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SiteCube.com, Business Opportunity Or Another Nail In The Coffin Of Website Design?

Posted by Paul B | January 23, 2008 .

A friend mentioned this to me so I thought I’d have a look. SiteCube.com offer a Flash website generation service and website hosting that they are selling to small businesses. I think what the idea is that you pick one of their pre-made templates and then you add text and your own pictures etc until you have a finished website. That in itself is not too bad, after all if people want to rely on a cheap Flash based website for their business then all the very best to them. What concerned me however was that they are reselling this service.

What they are trying to offer you as a reseller is your own website design business. In a market swamped by cowboys and hobbyists is it really wise to offer people with even less knowledge of the whole hosting and design market a business in a box? They’ll set up a domain for you and then you end up hosting pages from their website in frames on yours. Does anybody still use frames these days? What about support? How the hell is Resleller going to respond when his client needs support? The resale plan relies on you marketing to businesses skills that you don’t have. You are then responsible for billing them and collecting payment.

“You do not need any programming knowledge, design skills or any technical expertise to avail of this business opportunity.”

“The system has been setup such that YOU own the customers under your own business name.”

So I own the customers who I have got by misleading them into using a service that I don’t have the skills or knowledge to support, ace!

“integrated web solution created for independent professionals like, doctors, attorneys, musicians, models etc and small businesses like restaurants, salons etc”

Having been involved with small business website design for a long time now there is something else that doesn’t sit right with me with this. With every client their primary concern was using their website as a marketing tool, making sales and lead generation. They all wanted to rank well for search terms related to their business and products because the search engines can provide free eye balls, when you are starting of in business free can be a great word! It is wrong to pitch Flash as a suitable tool for small business websites, unless the client is in the design industry where lovely animation can count. If my business had been sold a SiteCube website then I think the chances of me ever having anything to do with the web again would be a bit limited. And some people wonder why website design has such a bad reputation?

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4 Comments so far
  1. 5 Reasons Why I Don't Like Flash Websites UNITED STATES WordPress 2.2.1  January 27, 2008 3:10 pm

    [...] seems that the post I did about SiteCube has caused a bit of a fuss. In fact I’ve removed the one way link to the reseller that was [...]

  2. Steve B. UNITED STATES Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.13  April 3, 2008 4:09 pm

    Tmy experience with sitecube was horrible. Horrible wait times in live chat they offer for support, AND HORRIBLE EMAIL RESPONSE TIME..MORE THAN 48 HOURS.

    I finally tracked down their phone number from one of their clients on the sitecube website, so i decided to call them to see if there would be any kind of phone support.

    Keep in mind..they don’t offer phone support but this is a good way to check out a company before you decide to buy.

    I suggest you call some of their customers and see what they think. Be careful that they aren’t friends,or bogus testimonials.

    When i spoke to them I got some foreign guy who gave terrible answers and on top of that, when you have technical questions the last thing you want to deal with is a language barrier…which is the case here.

    I didn’t understand a word he was saying! His english was HORRIBLE!

    What a sad statement.

    Even some of the testimonials sites they have on their site are either old or the people took their business somewhere else because some of the links either don’t work or there aren’t any links.

    One owner told me that when they talked to them in the past that it seemed to them that they were speaking to the same person even though they would give them a different name each time they called.

    This seem to be the same in their web chat.T

    They claim that they have great webchat support…I have been waiting for a response in live chat for over 45 minutes several time until I just closed the window… and sometimes I never even got a response!

    It appears to me that they are either a one man show or trying to act like they are a bigger company then they really are.

    Overall, I would be cautious if i were anyone trying to do business here.

  3. Jurgen NETHERLANDS Windows XP Internet Explorer 7.0  April 17, 2008 11:17 pm

    I was foolish enough to enter their reseller program, although I felt a bit uneasy about it to begin with. I wished I had listened to my gut feeling… You have to deposit several hundreds of dollars in an account, before they will create some crappy reseller site for you. I thoght I could create a site myself and offer their services, but this turned out to be not the case. After a few weeks I got a framed horribly looking amateuristic site with all kinds of texts I did not want. It was really awful. After multiple tries (over a few weeks) to get them make some changes to “my” site that any webdesigner could have done in 5 minutes I decided to bail out. I asked for a refund. No, I asked several times, because every question you have to ask multiple times to get through to these guy(s). They told me I could get a partial refund, because the joining fee could not be refunded. I went along with it, not wantinn to put up a fight. It’s 7 weeks later now, and I still haven’t got this promised refund. I reminded them several times during this period, but nothing is done. I’m pretty sure I can kiss my 200 bucks goodbye. So, beware, this program is a major scam. Be warned.

  4. Charlie UNITED STATES Windows Server 2003 Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14  April 22, 2008 5:53 pm

    Sitecube sucks!
    Cost too much money, tech support doesn’t reply to emails in a timely fashion………..DON”T BUY SITECUBE!!!!!! Look at Virtual October, they have Great Quality, they are cheaper and answer tech questions right away!!!