How good is Fatcow Hosting?

Question:

I am thinking about having Fatcow create my website. i was wondering how good it is with hosting, speed, customer service and quality of the websites that they can create. i’m spending hundreds of dollars and i don’t want to waste my money on something that will not be good. PLEASE HELP ME!

Answer:

I think web hosting companies outsource their designing.  I don’t think they have people in house do them.  Shop around yourself for a local website designer that you can actually call up and/or visit.  Compare prices.  Just because FatCow or any other hosting company makes it easy for you by offering web design services, doesn’t mean you’re getting a good deal.

Before you pay for any designing, make sure you get to see a rendering of it BEFORE you approve it.  Also, how much input do you, the customer, get in its design?  Ask to see references of other sites they’ve designed.  Will you be able to maintain it and add/edit change pages, or do you have to pay them extra to do that.  Tell them you want ALL source code, including any graphics images and you need to know which fonts they used.  If they’re using something like Photoshop to create images, you WANT those source files in case you or someone else ever needs to modify them.

I recently worked with an author that had a designer do her site.  Very nice work, but she didn’t get the source code for the header graphic and has no idea which font was used for it.  Months later her son noticed that the tagline used in the header was not grammatically correct.  Two words needed to be flipped.  I could make her a new header, but I could only come close to the same font.