w3c: January 2007 Archives

There are a lot of honest hard-working designers and developers out there. However, from a client's perspective, there are some things that they should be careful of and that they should possibly question

• The cost of the project seems to low
• The cost of the project seems to high
• The only contact details you can get are a mobile number
• The only contact details you can get are an email address, and it's a free one
• They won't let you choose where you host the site
• They won't let you access the site via FTP even when you ask
• They don't give you access to any form of control panel for email addresses etc.,

Don't get me wrong, not all of these factors mean that you are going to run into trouble. Even if you avoid them you could still "get done" by a "reputable" company. There maybe valid reasons why the developer does things the way that they do, but it can't hurt to ask. There are probably a lot of other things you could add to that list and I expect some developers would defend their stance on some of the items I've included :)

Spamming and lying plain and simple. Ripe claim to be "Ireland's Leading Web Design Company".... Ok. By what measure? Their >own website is a template Monster one. They haven't won any awards. Although they claim their site is XHTML 1.0 Transitional it isn't. If you're going to claim to be a leading web design company I'd have thought validating your site would be a good start.. But what would I know .... From an SEO perspective a quick glance at the page titles tells you how expert they really are. Now don't get me wrong.. I have no issue with competition, but selling yourself as something that you obviously aren't is a bit much. When you couple that with the forum spam that they've been posting all over the place over the last few days you would have to ask yourself... So what have other people being saying? Over on boards.ie they spammed a couple of threads, while on IWF they came up a couple of times Tom Doyle ripped into them, however, and did some digging into their spurious claims... They're making the same kind of claims that I see in our sector regularly. "You're all being ripped off" "You shouldn't pay more than X" (where X is probably below cost if you have staff to pay) But what really gets me is the claim to be "Ireland's leading web design company". I know a lot of web designers and developers who run rings around these guys, but they'd never dream of making that kind of claim I guess time will tell, but if past experience is anything to go by, they won't last

WhiteDust has been revamped for the new year. The new look and feel is quite nice, but some people have found issues with it. Running it through something like SiteVista would help to squash those bugs :) I ran it through the w3c validator and found that although it did throw errors most of them could be easily rectified. All in all it looks well and I hope the content in 2007 is as good as before (they got slashdotted several times)