Design1Online

I have known the owner of this business for a long time, going on seven years now. I have played her games also for a long period of time, so when I saw my favorite game by her go up for sale, I was interested. I didn't have the money she was asking for then, so I waited and just hoped it didn't sell. So, around five years after the website went up for sale, I contacted the owner of Design1Online and made an offer. She accepted my offer (which took a while because she originally wanted $5,000 which was crazy and I am a web designer that works on the same types of projects. I would never charge that much for what the website was. Plus the website is filled with glitches that I was planning to fix myself.) and we were working on the final details and the bill of sale.

Suddenly she tells me she has another offer from the current admin of the website and unless I uped my offer $500 or more she would not accept it anymore. I thought this was weird because the game had been on the market for over five years with barely any serious interest. I was friends with the admin so, I contacted her about possible shared ownership instead of starting a bidding war. I found out from the admin that the owner of Design1Online actually approached her instead of the other way around like I was told. She offered the website to the admin for the same price that I was already willing to pay and told the admin that I wouldn't care for the website and she would rather sell to her instead. Of course, she didn't mention who I was because the admin knew I was a faithful member of the website I was trying to buy and had been for many years. I was even a moderator at one point on the website.

This made me mad, but we decided to try for shared ownership together anyway. I told the owner I knew what she had tried to do and obviously she tried to start a bidding war to benefit herself. Then I realized the bill of sale had many legal holes in it and I asked her to fix those. She was also selling me the member database with all the member information which her privacy policy said she couldn't even legally do. So, I brought all of this up and she denied it and refused to fix it.

She also refused to encrypt the database passwords before the sale which was a high security risk. So, I countered saying she had to fix these things or I was walking away. She never could agree with me, so no sale was ever made.

She was shady even to a person she had known a long time. I can't imagine what she would do to a customer she didn't know personally. This is the second failed sale of this website that I know of. I would stay away, find someone with better coding skills, and cheaper prices!