Just a public service announcement to caution everyone about IDS Adult (idsadult.com).
My brief story begins in early Dec 2011. I have a new site needing to be designed. I purchased ElevatedX and wanted a tour/website built on and integrated with EX. AJ from EX recommended me to a few designers and I decided to go with IDS Adult. I laid out the requirements for them and timelines and we agreed on everything. With all my requirements I was told "no problem" I sent example sites with similar functionality and design that we wanted. I was originally told 2 weeks for design and 2 weeks for EX integration. That was within my time frame and was happy to get excited.
Within the next few days I provided 600+ high res photos for design content and after about a week I had design proofs to which I made revisions and a few days later new proofs. This process went on for over a month. One of the biggest issues is IDS' lack of quality control. It seems they would fix one thing in one revision and break something else. Minute little errors all over the place. Spelling, alignment, inconsistencies from one page to another. I found myself having to take the proof screenshots and draw annotations of them because it seems like through text they just didn't get it.
In early Feb 2012 the design was finally to a point to start coding the EX integration. Weeks went by and finally after several emails they had the tour pages setup within EX. However content was not being pulled in. So more time goes by and after more emails I get a reply saying oh we need content in the CMS. Now, while I understand that now....at this point I am new to EX and they as experienced EX designers should have told me that content will need to be in the system before it can be coded. So I scramble and start getting content loaded. Now weeks go by and I am loading content almost every other day. Then I finally get an update that is pulling content but thumbnails are the wrong size, and more quality control issues. This goes on all through Feb into late March. I finally had to send a stern email to the point person Jey P to get things fixed.
Fast foward to today. My tour works, but still has many bugs. I am not a programmer so I am looking for someone to help fix the problems (I have a few emails out.) Through speaking with support at ElevatedX, it turns out that IDS basically was submitting support tickets pretty much for everything I wanted integrated. Seems they really didn't know how to make an integrated tour after all. EX support became very frustrated with them because they are there to do tech support and fix problems not do the job for IDS which increasingly seemed the case. EX support has been out of this world helpful to me however they can only help me so much as I am not a programmer. AJ
During this time I spoke with AJ a few times about my horrible experience, mainly because he was the one to recommend them. AJ reached out to IDS about the issues recently and IDS emailed me promptly asking what needed to be fixed. Tired of going back and forth via email I asked to speak via phone or skype. I heard nothing and sent another email asking about phone or skype and 3 days later I got a reply saying "tomorrow at noon via skype". That tomorrow came and went and its been probably 14 days now since they were supposed to call. In my latest communication with AJ he said that he has gotten additional complaints about them since mine and that its probably time to go to the boards to let everyone know of this experience with this company and that with why I made this post.
I kept this as brief as possible. If your considering IDS Adult, especially for ElevatedX tours, you might want to think again.
My brief story begins in early Dec 2011. I have a new site needing to be designed. I purchased ElevatedX and wanted a tour/website built on and integrated with EX. AJ from EX recommended me to a few designers and I decided to go with IDS Adult. I laid out the requirements for them and timelines and we agreed on everything. With all my requirements I was told "no problem" I sent example sites with similar functionality and design that we wanted. I was originally told 2 weeks for design and 2 weeks for EX integration. That was within my time frame and was happy to get excited.
Within the next few days I provided 600+ high res photos for design content and after about a week I had design proofs to which I made revisions and a few days later new proofs. This process went on for over a month. One of the biggest issues is IDS' lack of quality control. It seems they would fix one thing in one revision and break something else. Minute little errors all over the place. Spelling, alignment, inconsistencies from one page to another. I found myself having to take the proof screenshots and draw annotations of them because it seems like through text they just didn't get it.
In early Feb 2012 the design was finally to a point to start coding the EX integration. Weeks went by and finally after several emails they had the tour pages setup within EX. However content was not being pulled in. So more time goes by and after more emails I get a reply saying oh we need content in the CMS. Now, while I understand that now....at this point I am new to EX and they as experienced EX designers should have told me that content will need to be in the system before it can be coded. So I scramble and start getting content loaded. Now weeks go by and I am loading content almost every other day. Then I finally get an update that is pulling content but thumbnails are the wrong size, and more quality control issues. This goes on all through Feb into late March. I finally had to send a stern email to the point person Jey P to get things fixed.
Fast foward to today. My tour works, but still has many bugs. I am not a programmer so I am looking for someone to help fix the problems (I have a few emails out.) Through speaking with support at ElevatedX, it turns out that IDS basically was submitting support tickets pretty much for everything I wanted integrated. Seems they really didn't know how to make an integrated tour after all. EX support became very frustrated with them because they are there to do tech support and fix problems not do the job for IDS which increasingly seemed the case. EX support has been out of this world helpful to me however they can only help me so much as I am not a programmer. AJ
During this time I spoke with AJ a few times about my horrible experience, mainly because he was the one to recommend them. AJ reached out to IDS about the issues recently and IDS emailed me promptly asking what needed to be fixed. Tired of going back and forth via email I asked to speak via phone or skype. I heard nothing and sent another email asking about phone or skype and 3 days later I got a reply saying "tomorrow at noon via skype". That tomorrow came and went and its been probably 14 days now since they were supposed to call. In my latest communication with AJ he said that he has gotten additional complaints about them since mine and that its probably time to go to the boards to let everyone know of this experience with this company and that with why I made this post.
I kept this as brief as possible. If your considering IDS Adult, especially for ElevatedX tours, you might want to think again.
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