Yell Website Review
8 Reasons To Not Use Yell Web Design
Our honest review of Yell Business Website and Web Design service.
The History Of Yell.com
You probably remember looking through the Yellow Pages for the telephone number of a business in the 80’s and 90’s. Or you remember the Christmas advert of the boy using the Yellow Pages to make himself taller so that he could kiss the girl.
This was the prime time to use Yell to advertise your local business, even though it was expensive – every man and his dog used the ‘big yellow book’. In the last 20-30 years, the ways to find business details have changed. Everyone has a mobile phone or access to a computer where this information can easily be attained.
In 2013 Yell racked up huge debts of over £2 billion and the company was seized and taken over by lenders. This is why Yell now offer online web services at a very high cost to try and recoup as much money as possible.
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Yell Website Waste Of Money
When you decide that you want a website creating for your business, you want it to be your ‘online digital business card’ which attracts customers. After all, you are investing your hard earned money into the website, so you should expect at least something back in return.
Here at Wigan Web Design we have had several people contact us who have previously used Yell Website Services with zero leads and very low website visitors. The fees that these people have paid Yell is extortionate. We will discuss this further below with some real facts and figures of why we think Yell Websites are a waste of money.
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The Issues With Yell Website Design
1. Very Aggressive Sales Team
Yell’s sales team oversell a lot of the services that actually under perform. They rely on computer illiterate people who think that they need a website and sell them ‘the dream’, and before you know it the salesman has offered you ‘a limited time offer’ which persuades you to sign up for the service. You are then stuck in a 12 month contract with no way out. It has been reported on Money Saving Expert that several business owners have regretted signing up for the service and within minutes of signing up, instantly regretted it.
2. Misleading Contracts
Every service Yell offer is for a minimum length of 12 months. The aggressive salesmen pressure you into signing up to every package you can think of and once you get familiar with what they have sold you, it is too late to remove anything from your package. We have seen a business not been able to keep up with the high monthly payments they are stuck with, and therefore the business had to stop trading.
3. High Prices
Yells Websites actually appear to be reasonably cheap, with prices appearing to be £499 (plus £35 monthly fee) for the Premium package and £999 (plus £55 monthly fee) for the Premium Plus package. To start with this price does not include any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The price is simply the web design and monthly hosting fees (which should not be as high as this). These prices do not include all the additional extras that the salesman will up sell you to. For example a 15 page website will cost you upwards of £4,000. A client of ours (locksmith) came to us after finally getting out of the 12 month contract of Yell, they paid a grand total of £12,000 and received 4 customers for that. That in short cost the locksmith £3,000 each job.
4. Average Template Designs
The work that Yell Web Design team produce is extremely average at best. There never seems to be much thought going into the websites that they create, with the majority of them looking the same through templates. Look at this website for example which we found had been made by Yell Websites from a simple Google search of “web design by yell” builder. Looking at similar sites you will see the same poor web template used time and time again, begging the question – “What is the customer actually paying for?”.
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5. You Don’t Own The Website
What you don’t realise when signing up to Yell Web Design services is that you are in fact only ‘renting’ the website from them. So after paying all the start-up fees and monthly fees for 12 months you are stuck, you either carry on paying these high fees or you go elsewhere hopefully to Wigan Web Design and enquire about our web design services. The problem with the second option is that you have to start a website from scratch and choose a new domain name.
Without bragging (well maybe a little) we are confident that we could get your new website ranking higher than your Yell website ever did in 3 months.
Checkout the poor reviews Yell get on Trust Pilot.
6. Expensive Monthly Hosting Fees
The monthly hosting fees for the various Yell Website packages are expensive to say the least. The average monthly hosting fee that they charge is £96 (inc VAT). That is a grand total of £1,152 for the 12 month contract – just for web hosting! To put that into perspective, our monthly hosting fees range from £10-50 a month, with the £50 monthly fee for larger websites with tens of thousands of online visitors a month. Unlike Yell, we (Wigan Web Design) also give you the option to host the website on your own hosting if you’d like.
We only charge you a monthly fee for hosting to cover our costs.
7. Support
We have all been on hold on the phone to a support team before and then been greeted with a broken English accent that you struggle to understand what’s actually been said.
Well Yell is no different! They have ‘call centres’ all over the word with India, Philippines, Colombia to name a few. We have heard that a customer requested to change the wrong telephone number that was put on their website for over 2 years. We have a UK support team that aim to get back to any questions on the same working day.
The only thing you will have to worry about is understanding our Northern accents!
8. Yell Websites Bad Reviews
Don’t just take our word for it, you can read thousands of bad Yell reviews on Trust Pilot.
A few examples of these reviews are:
“Utter waste of money for the online services.”
“DON’T DO IT! Avoid.”
“Absolutely awful service done nothing that was promised tied me up for 12 months was a complete waste of money”
“It appears that I am not alone in being duped by Yell and then unable to talk to anyone about this.”
“My advice to anyone contemplating buying from Yell is simple – Don’t.”
What Are My Options?
Get in touch with us when you are ready with as many questions as you like or simply ask us to tell you what web design and SEO services we offer.
We are a friendly team and even offer free advice out! We really hate seeing people getting ripped off which is why we made this page to show you how multi millionaire companies con people out of their hard earned cash!
We work hard and are good at what we do, and we genuinely enjoy seeing other businesses doing well off the back of our work – it’s very rewarding!
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