I met Amanda earlier this year when she needed some work done to blackpotsafaris.co.za. We concluded that work and then started the next project which was umsisihouse.co.za. The website was to be a wordpress site and hosted on her servers. I queried whether the servers were capable of hosting wordpress and was assured they were.

Once I had completed the theme tested on one of my test domains, I decided to transfer the work to the servers. Nothing I tried gave me any success. I then registered a domain umsisi.co.za and placed the working website on it. I suggested to Amanda Castleman of Umsisi House that we place a redirect on umsisihouse.co.za to the umsisi.co.za. Her answer was not at all pleasant and her rejection of my offer was unmistakable.

I removed her website from umsisi.co.za and tried once more to communicate with her service providers. They were unable to resolve the problem. I advised Amanda Castleman that I had achieved an impasse but could prove that the code was functional. I invoiced, she refused to pay and unilaterally cancelled the agreement.

When I insisted on payment she made legal threats. After discussion with my wife we decided to walk away. The effort of trying to claim R2500.00 just seemed like a lot of PT. I then continued with other projects.

A couple of months later I was contacted by Amanda Castleman of Umsisi House and asked to transfer the umsisi.co.za domain. I suggested that I would happily do so upon receipt of payment for the work I had done and a sum for the domain. It was ranking well on google for umsisi house and still does despite the fact that the article on the site is about the coral tree known to the Siswati as Umsisi.

Imagine my surprise when I received a lawyers letter today accusing me of hanging on to umsisi.co.za purely to rank for umsisi house. Now I suppose that Amanda Castleman of Umsisi Housecan be forgiven for thinking that a SEO practitioner such as myself would be unable to rank for Umsisi House without the domain.

I guess we shall have to prove that ranking for a business name is not impossible when you have enough skill.

PS Amanda, it would be awesome if you paid your account. It is now at 150 days. Within 10 minutes of my writing this article I was the second site listed for umsisi house and the fourth for black pot safaris on Google.com I predict I could achieve number one with a little work. This was just to easy

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