This is a testimony to the fantastic work of one web design firm and the incompetence and unethical behavior of another.

This is simply our true story and our humble opinion.

SOHOjobs.com / SOHOjobs.org / SOHOjobs.net has been online since 1998 and has undergone many changes as we have grown. In 2008 we realized it was time to make a substantial upgrade to the site. We decided on DesignB Studios a small firm out of Loudoun County Virginia (http://wasdmz2.courts.state.va.us/CJISWeb/) owned and operated by Brian Reynolds. This was our mistake.

This atrocious ordeal with DesignBStudios was filled with lack of skill, incompetence, mismanagement and complete insolence on the part of the design firm. This nightmare with Design B Studios dragged out well over a year. The result was a broken, unfinished site that was never delivered despite a price tag well over $30.000 (paid in full by us, by the way). When we demanded the unfinished site after paying the final payment as per the contract, DesignB Studios attempted to extort additional funds from us, refusing to turn over the site unless we paid.

Moreover, DesignB Studios obtained a misspelled version of the SOHOjobs URL and attempted to benefit from our brand by putting up a misleading website filled with advertisers. This form of typosquatting is highly unethical, especially when the squatter is a paid contractor for the domain! DesignB Studios not only registered the domain name in bad faith, but then put advertising and affiliate links attempting to profit from our traffic while also driving click-thrus to our competition. (They did NOT include any links to the actual SOHOjobs website).

We've read other posts which can be found online by searching for "DesignB Studios" that would lead us to believe that we may not be the only company that has encountered these problems with DesignBStudios. At this time, we cannot attest to the factual nature of these posts as we are still attempting to locate and talk to these individuals. As a result, we can only tell you what we have discovered online from our own research. We encourage you to do your own research as well. Had we only discovered these posts online before we contracted with Design B Studios we surely would not have found ourselves in this situation.

In the end, and for more than $30,000, all we ever received from DesignB Studios was long, irrational and babbling letters from Mr Reynolds about the various reasons why he was unable or unwilling to deliver the completed project, or why he thought he was entitled to even MORE money! This is now simply a matter for the courts to work out (and from the looks of the Loudoun County courts website, Mr Reynolds is no stranger to them!)

What is typo-squatting

Typo-squatting refers to the practice of registering domain names that are typos of their target domains, which usually host websites with significant traffic.

From the business perspective, many of the typo-squatting cases involve bad-faith domain registrations or trademark violations. Worse yet, it is not uncommon to see a typo domain displaying ads from competitors of the target-domain owner or even negative ads against the owner.

Source: Strider Typo-Patrol: Discovery and Analysis of Systematic Typo-squatting, Yi-Min Wang, Doug Beck, Jeffrey Wang, Chad Verbowski, and Brad Daniels, Microsoft Research, 2006

Every cloud has a silver lining.

In this case the silver lining came in the form of Design209.com Design209.com came highly recommended not only for their design abilities but for their ethics and customer service.

Design209.com has shined, designing a clean, functional site quickly and without complications. Design209.com was able to listen to Team Soho and develop the user friendly web experience that SOHO'ers expect. They were up front and honest about SOHOjobs functionality and the time required to finish the project (which, as a result of the breach by the other design firm, was just a matter of DAYS).

Throughout the process we were continually impressed by Design209.com's attention to detail and their ability to think of how the site would function for the user. They offered advice on how to make the site more dynamic for our members and even added programming work to help us better manage our users on the backend. Design209.com did this on short notice, working with us day and night until the site was complete. They quickly turned over all work and helped us set up the site on our server and transition our members.

Design209.com has an impressive skill set including SEO/SEM Proficient In: Adobe, Wordpress, Silverstripe HTML, CSS, PHP, CMS, as well as live payment gateway implementation. In addition to those skills, Design209.com is intent to stay one step ahead of current web designers. Expect to see SOHOjobs Facebook, Iphone and Droid applications very soon!

We are so pleased to have finally found a design firm that we can build a long term relationship with and intrust with all of our business needs, today and in the future. We highly recondmend Design209.com for all web based media projects.

Thank you Design209.com. If only we had found you first.

We would be happy to provide additional and detailed information about our experiences with these two very different design firms and the outcomes of these projects at your request. Email Us (info@sohojobs.org)

Team SOHO
SOHOjobs.com / SOHOjobs.org / SOHOjobs.net