Red Wolf Marketing
reviews and complaints

I hired Redwolf Marketing (Victoria Wolf) of Golden, CO, to import my Blogger posts to Wordpress and rebuild the new site to look like the original. I paid her upfront $625 after we both agreed on a detailed contract spelling out her duties. Another 625 was due at completion. I totally wasted the $625 because:

#1. Victoria kept making excuses for not making changes to my specs such as line spacing. She’d commonly say, “I’ll put that on my list, ” even though it was already pointed out.

#2. At one point she got cantankerous and snapped, “Stop! I’m not doing that!” when I asked her to narrow the width of a banner, even though making these adjustments was spelled out in the contract.

#3. Victoria Wolf kept putting off building my requested “most popular posts” widget. It never got done.

#4. At one point, 90 percent of the extensive drop-down menu that I’d been building suddenly vanished. Victoria had no technical explanation and I had to rebuild it: very time consuming.

#5. The day before our fourth phone appointment, she sent an email telling me she was quitting the project (and this came out of nowhere), that I could hire a new developer to pick up where she left off (which proved impossible; explanation coming). She claimed she’d already spent more time than expected and wasn’t getting her money’s worth, even though at the beginning, she insisted on a flat fee rather than bill for an hourly rate. At this point the site looked very incomplete.

#6. I hired a new developer who emailed me the following:
“I took over helping my client with her website after another designer could not complete the job. There were rather easy fixes that she [Victoria] could not complete without help from elsewhere [e.g., theme developer], and waiting for said help significantly delayed the project. If she couldn't get someone to help her, she simply didn't complete the tasks requested.

“In order to adequately develop my client’s site to her specifications, I needed to start from scratch, as what was done by the previous designer was hacked together, both with messy code and in such an unorganized way that it was a far better use of my time and my client’s money to start over rather than try to decipher and fix what the previous designer had done. It is my professional opinion that my client was taken advantage of and did not get what she paid for in her previous designer.”

More Alarming Examples:
-Victoria claimed she couldn’t set the font to Arial. The new developer quickly did this.
-I told Victoria that words were being cut off at the end of post excerpts, such as “sho” for “should.” The new developer explained that Victoria should have set the feature for maximum words, not characters, to prevent this.
-The new developer quickly found a different theme that was more compatible with my specs, even though Victoria claimed it took her “a while” to find the theme she hacked together.
-Though the new developer started from scratch, she imported from Victoria’s incomplete files to save me from retagging hundreds of articles for the drop-down menu. As a result, a lot of messy code was inherited, though technically, the new developer DID rebuild from scratch. After only HALF the time that Victoria Wolf spent on the project, the new developer presented me with a site that looked just like the original, and for a much cheaper price.
-I might point out that whenever I told the new developer what Victoria claimed she couldn’t do and why, the new developer chuckled and said, “That’s not true, and that only shows she didn’t know what she was doing.”

Redwolf Marketing’s only defense may be that I was too picky. But I clearly explained that I lack code and Wordpress knowledge and that’s what I hired her for. Victoria Wolf may claim the project was taking too much time. But the contract included a list of tasks that she should have been able to estimate time involvement for. She also originally agreed that the flat rate would cover the possibility of spending more time than she initially anticipated. Most of the tasks were never completed. My site should have been done right THE FIRST TIME. I blew $625 and have nothing to show for it. (My new site is still under development.)