Bad-web-design-hydra sprouts new head

There have been posters put up around my city touting web-pages for $50. They come from a Wisconsin based web design “company” called Bat Cave Productions. They should have stayed in their cave, along with the TemplateMonster templates that they’re reselling.

This kind of poor web design, with no regards for standards or originality is running rampant, not just in my town, but across the web. The only upside to having these people around is they’ll scoop up the clients who’s budgets are so low that they’re not worth the effort. Nonetheless, I’m a little peeved at the gall of people who have the nerve to sell templates to people under the guise of web design and convince them that this is a good strategy for being on the web. It undermines everything that we stand for. It’s the small-time farmer producing organic food being run out of town by the corporate farms who can produce more product at a lower price. Ignoring, of course, that that product has lower nutritional content and health value, and is loaded with byproducts, pesticides and is genetically modified in ways which we don’t yet know the consequences of. Except in our case, we do know the consequences. Bad web design is littering the web with unreadable, unmanagable, unmaintainable and non-forward-looking code. This is not Web 2.0.

Bad design and cheap websites degrade what we do for a living. Our customers come to expect more for less. My clients didn’t care about web standards to begin with, so I don’t try to explain them. But it’s hard to justify the extra work I put into a page to make it both original and valid when I could just slap a template up and fill in their content.

I can only hope that my clients will see the value of a custom designed web page with a fluid back end CMS and valid code.