking them to court to demand compensation.