ThirdSide

ThirdSide is great! Jason and Lisa are very easy to work with for both design and web development.
They put together my small business website, as well as the site for a non-​profit my wife and I are a board members for. They are easy to talk to and they hit our budget and schedule right on the mark every time we work with them!

Thirdside is a local graphic design company here in Champaign run by an awesome crew. My husband and I were given a recommendation by another local business owner to go talk to him when we decided to start up our own small business in town. The owner, Jason, took the time to discuss our concept and what we wanted before he went back to his team. At the time we needed a logo and a website. The folks that work for him were very nice, incredibly good at communicating with us, and ended up presenting us with three separate and very different concepts for a logo. After we had chosen our favorite, Jason and his team built upon the logo to make us a really sweet website. The site has gotten nothing but compliments since we opened and our logo is very unique and distinguishable. Since then we have also gone back and gotten business cards from Thirdside to complement our theme. While we are still growing our customer base, we are becoming better known throughout the area in large part due to the designs they came up with. In short, we would not be where we are without the help and support of this wonderful graphic design company. So thank you to Jason, Lisa, and your hard working staff!

I hired Thirdside (
) via elance to revamp my website. Lisa didn’t finish the website by the deadline she herself set. I then asked Lisa for the money back that I’d already paid her. She refused to reimburse me.
I didn’t have a website. I didn’t have anymore faith she could actually create the website. And I had an app launch that was supposed to coincide with a new website relaunch, which clearly wasn’t happening. I was not happy.
So, we went through elance’s mediation and she agreed to give me back half of my money so long as I didn’t leave a negative review of Thirdside on elance. I agreed to it since the elance mediator convinced me that’s all I’d get back if I went to elance’s next stage in resolving disputes, which you have to pay for.
Elance gave Lisa 30 days to reimburse me. I waited and waited and waited for her payment. Then, coming as quite the surprise, on the day the reimbursement was finally due, rather than pay me, Lisa closed up her Thirdside shop on elance and left the website. She didn’t email me or call me.
So, I tracked her down and sent her a letter informing her I was taking her to small claims court to get the reimbursement. It had been two months after the payment was due, but after that, the reimbursement was miraculously sent.
Now she’s back on elance, unbelievably, and elance has listed my job on her account page as «completed» — when it was not — and elance won’t let me review it there because technically she finally paid up. Even if it was months after the due date. Fair, right?
Based on my experience with
, I cannot recommend them.
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UPDATE: Having just read the co-​owner of Thirdside’s response to my Unilocal review and his depiction of what happened, I can only say I’m really happy I was forced to find another web developer who had the advanced skills my site needed, met deadlines, was professional and kept me informed of his progress throughout the entire process.