Red Diamond Digital Reviews (%countItem)
Red Diamond Digital Rating
Address: 14432 15 Mile Rd, Sterling Hts, Michigan, United States, 48312-5768
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Absolutely a pleasure to work with. They printed my posters extremely quickly and helped scale to size so they would print clearly. They followed up and made sure I received my delivery on time as well. Will definitely use them for all future print jobs.
I conduct business with a number of vendors, small, medium and large. The common denominator that I look for is great customer service. I was in need of 200 shirts produced with my company logo on them and in a very short window turn. Red Diamond Digital promptly accepted my order and demonstrated that they were capable of playing in the “Big League”. After answering a few questions and sending over the logo in the requested format, I had my FedEx shipment within days. I was very impressed with the product, level of customer service, attention to detail and ability to go above and beyond to take care of me as a customer. Red Diamond Digital is a new vendor for me and I will continue to use them after such a great experience.
Very professional company with great customer service
Red Diamond Digital has always been a positively wonderful company to work with for me. They are professional and always provide valuable insights that help me accomplish my goals and business objectives. I strongly suggest using them. They make my job easier and always produce a timely and phenomenal work product.
Over the years this has been my number one pick when ordering custom prints for many occasions like invitations for my kids birthday parties and even my wedding anniversary celebration as well as holiday cards. They are very professional and meets all deadlines. They have always exceeded my expectations in the design department. All I do is provide my theme and color scheme and I'm always amazed by the design results. They make the whole process so easy from the initial communication to the edits all the way to the final product. You will always get quality products from Red Diamond Digital.
Red Diamond Digital created a much needed new website for my company. Their willingness to collaborate with you is refreshing and welcome, as well as their patience during the process of creating a new website. I’ve received many compliments and more traffic for potential clients since the launch of the new website. Highly recommend their services.
This company always deliver good consistent service.If you ever need any flyers, websites, business cards, t-shirts, team jersey's, printing etc.. This is the company for you. They definitely puts pride into their work.
Thank you. It is our pleasure to provide you with world-class service!
Harper Woods High School marching band had 3 sets of warm up suits prepared by Red Diamond Digital and we extremely pleased with the products and professionalism
Glad we could assist with the Marching Band Uniforms, Logo and t-shirts. We look forward to working with you more in the future!
Red Diamond Digital has designed personal and professional materials for me. Each time, service was tailored specifically with me in mind as the customer and items were designed exactly to my specifications. The products continuously exceed all expectations... beyond pleased with the company!
Very professional and answered all my questions promptly. I highly recommend Red Diamond Digital, LLC for all your advertisements.
Professional, quality and speedy service all the time. I’m pleased with the knowledge and the I know just what you want experience.
Excellent and expeditious service from these guys. I’ve used them several times and they’ve always come through.
Absolutely amazing company!!! Professionalism is through the roof working with these guys, and the quality of work is just phenominal. If you are ever in need of a great website design or graphics, Red Diamond Digital is the way to go!
Thank you! It was a pleasure working with you and I look forward to continuing our relationship in the future!
Red Diamond Digital has become preferred Graphic Design and Printing vendor. To date we have had RDD assist with five (5) projects. These projects have assisted in our re-branding efforts for our non-profit organization. We have received fair-market pricing for each projects and the turnaround met our expectations. I would recommend Red Diamond Digital, LLC. for any graphic design and printing needs.
In June 2017, I engaged Red Diamond Digital (RDD) on a project that involved the design, construction, and deployment of a small Shopify ecommerce website to sell t-shirts. Specifically, I dealt with ***, the CEO/founder of RDD for the duration of the project. During initial calls prior to actual engagement, *** said the project would take approximately one month to complete and would cost $700 total. I agreed and promptly paid the required deposit of $375 to get the project started.
It wasn't until two months and many insistent inquiries later that I was finally shown the site in RDD's local test environment. Throughout this time, *** became significantly less responsive and increasingly vague with status updates and ETA's. Often times, several days would pass before I would get responses to some inquiries. The test site was presented to me through a pixelated join.me web conference meeting *** hosted, so I was not able to directly interact with the site myself in to provide any meaningful guidance and feedback to RDD. Instead, I instructed *** to simply publish the site "as is" to the live Shopify environment so I could interact with it directly and be able to give better feedback. *** acknowledged and said it would take about a week to publish the site to Shopify.
Two more months passed before the site was published and demo'd to me. During this time, ***'s lack of responsiveness and ambiguity with status updates and ETA's persisted, and if anything got worse. *** would tell me that the site's "really coming along" and reassure me how "great it was looking" and that his team is "going above and beyond the defined scope" (even though there was no official, formal scope documented). Realizing that he was just telling me these things to pacify me, I asked *** for screenshots of the live, in-progress site just to make sure he wasn't blowing smoke. Bear in mind that the site-publishing was three weeks past due at this point. Finally after two days, he sent me a single screenshot of the site's home page as it existed in the local test environment, although I didn't catch this at the time. This strongly suggests that ***/RDD had not even begun the process of publishing the site yet.
This also begs the question of why a so-called professional web design company missed the mark so badly with the predicted ETA of one week for the site-publishing task. This was a margin of error of seven weeks, or 700%. The only possible explanations for this is that they, RDD, weren't really working on my site at all, or they had assigned it far fewer resources than it required. Both explanations are unacceptable.
When I was shown the final product, it was a virtually empty site/Shopify template. My logo and a few other basic site properties were present, but 99% of the rest of the site properties were not. In other words, I essentially waited four months to be given a blank Shopify template. I expressed my dissatisfaction to *** on this matter and that I was going to explore some Shopify templates on my own, mainly to verify whether my suspicion of being handed a blank template was accurate or not. Turns out it was. Needless to say, I was able to my site up and online using a free Shopify template, product catalog and everything, all by myself in one week. Why it took a professional web design company over four months to deliver an incomplete product is beyond me.
The missed opportunity from unrecognized sales during the four to five months I worked with RDD far exceeds the amount of money I'm asking to be refunded, which is just my initial deposit of $375. I think this is an incredibly generous request given the trust I had placed into RDD to build a site in a month's time.
We are willing to come to an agreement of a refund of half of the initial deposit which would be a total of $187.50. Even though the customer is not seeing the full value in the work completed, there was still a large amount of work done and hours spent on the work completed. We offered the client the usage of the work completed still, at no additional cost, for use on the website created by the customer so that he could take full advantage of the additional functionality that he is disputing doesn't exist. The custom components and features that were added to the website can only be seen after the products are actually added to the website. We explained this to the customer and walked through via web conference on how the products would be added (this required customer input for product descriptions, options, pricing, etc.) after the web conference we didn't hear from the customer again until the request for returning the deposit funds. When we showed the client a demo of the website we used fake data to demonstrate how the products would be displayed and how the end user would see the website. However, the fake/dummy test data is not something that would remain on the deployed site, which is what/how we explained to the customer.
To end this and t keep good faith, again we are offering a refund of $187.50 which is equal to half of the initial deposit paid for the custom Shopify work we completed. The customer is still offered the use of the custom components completed if he wants at no additional cost.
As far as other work completed for the client (vectorizing of submitted artwork) we completed over 8 designs for the customer all at his satisfaction. Some of these vectorized pieces were of extreme complexity and detail in which we still charged very low rates to make sure the client was happy with the outcomes.
In regards to the "one man show", when the client was referred to us, I took the client under my wing as a personal client due the relationship of the referring client. The work was completed by various members of our team/staff but I remained as the primary point of contact. A project manager is assigned to all projects/work completed by RDD. This project, due to the relationship with the referring client, was not assigned a dedicated PM.
Revdex.com:
While I accept RDD's standing offer, I would like to make an additional counter proposal: Should RDD issue a full refund, I will remove all negative posts made by me on any/all sites including, but not limited to Google Reviews, Yelp, Revdex.com.org, etc.
In addition, my responses to RDD's message:
1) RDD claims that I am not seeing full value in the work completed. This is partially true, because many of these supposed features or functionalities were not ones that I requested. Instead, RDD made a business decision on my behalf to implement these features that "extended above and beyond the project's original scope" (their words, not mine). I think RDD intended for these features to compensate for delays already incurred, but if anything, it seems as though they may have contributed to even further delays. Had I been consulted on the possible decision to implement said features, I would have instead opted to forgo them until the site's original scope and requirements had been met.
2) In my online review(s), I explicitly praised RDD's graphics design team on their ability to complete assignments with a decent level of quality and within a reasonable timeframe. Nothing exceptional, but definitely not bad by any standard. Also, the technical requirements for RDD's acceptance and use of custom graphics, including expenses associated with converting those images to vector formats, were not disclosed to me during initial discussions. It wasn't until the project was "well" underway, that I learned of these details.
3) I sincerely appreciate ***'s gesture to personally lead my project and I fully understand the reasons for wanting to do as such. Unfortunately, this well-intended gesture had many frustrating negative consequences as routine inquiries and requests would often go days unheeded until I sent subsequent and more persistent inquiries. I think these consequences are to be expected when dealing with busy, traveling CEOs on a daily basis (through no fault of their own). Therefore, it would be wiser in my opinion for CEO's like *** to assume a more "background" or transparent role in such projects.
Regards
I did not see that he was willing to resolve this matter with the resolution we proposed. We will be able to refund the amount we proposed next week when my accountant returns.
Revdex.com:
That is correct. I am willing to accept the partial refund, but in doing so I will leave all negatives reviews and posts on various sites up and active, and possibly leave some more at other sites. If a FULL refund is issued, however, I will remove all posts and will not write any future ones either.
Regards
I do not agree with making the refund of half of the deposit and yet still getting all of the bad reviews blasted about our company. If we make the refund of half of the deposit amount (even though we completed hours of work that would be above the half deposit placed), we would like the negative reviews removed. There is zero compromise on behalf of the client in this situation.
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID 12521620, and have determined that this proposed action would not resolve my complaint. For your reference, details of why I am rejecting this response appear below:
1. Work "completed" is very much debatable.
2. Work was not completed in a reasonable amount of time.
3. Overall communication was abysmal.
4. Project Manager, *** in this case, deliberately mislead and misinformed me on progress when I periodically requested status updates.
Potential customers need to be aware of what they are getting themselves into when they attempt to engage RDD in projects. The only scenario I will remove all reviews is when I am issued a full refund.
Regards
The representation that this client is attempting to display of our company is not representative of our company in whole. Even the referring client that sent this customer to us had a very different experience and their website is prospering. There was never misrepresentation of work completed. The client was under the impression that the modules and components that were developed by our company were "free" tools/modules/widgets that could "easily" be implemented into a Shopify solution. This is not the case. We are a platinum developer of Shopify and have obtained this status by completed such work for multiple clients across the country. Yes, we have widgets and modules that we reuse on various customer sites and ones shared within the developer community, however this does not subtract from the time and effort that we deem necessary to implement these solutions. We showed the customer what the end product would look like based on our test data on our testing servers. However, the end product is based off the client's actual input and information being placed into the actual site once transferred to their account. We explained this, and assured the customer that we would assist them to get the site to the same status as the testing site shown with the assistance of the customer providing the pertinent details about his products (descriptions, pricing, colors, etc.).
Again, we have no issue with refunding half of the deposit with the understanding that the reviews will not be posted. Even with the level of work performed for the customer for digitizing and vectorizing his artwork, we have not received any positive reviews for that. Those pieces are still being used by the customer to date. Many of these designs were very complicated and integrate designs that we got done below market rate as well.
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID 12521620, and have determined that this proposed action would not resolve my complaint. For your reference, details of why I am rejecting this response appear below:
"The representation that this client is attempting to display of our company is not representative of our company in whole."
All claims I've made are based off real events that transpired and can be validated by actual email and text message transcripts. This is not a smear campaign. If instead what you mean is "the customer's experience in this case is not representative of the company in whole", then I would like to know why I was singled out to receive subpar quality and inadequate project resources. If this is not representative of the company in whole, then why did it happen to me specifically? On this note however, I do recall seeing other online reviews that portrayed similar negative customer experiences with RDD (and/or its predecessor "FM Webmasters") and ***, some of which have been deleted semi-recently. So maybe my experience is not so unique after all.
There was indeed misrepresentation of work completed. When we were three weeks past due for the publishing of the site from its initial testing environment, I was told verbatim "we are almost there", "we are far beyond where I last told you over the phone where we would be", "it's looking awesome!". At this point since we were three weeks past due and still nothing to show for it, I demanded screenshots of the published site as-is, with the full understanding that it was still a work in progress. Two days later, I get a single screenshot of the site in its original testing environment (which I failed to notice at the time). If the site was "looking awesome" and "almost [done]", then I would have expected to have received screenshots in its almost-final, published form. Instead, I got a single screenshot of the site as it existed four weeks prior. Thus, there is strong probability that the progression of the site's publication was not nearly as far along as *** had otherwise indicated.
In conclusion, my request was simple: a basic shopify site in which to sell shirts and other apparel -- a site that mimicked another RDD client's site owned operated by friends of mine. I made it clear from the beginning that I am very busy individual and was looking to completely outsource the creation of a said website at price that we both agreed upon - $700.
Instead, *** took it upon himself to alter the scope of the project after initial discussions to include features not originally discussed nor required by me, I assume as a gesture to compensate for the delayed project deliverables and milestones. Instead, this may have contributed to further delays. At any rate, what I was given at the end was not what I had originally asked, and was certainly not within a timeframe anyone in this industry would expect for such a project.
I have worked successfully with at least five other web development and design companies in the last decade on websites much more complicated than this. I am very well acquainted with how these projects tend to pan out. I can say that very little to none of the types of project resources, overall structure and organization, and timeliness of responses and deliverables I was accustomed to seeing with those other companies were present with RDD in my experience.
Regards
Preface:
Red Diamond Digital (RDD) is easily the worst and shadiest web design company I have ever dealt with by far. And I’ve dealt with many. My full time occupation is an IT Manager for a 200+ employee healthcare practice. I personally have worked with several web development/design companies on numerous different projects over the fifteen years I’ve worked there. During this time, I have established a solid understanding and frame of reference of how “normal” web dev/design companies operate: the types of deliverables to expect, their timelines, project team members involved, and basically just the entire project life cycle in general.
I chose RDD because an old college friend of mine has his own successful, online t-shirt business going, which was designed and built by RDD. Because my soon-to-be site involved politically relevant t-shirts, timing was essential as opportunistic events were unfolding almost daily at the time. Given that I could not realistically devote the necessary amount of free time to build the site myself, I figured the quickest way to get a site online would be to pay RDD to essentially clone my friend’s site with some minor changes in layout, style, color theme, and of course my own product catalog. I think most people would agree that for a small site, this was an extremely simple and easy request. And yet...
The Good:
Let’s start with the good. Anything design or graphics-related usually gets handled relatively well:. completed in a reasonable timeframe and with decent quality of work.
Also my project, a small simple Shopify ecommerce site, was priced at $700 with an estimated completion time of one month total. This was to be a ready-to-go, ready-to-launch, I’m-paying-you-$700-to-completely-build-this-site-because-I-don’t-have-time-...⇄ site. I felt that this was a pretty fair and competitive price.
The Bad:
RDD is unorganized, willfully deceitful, unprofessional, often extremely slow to correspond, seldom completely answers your questions, always misses deadlines, and does not deliver requested end product.
Unorganized: When you engage Red Diamond Digital for a project, you don’t get assigned a project manager, or individual team members. You get the one-man Bartel show and that’s it. He’s the founder and he’s always on the move or in meetings, and is therefore very elusive. And when he’s occupied or busy, which is most of the time, your project halts. You’re instructed to send all email to [email protected], which only Bartel seems to respond to, although you’re never quite certain since email signature blocks aren’t included in replies, etc. “Wait, is [email protected] even RDD?” I guess? If you say so… It’d be nice if I knew for sure exactly with whom I was corresponding.
Willfully deceitful: I was told during initial engagement call that the site would take approx. one month to launch… as in final product -- completely finished. In reality, it took two months just to see test version of site. And then two more months for final product, which ended up just being an empty Shopify template.
During a phase of the project where RDD was supposed to be publishing my site from their local test environment to the live Shopify platform -- a process which Bartel estimated would take one week -- I asked for screenshots of the live site’s home page to ensure he wasn’t bs’ing me with the repeated “it’s almost ready” responses. Bear in mind, the site-publishing phase was already three weeks past due by the time I asked for screenshots. Two days later, I get a single screenshot of the site’s homepage in the local test environment although I didn’t realize it was the test environment at the time. Yet during the past three plus weeks, Bartel had told me multiple times “site’s really coming along” and “it’s looking awesome!” just to keep me pacified.
Unprofessional: With RDD, it’s always “tomorrow”. We’ll have it done by tomorrow. We’ll talk tomorrow. Let me check my schedule tomorrow. It’ll be ready by tomorrow. Wait… you’ve told me ‘tomorrow’ four times already and we’re two weeks past due. No really, when can I see the demo?*** Tomorrow.
Also there’s no in-depth discussion of site details and requirements as far as layout, design, scope, etc. There’s never any formal, signed agreement where both parties have defined the scope and estimated timeline of the site and/or project. There’s no agreement of any kind signed.
Bartel was often late to arrive at scheduled conference calls (up to 40 minutes late once) without heads up notice and will sometimes cancel at the last minute entirely. No business that respects their customers’ time would do this.
Oh, and no one ever answers their main telephone number if you call it. I’ve called it at least a dozen times on various days and times of the week. Not once has someone answered.
Often extremely slow to respond: On rare occasions, RDD/Bartel will be lightning fast with email responses. This is usually for the quick one-word type responses. He prides himself on these super fast responses and claims they are exemplary of world-class service. The vast majority of time however, several days will go by -- and I’m talking up to four or five days with multiple pings/”hello??” inquiries sent in the meantime -- without responses. It once took five business days to schedule a web demo. As in the act of scheduling something once took five days.
Seldom completely answers your questions: If you ask multiple questions in an email, they’ll answer the first one. This is consistent.
Always misses deadlines: Not one single deadline was ever met. Seriously, zero. Not a single one. What happens is I’ll ask how long a certain task will take. Bartel will say one week. That deadline will pass without any word from him, so I’ll ask for a status update. He’ll say one more week, and so on, and so on until I start expressing sincere dissatisfaction. It took one month from first-contact phone call to officially engage in project (ie. collect up-front deposit which was half the total amount). Then another two months to see the test site. And another two months after that to see final product which ended up just being a blank template on Shopify. Most of the time elapsed was waiting for RDD to respond back to me about things.
Does not deliver end product: In the end, RDD gave me a blank Shopify template. It had some basic template properties and settings filled out like Company Name, Site URL, and “Powered by Red Diamond Digital” in the footer. Bartel tried to convince me that these were the super fancy customizations I was paying $700 for. But apparently a lot of the other customizations are on “the back-end” to make the site look and operate nicer so it’s hard to see them in tangible form. So being versed in all things Information Technology, I said “Oh cool, like what? Show me. Show me the back-end code.” to which he proceeded to show me other basic template settings like Promotions, the Checkout process, etc that were clearly not customizations or custom-written code of any sort. Instead, he was pointing out default features every template on Shopify has. The “finished” site contained my logo and that’s it. No other images, no products, shirts or catalogs.
Conclusion:
If my experience is reflective of how RDD treats all of their clients, then they will take your money, delay your site by several months while promising you’ll be “wowed”, stop responding to communications in the meantime, then leave you with a blank template, and try to deceive you into believing that there’s custom work put into the site’s back-end to make it function better.
Needless to say, I said screw these guys and created my own site using a free Shopify template all by myself in one week. Granted, it took me every minute of my spare time for that entire week, but still… The whole site, product catalog, everything. All images, 9 t-shirt designs, 21 shirt styles, and over ten thousand variants all uploaded myself. That week sucked for me, but I needed reassurance that this relatively easy project should not in any universe take someone, a “professional” web design company no less, 4+ months to complete!
Also I have a ten-page day-by-day, hour-by-hour transcript showing all written correspondence and project progression available upon request. It’s appalling.