Crystal Blue Solutions - San Diego, California

dinesh kumar

Crystal Blue Solutions completely transformed our business operations! Their expertise in streamlining processes and user-friendly data base development elevated our efficiency to new heights.

Nikoo Sadat

I've been the Crystal Blue Solutions customer in the past few years and I really appreciate all supports, help, new ideas, and facilitating incredible services to my business. The staff are easy to communicate, available, and walking me through steps to enhance my practice. I am so grateful of being connected with this business. I really recommend this services to people who wants to run their business smooth and to their best potential.

Thanks,
Dr. Nikoo

Victoria Mazza

So grateful for this company! Professional, honest, and fast results! Thank you Crystal Blue Solutions for all that you do. We finally found the missing link to help our business grow!

Tamra Baca

We're glad that others had a good experience with CBS. We did not. Our project seemed simple: Convert a WordPress site for a non-profit into a custom website. Their work was somehow worse than useless. We have so many problems now with the new site that we would have been better off not using them at all. We no longer have the previous functionality, reports, or speed of our previous site. It was a complete waste of $10,875.26 (an amount that our organization had to scrape to afford). We do not recommend them. For more details, see below:

Reporting from the Website - Our previous reporting was far more customizable and we could filter out unwanted or duplicate values. We can't do that anymore. Now we must pull down larger tables and use Excel to tailor out the cruft. Even though this functionality should have been in scope for the project (they were supposed to replicate our previous site, which had this functionality), CBS told us that fixing this would "require changes to the code, which would cost more money". This complaint leads me neatly along to the next - and perhaps biggest - area where they failed.

The Database - We now have a Microsoft Database Certified person on our staff who was able to pull down the database that CBS built. We suspect they copied and pasted the structure from a previous project and tried to apply it to this project. According to our DBA, there are a myriad of tables that make no sense to have, and CBS didn't normalize/decompose some of these larger tables. Our DBA suspects that CBS didn't create an Entity Relationship Diagram, which probably explains where most of our problems stem from.

Security - At some point during the development process, our production environment was susceptible to SQL injection. This was proven by our previous IT Administrator when she ran a query into a search field, and it brought back all of the results for the table associated with that field. We then had a white-hat take a look and he was able to find passwords, sensitive data, and could have dropped tables. He could have done ALL of this with SQL injection. To be fair, CBS did end up fixing this, but it shouldn't have been incumbent on us to test for these kinds of issues. To my mind, a firm with "highly qualified experts" should have been able to catch this without customer intervention.

Their Bedside Manner - The staff they used for this project were - to my view - patronizing to our previous admin. When she brought up the SQL injection concerns from above, she was immediately brushed off by their development team. They gave her the "the possibilities of 'SQL Injection' is not there" treatment as if she had no idea what she was talking about. After the research she put into the above concern, she absolutely knew what she was talking about, but it wasn't until the white-hat report was provided and higher echelon leadership at CBS got involved that she was taken seriously. Our admin had even stated that she was fine if the testing wasn't done yet, but her concern was that the minute she brought it up via email, she was shut down. They did fix this problem eventually. But our previous admin had to provide - in my opinion - more evidence than necessary to even have them look into this. In the meantime, the website was indeed vulnerable.

It could be that our experience was a fluke. But a $10,875.26 fluke still costs $10,875.26. To this day we are dealing with the above issues, coming up with workarounds, and re-building the site through WordPress during spare time. Not what you want from a web development firm.

And, Lisa - Since we know you read/delete our reviews. Any reader should be made aware that all claims held out as fact in this review can be substantiated with email threads, recorded virtual meetings (with YOU on the call specifically), or possessing the gift of sight. This review contains many specific examples of where our ire comes from. It didn't just fall out of the sky.

holly roselle

Before coming to Lisa at Crystal Blue Solutions I had gone through 2 other web developers that simply could not complete my web site. Lisa's team was able to successfully complete my website, always hanging in there with me through all the details that were important to me. Now, it's done and looks amazing!

Cassandra Foster

I only have ONE word to express the gratitude service and the spirit of "Excellence" that Crystal Blue Solutions has provided to our website and social media. "AWESOME"

Marcus y Marcos

Lisa is a marketing SUPERSTAR! I am an attorney and partner in a small firm in the competitive San Diego legal market. We hired Crystal Blue Solutions in the summer of 2014.

In just a few short months of managing our Facebook and other social media platforms Lisa and Crystal Blue Solutions took us from 4 followers to over 500! As her client I feel that she is attentive and accessible by telephone, email and text.

It is obvious that she loves what she does, is very knowledgeable and has a genuine desire to see small business succeed through the power of social media.

If you want to increase your business' "reach" your choice could not be any more crystal clear!

Elizabeth Kurtz

Lisa was so easy to work with and continues to be. Her team is top notch! I couldn't believe the turnaround time! I was impressed!