Can Codemyconcept.com live up the bold claim of "Best psd to html company on the planet?" Read our review to find out.
CodeMyConcept.com Review
Since it was time to do another review, we decided this time it would be the turn of a psd to html company, and thought we would give Code My Concept a try. What better project to test it on than our very own site 
The page you are reading right now is a Codemyconcept.com coded WordPress Theme.
We had our regular designer, David Vuu the Melbourne Web Designer, create us a Photoshop file of our new site which was used for the Codemyconcept.com order.
The order process
The order was placed with Codemyconcept on the 27th November, and we paid $258. This consisted of 2 html/css pages (our home page is different, in case you landed on this page directly), then the additional charges for Cufon ($10), CSS dropdown menus ($15) and coding to a WordPress theme ($119).
The pricing is definitely competitive, I have absolutely no complaints here. I’m not sure why they don’t take payment immediately, as this would speed up the process. They sent me out payment details after taking all the order details.
Codemyconcept at work
Once the invoice was dealt with, a coder was assigned to my job. He was quick in turning the psd into fully coded html/css pages which looked great. Up till this point I was extremely happy, it looked like this was going to be an easy job to complete, and an easier review for me to write.
Codemyconcept then missed the job deadline by 6 days.
The problems
The first one was obviously missing the deadline, with no real explanation why.
If you check our homepage, you will see “recent news” in the left column, with post titles and a snippet. These are our recent blog posts. These should have linked to the recent posts, but didn’t. So there was absolutely no way for the visitor to use those to navigate to the posts. This has since been fixed.
If viewers did manage to make it to a blog post, they would find all the comments were not viewable, and they couldn’t add a reply either.
Both of the things above were the biggest issues I had, but they were quick fixes for my own coder so certainly not a huge problem.
If you look at the breadcrumb navigation on this post above, its not laid out very well, it should have a ” > ” after the category, but before the title. I’ve added an image above as we do intend to fix this.
None of the images will align right, the Project Summary image I have used at the start of this post should be aligning right in the post, but isn’t.
This sentence is a quote, using /blockquote
As you can see, quotes are not working. It looks exactly the same as any other text so its hard to quote anyone properly within a post. It should have at least been indented to the right.
Codemyconcept.com – The verdict
The final product is “okay”, but not perfect. I would have been more willing to overlook the minor errors if they had delivered on time. I can accept lateness, or I can accept errors, but not both together.
I never bothered sending it back to be fixed, as once they missed the deadline by such a long margin, I’d lost confidence a little so I chose to pay my own coder to fix the 2 bigger errors. As you can see, the other problems are minor enough that we launched with them in place, but they are on the to do list
I’ve seen them return good work, and on time, before so I’m not sure why this one didn’t go as I thought it would. A friend told me he also had some delays with his project, emailed to complain and the CEO Mike La Rosa wrote back to him personally, so hopefully its something they are working on.
They are certainly in a crowded marketplace, so for me “okay” isn’t good enough. psd2html are slightly more expensive, but with a 2 day turnaround time.
So is their claim of being “The best psd to html company on the planet” true? At this time, the answer has to be “not even close”.
They are providing an average service at a below average cost, but unless you value your time at zero (or like playing with code) you’d probably be better going elsewhere. If you are working on a tight budget where every last penny counts, maybe you will want to check them out. For me its a little frustrating, as none of the errors are major, so they were close but just fell a little short.
edit – Just added this post to a 2nd category and hit the publish button, another error in the Breadcrumbs. I’ll set this post to 1 category only for now.
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7 Responses to “CodeMyConcept.com Review”
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First of all we would like to thank you for your time on writing such a detailed review.
We would also like to apologize for the delay you experience on your project, this was definitely a random issue and we would be extremely happy to make amends so you get a better experience with CodeMyConcept.
Please contact me with your project number and any other details you may think are important so we can figure out a way to make your experience the best PSD to HTML experience ever.
Sincerely
Grace Gonzalez
Marketing Director
http://www.codemyconcept.com
grace@codemyconcept.com
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I also experienced a delay with no explanation or warning. I sent in a PSD to be converted to an HTML email. The site said I’d have it by Tuesday, but after a few details were sorted out Weds. seemed more reasonable. Nearing the end of Weds. with no word, I checked in via my project board. No reply. Resorted to chat, was told Thurs. or Friday at the latest. Nearing the end of Friday, still no word. So I check in via chat again. “Sorry, it won’t be done today. We need a few more hours that we don’t have.” Umm, what? I press for details. Yes, they’ve started but need more time. I press for a Monday deliverable. Then, a bunch of questions come about the design. That’s fine, but they should have contacted me with these questions earlier. If I hadn’t checked in, who knows when I would have received my files. To their credit, they worked Sat. to get me a comp to review. I QA it and send a little feedback, which they immediately fix Monday morning. Awesome. I grab my files, send out some test emails that evening. Oops, broken stuff in Gmail and Hotmail, font stylings ignored in Yahoo. Post these issues on my project board, which has a status of “finished.” Don’t hear so next day I email the dev directly. No reply. Still waiting. Obviously, they didn’t actually send out the email to test it. Also, the images weren’t optimized at all. They were the saved out at highest quality and file size. That isn’t ideal for an HTML email, esp. when I specifically stated it would be read on mobile devices as well. So, in addition to fixing a few minor issues, I had to re-save out the images so they were the lowest file size (but still decent quality) possible. I shaved off about 60% in file size weight. As this review says, they are not “best” as they claim. If you have time to spare and don’t mind fixing some issues on your own, they’ll work for you. But they definitely over-hype themselves on their site. Being late and not telling you they’re going to be late is the most egregious problem in my book.
I would not EVER recommend CodeMyConcept.com to anyone!
I had a rush job that I needed completed in under 2 weeks. They not only missed the deadline, but in the end they tried to blame me for the short-comings in their mark-up. The site slice did not validate in ANY browser, and completely fell apart in IE 6, 7 AND 8.
They ended up showcasing the project on their site under their portfolio of projects, even in this maligned state (the View CSS/View HTML buttons don’t even click to anything because they would be embarrassed to show anyone what’s under the hood). Unfortunately for me, they used my name and site URL WITHOUT MY PERMISSION, which has negatively affected the first-page search ranking of several of my social network profiles; effectively, their terrible slicing job is ranked higher than some of my actualized, relevant projects and client work.
Needless to say, I never paid for the project because it was never finished, AND they missed their deadline by over two weeks. By the time things got straightened out on their, I had to get someone else to do the job in under a week.
To top things off, I had several conversations with the customer support line, and the owner (Michael La Rosa), which all ended in him trying to blackmail me into paying the balance on the project that they could not deliver on.
I would give them a rating of an F overall. Bad business practices, poor coding, and terrible project management. Avoid like the black plague. I recommend YummyCSS.com instead. I’ve now used them for over two years without a single problem ever!
I love how the staff of CodeMyConcept search all these reviews and leave a comment as damage control, but too much damage has been done. Out of 6 projects I’ve been involved with using CMC, only 1 was delivered on time. But the most recent project I saw from them was atrocious, delayed by weeks, and after all that time the quality of the html cutup and WP implementation was terrible. And has anyone ever actually received a refund from them? So much for a 100% money back guarantee, there’s always an excuse for not being able to provide a refund. AVOID THEM.
Well I gave codemyconcept a second chance and handed them another project… I wish I hadn’t bothered.
They waited till the last minute then told me that they weren’t going to deliver on time. Not sure if they’d have told me at all (I went on to livesupport to ask about progress).
They are now saying it takes 2 WEEKS to process a refund… even although it was paid by Paypal. I’m struggling to see a single reason to even suggest that, unless you’re hoping people get bored of chasing it and give in (which I won’t
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Trust me. CodeMyConcept is crap! Worst support ever, and WORST customer relations I have ever experienced.
AVOID CODEMYCONCEPT AND JUST USE PSD2HTML INSTEAD!
We also had a horrible experience with CodeMyConcept.
Their work is very poor quality with no attention to detail.