I was browsing Michele Neylons Blog today when this post caught my attention.
Given the amount of coverage that this company has received, I am not going to name it or link to their website. But you’ll find it quickly enough if you follow the links on Michele’s blog.
I’ve recently decided to devote more time to my web design hobby, and see if I can go semi-professional with it. So when I saw this post, I thought to myself there could be some handy pointers here. How right I was. The company in question seems to have annoyed a lot of Irish web designers with their claims of being the country’s best and cheapest web design shop.
A claim of this magnitude requires a lot of evidence to back it up. However, in this case, the problem arises that they are a new company and therefore have no clients as of yet.
Apparently, on the original version of their site, they created some portfolio mock-ups using well known company names. Companies which they hadn’t actually done any work for. But that’s not all. The mock-ups they used were created using standard templates from a well known website: Template Monster. And they claimed to be charging one-fifth the price the normal development costs of other designers.
I design websites in my spare time. I have a portfolio of sites that I have written and maintain. My portfolio contains exactly two live sites and I have another two in the works. But at no point would I describe myself as being the best web designer in the country. I know exactly where I stand in relation to the large we design houses, and I have no problem with that. I’m not aiming to design websites for multinational conglomerates. I’m aiming for the exact same market that this company is – small companies who want a presence on the Internet, but don’t have the budget to go to a large design house.
All the websites I design are hand typed. I don’t use WYSIWYG editors or templates. I type everything out in a basic text editor, and continuously review the results using Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 & 7, and Opera. So while I respect their decision to aim at the lower end of the market, I just don’t get how they can justify themselves as the best web design company in Ireland. Not when you look at the portfolios that some of these companies have.
Tags: Internet, irish, templates, template_monster, Web Design, whatithink