Client Review on Gruene Acres Web Design

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I'm an author from San Antonio. On December 5th of 2013, I contracted with Caryn Maus and Barbara Maus of Gruene Acres website building - in Gruene/New Braunfels, TX area for the building of a new author's website, and to provide me with promotional elements such as advertising, search engine optimization, and a retractable banner for book signing tours. I provided them with a $2,000 deposit. She promised it would be done very quickly, with the absolute latest date of completion being the end of February (Today's date is April 18th). That date came and went, and despite my urgings, they could not produce any evidence that they had done any real work on the website. We had numerous phone conversations, and she assured me she was taking notes throughout, but subsequent conversations revealed that she retained almost nothing of what we discussed during those calls. Each week, she promised it would be up and viewable by the next week. Each subsequent week inevitably yielded no results whatsoever, except for two occasions, and each of those times it was clear that she'd put perhaps an hour of work into it; simply posting a few of the photographs or text content I'd provided, and even those were posted mostly in the wrong places. One week ago, she wrote me, saying that I'd made it clear that I didn't believe she would finish it (really? I wonder why?), and because of that she was backing out of the deal. She went on to say she would provide me with the content. I asked for the refund of my deposit, but I have heard nothing, other than discovering that she has disabled access to what little there is of the site. Anticipating this, I took photos of the website before she disabled access to it, so I could show a judge how very little she'd accomplished, and to show that the material is of little monetary value to me, since 98% of it was content that I originally provided to her. The only one who did any work on this website was me.I'm going to be taking Gruene Acres and Ms. Maus to court and attempt to recover my money. I don't hold out great hope of recovering it, as they've built a firewall against litigation by forming an LLC. Don't let them draw you in - it's clear that their job isn't to design websites, rather that they are predatory and rip people off for a living.Jim Surra (author J.M. Surra)