WebsiteBusiness.com finished my template and basic site set up in July 2010. I foolishly agreed to pay $760.00 for bloggers to supposedly promote the site. I should have realized that there was nothing to promote until I wrote real content--reviews of other business sites, products and services. I designed the web pages, and they were very helpful whenever I had questions with using widgets or using AdBrite. My gripe is that I didn't have to pay $3,508.00 for designing my site, a business blog/affiliate site. I can see paying that amount if someone was designing a site for a business, but not for a blog. I should have done comparison shopping before agreeing to that amount. They wanted me to do a press release and I declined after realizing they were just trying to hit me up for more money.

Former employees are blogging on the Internet, complaining they haven't been paid and reporting the owner, Kyle Winn, abruptly closed the business. Many customers plan to dispute credit card charges because they never got to see their websites up on the Internet. The predicament many of us are in is that we cannot login to our accounts and therefore cannot make changes to our sites. At least my domain name is listed on Whois.com under my name, so I should be able to gain possession of it and rebuild my site using WordPress. I would never again go to a website design company that has control of my administrative panel. I don't trust any of them and how do I know if they didn't tamper with the ID account numbers in the HTML codes of my affiliate links and banners so that they get credit for sales commissions with Commission Junction, LinkShare, etc. You really have to be careful of con artists and my WebsiteBusiness.com account manager was a fast talker who used pressure tactics like you will be able to make some money from an Amazon store and Google ads. They never mentioned website business basics like list building or how to use keyword tools, and harped on the ignorance of those new to operating a website business. My advice to anyone who wants to have a website on the Internet is to learn to build a WordPress site or pay someone to build it for you. That way you are the only one who has access to your dashboard, unless of course your hosting company is dishonest. It's so hard to trust anyone and you also need to have security protection like SiteLock or the more expensive McAfee to keep out the hackers.

asked by Anne C. on 9/15/11