In your opinion, is this right?

suarve

suarve

suarve

Soldato
Joined
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Just wondering what your opinions are on the following.

Say a web company used a wordpress theme (http://demo.arrastheme.com/ ) to make a so called bespoke site (the site is identical to theme I linked) would this be right? They are marketing themselves as innovative and bespoke sites and I know it cost their client a fair bit.

I'd link to site directly, but I don't think it would be right.

What are you opinions?
 
Someone has fobbed another's theme as their own? Happens all the time, and no, it's not right but then it could be that the client asked for that very specific design. I've made sites for people that have said "We want it to look exactly like this other persons site" to which I've made my arguments, but at the end of the day.. it's their site, and most importantly, their money.
 
They haven't tried to even fob it off as a theme, they have sold it as a bespoke design and content management system (it uses wordpress?!?!?!). So it like me googling a for a random wp theme, changing the blog title and saying to client, here's you site.

Seems very wrong to me.
 
Its not right, but it happens all the time and even more so with the amount of small independent "web designers" who are quite often college/uni students out to make some beer money. (not saying that well established and highly acclaimed web designers dont/wont do the same)

As Jestar says, if you get a specific of what the customer wants, then who are you to argue.
If it happens to be a free GPL software with a free template.. then its money for old rope and some will take advantage, I'm afraid to say that I would probably do the same thing to keep a paying client happy, but I'd obviously let my client know that it's not bespoke from the ground up and give them a better price.
 
It isn't right. But things are marketed in this fashion all the time, and it's really up to the customer to be a little more aware of what they're getting for their money. A bit of research works wonders.

(Also, that site doesn't centre properly in Firefox or IE8, so it looks terrible!)
 
I recently had a meeting with a few people who were looking to get a site redeveloped, the company in question are using an open source cms with readily available templates, they are charging 10k. a lot of money for the site, but there is an absolute crap load of information to migrate over.

That and it aint my money so who cares :P
 
Using Open Source materials/tools is fine, you're not charging for them directly, you are charging for the time taken to prep and set them up. :)
 
Dj_Jestar said:
Using Open Source materials/tools is fine, you're not charging for them directly, you are charging for the time taken to prep and set them up. :)
Click to expand...

If it was a hugely customised wordpress install I could understand. But the site in question is literally a bog standard wordpress install (they added a link to theor web page in the footer - 10 second job) with a theme applied. I know a developer who works for this company so will try to find out who much they charged :) Am interested as I know they charge quite a lot anyways (£95 admin charge minimum!).

I mean you can't charge much at all for installing wordpress (my mum could it now they've made the web installer better), downloading a theme, uploading the theme and pressing apply theme can you?
 
If it's all the client wants, what does it matter? If they've charge 10k for the thing then that's too high but if it's a few hundred quid then fine. Making a site for a client isn't usually a quick or simple process, it requires management and administration, all of which have to be paid for even if creating the site doesn't take very long. The fact they used wordpress itself itsn't an issue, there are other commerical cms's which they could've used, are just as easy to setup and come with theme's (but you have to pay a license for the cms of course) that would do the same job but possibly be massive overkill for their client and more expensive. Wordpress fits the small budget cms niche quite nicely, especially in the current climate.
 
The worst is that it's broken in Opera, so not only is their marketting dodgy, but their coder sucks.

Often clients are too cheap to actually finance proper bespoke designs and proper CMS implementations. As Markeh said, if they paid top dollar for this then it's very very wrong. If they only had £400 to spend, then they got what they paid for.
 
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