We feel that it is important that we only provide services were we have the necessary expertise to properly handle the work, that isn’t something that is shared by every other web development company, as were recently reminded in a situation involving a Magento upgrade.
We were contacted by a web development company about doing a Magento upgrade for them (the company portrays themselves as being based in New York, despite it being rather obvious they are actually based out of India due to things like the companies name ending “IN” after the rest of the name was in lower case). After sending a few emails back and forth they were supposed to be getting us the login details to get started working on the upgrade.
Four days later they get back to us and say they had now upgraded the Magento software, but needed help upgrading the extension. We were rather perplexed by this, as it is much easier to upgrade the extensions than Magento, so how is that they could handle upgrading Magento, but not the extensions? When we asked them that we didn’t get a direct answer, instead they replied with the steps they took to upgrade Magento.
The steps they took indicated that they didn’t not actually know how to upgrade Magento, that started with it looking like they had just copied the steps from some random website. That is concerning since they apparently were not even familiar enough with Magento to even know about the official upgrade instructions. Of more concern is that they were not doing things right, as they skipped doing a test of the upgrade, which is very important to having a successful upgrade. Something their customer is unfortunately fairly likely to find out down the road when something doesn’t work right on the upgraded website.