Yes, they can themselves developers but... they weren't honest with you and you actually got ripped off. They should've explained you the different offers or the technologies to use. Specially if you were paying some kind of lotta money. May be they weren't programmers and that was all they knew, who knows. But you expected something else and you should have demanded that based on your first experience. Custom websites is not a matter of tweaking templates, sure if you are a programer you can get some help. But if your customer ask you for custom down from the botton to the top you have to do it, and of course charge what's due. A programmer is not a simple tweaker because he knows how to build what is tweaking and why whe he does. But a developer may be just a tweaker of CMS's and templates. Wordpress was supposed to be easy for the end user, but there are people that just don't have the time, and maybe want their wordpress with extra features and there are profesionals in wordpress who know hoe to programm those features. But that's not to say that every person is a profesional. So you qualify him by his knowledge and his reaching, what is capable of doing. programmer does not equal developer. May be a good developer or one of the bunch that are beginning into the world of programming. Nop, changing images in a template does not make you a developer. Being able to put things together, set up serves and services, mixing the righ libriries and using them, may be, but you are limited to what exist. Same apply to programmers, there are bad, good and excelent programmers and their tool are logic, rmembering resourses, inside lenguage functions, the range of lenguages they know, how well they know each lenguage and how well they know how to apply them to solve problems or even knowing what question to ask to solve those problems.