Words to live by:

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”

– Hellen Keller

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Recently, I received a referral from a client of mine, a lovely lady who needs some WordPress tweaks done for her. So I spent some time on the phone with her talking about what she’s been through, what her site is about, and what she would like her site to evolve into. She admitted that she is technically challenged.

Now, some unscrupulous consultants would instantly use this tidbit of information to take advantage of the client by over-charging, basically ripping them off. I know this for a fact, as I’ve seen it happen with other clients, and I think this new client of mine was indeed ripped off because she paid a whopping $600 for a “custom” Artisteer WordPress theme!

For those of you who don’t know, Artisteer is a theme generator. It’s a great tool if you’re banging out basic sites, but there is nothing really custom about it, and the code it outputs is akin to the mess Frontpage used to generate. Horrible messy code. And, the client could have bought the Artisteer software herself for $50 or $130, depending on the version, spent a week playing with the software, and come up with her own design, if she was so inclined.

I informed the client of this. She asked me how I knew it was an Artisteer design. And I said very simply, and I proceeded to tell her that on her web browser she just needs to click “View” and then select “page source”. A pop-up page opens that shows all the code of the current page. The code to look for is a dead giveaway that it is an Artisteer-generated site and it looks similar to this:

All Artisteer templates have “art” as a prefix for all CSS classes and ID’s. There you go – knowledge is power.

For the record, there’s nothing wrong with creating a website for a customer using Artisteer. As long as the customer knows what he or she is getting, and certainly the price you charge should be equivalent to the total time spent on the project. A person familiar with Artisteer can whip up a design in minutes to an hour. Yes, there is going to be time spent designing a custom header perhaps, and time spent consulting with the client, but I really think that charging $600 for a generated template and touting it as “original” is simply wrong.

People like the designer who gouged my new client give us web design consultants a bad name. It just makes me sick. What do you think?

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Turn the news off, try to stop all thinking about what you are watching, because there is just so much stuff going on in our crazy world, that it can really be over-whelming for those of you who are sensitive souls. I know if you stay at my site, you’ll see that I’m, indeed, a sensitive soul. So I really like doing things that bring peace to the mind and soul. Music usually does the trick.

This weekend, I decided that I wanted to focus on the beautiful, peaceful visions of our world. So I got a little creative, and dug up some stock photos I had of mostly water scenes, found some nice faerie music, played around with some transitions, and ended up with my own relaxation video. I thought perhaps it could help you relax, too. Here you go…

Relax…

ps: there is a lot more good in this world than there is bad, and therein lies our hope.

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