Hello.
I am not a web developer, but I came to this website because I desperately want an honest answer from a community of developers for my question about a couple of web developers my company hired.
I am a graphic designer working for a small graphic design studio. I know a little bit about HTML and CSS, but not enough to build a website from a blank slate or anything like that. Our studio doesn't do web design. We are a group of print-design specialists. We've always used Squarespace to have our portfolio website, but we didn't know what we were doing, the site was super-slow, and we decided we were better off hiring a professional web developer to have something better.
So, we hired the first guy. He said he could build a full-custom website from scratch with a photo gallery to showcase our past design work beautifully. We paid him $1,000 for it. He did his job, and we were okay with it until my friend mentioned that he'd seen something similar to our website elsewhere. It turned out that he stole the website template they were using for their website and tweaked just a few elements. He didn't do any meaningful "development" at all.
We decided to re-do it again, and we hired another guy. He insisted that we should build our site on WordPress. We paid him around $2,500 to do the work. Again, it looked nice with all the bells and whistles front and back, but it was s.l.o.w. He kept telling us that it was just how things were with a full-featured website nowadays. This time, we dug a little deeper on the technical side of things. To our shock, we found out that this guy used a $50 off-the-shelf premium theme, removed all the branding stuff to hide where it originally came from and made it look like he built it from scratch.
We confronted both of them on separate occasions. They both insisted that it was standard practice. They said it was common for a developer to start with some pre-made stuff to avoid reinventing the wheel much like automobile companies outsource their manufacturing. Quite honestly, we aren't buying it. They are ultimately saying that "custom website" is a matter of tweaking some templates, and they could call themselves a "developer" doing that. How is that different from us doing Squarespace then?? We could've done what these guys did if we knew it was how these guys built their "custom sites." We can't help feeling ripped off.
So, with all that considered, my question is this. Is it normal in your field to regard someone as a "developer" or a "programmer" even if all you do is to tweak a few things and not build something from scratch? How do you qualify someone as "developer" in your field? Maybe our expectation is not reasonable and maybe it is just the way things are when it comes to website constructions? Or, are we getting ripped off?
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.
Unfortunately, I think it is relatively common for people who can work only by tweaking existing templates and frameworks to call themselves a "developer." Your post reminds me of this article:
devwp.eu/development/dont-call-yourself-a-develop…
The author discusses the exact problem you bring up in your question. I tend to agree with him, and I'm also sure that Jason Knight can say a lot about what he thinks of the article. ;)
In any case, I think the people you hired cut a lot of corners and overcharged you for their work. It's a red flag when I hear stuff like someone using an off-the-shelf premium theme for a WordPress project that's supposed to be a "full-custom" job. I wouldn't pay any more than $30 for someone to customize it for me if I were in your situation and that's what you want. (= Hire someone to customize for you so you won't need to mess with it yourself.) But then, I wouldn't even use such shortcut myself. WordPress premium themes are bad news in my past experiences using them.
My opinion on this is going to upset some folks.
I would say in both cases you encountered the typical sleazy dishonest fly-by-night dirtbags who specialize in ripping people off. If they had to it is highly likely they would be able to create anything fresh out of the box for the simple fact they don't know how.
The majority of con men out there calling themselves developers do this, so yes they were 100% right when they said it is pretty much standard practice... and that's a massive problem in this industry right now!
Site owners are slowly starting to wise up to this, but in general because the normal person doesn't know anything about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, emissive colourspace, or any other aspect of building a site properly, it becomes ridiculously easy for these two-bit scammers to saddle people up and take them for a ride.
This situation is often only exacerbated by the fact most of these off the shelf templates they start with are themselves poorly coded and developed, and in fact could be telling large swaths of your potential visitors to go such an egg. As these jokers themselves slapping together and modifying these templates rarely have the proper knowledge of the underlying languages, they're unqualified to even know if what they are handing you is garbage or not.
... which is why I have told more than a few clients the past five or six years to sue for damages. Particularly if they did something like use an off the shelf template and didn't tell you that's what they were doing.
It's one thing to tell you they're buying off the rack, it's something different entirely when they do so and then have the nerve to call it bespoke... since then it's not even tailored. For all intents and purposes such "developers" little more than glorified alterations ladies.
You work with print graphics? Great, you'll know exactly what you got then; you didn't get artists or an artisans, you got plagiaristic tracers. The guys who brag about what great artists they are when everything they've ever done has been paint-overs of magazine cover photographs.
... and whilst yes, that is pretty much industry standard, that doesn't make it right. It just means they're part of the sleazy fly-by-night scam artists who have destroyed any sort of ethics, morality, or decency in the industry.
It's something I'm always saying, always pointing out, and always fighting against no matter how many people that might upset for the simple fact that it is dishonest, two-faced, and nothing more than outright con-artistry.
Simply put, anyone telling you to use Wordpress for business doesn't know enough about websites to be making them for businesses. Anyone who uses off the shelf frameworks or templates and has the brass to claim that it's a custom solution is bald faced lying. The people using these broken, nonsensical practices on the whole basically are nothing more than predators, taking advantage of your ignorance so they can charge you several thousands for work that I would feel guilty charging $50 for.
Just be thankful you're not working in healthcare, banking, public utilities, or government agencies where the typical results of these sleazy shortcuts can land you in court with four to six digit fines per DAY. Because the folks who slop together these ready-built answers don't know the first blasted thing about the underlying technologies they most often result in sites with major accessibility violations, which in certain industries and types of sites can run afoul of contractual obligations, or laws such as the US' ADA or UK's EQA.
that's are really good question! Let put it in an analogy in design do you reinvent all shapes of your design?
If you can build those things and you know how they work you can call yourself something.
I love the reasoning of reinventing the wheel ;D .... but lets go down to what happened ... you paid someone to build you a homepage and they used a template. That is common business usually a qualified person would not necessarily use an existing complete template but reusing existing parts is common.
It's hard to asses the work and the output based on 'they reused things that existed' this is like blaming you for your photoshop presets .... the amount of work needs to be tracked ... but if you went for a fixed price instead of hours that can be proven you somehow have yourselves to blame as well.
just the basic calculation -> i googled a standard fee for freelancer $70 per hour in north america that would mean you paid less than worth of 40h of work. The question of quality is something else. But for quality $2.5k ? the process alone of sitting with you guys talking on what you need and want and how it should be done, sending you different templates really would probably already cost half of it.
I understand you feel ripped of ... I don't say he didn't rip you off ... all I can say is that 2.5k is not much and if bad comes to worse it's cheaper to install a cache plugin + putting a reverse proxy (something like cloudflare) in front of your homepage to speed things up. So you can compensate for the slow hosting etc.
but without technical data or anything similar it's hard for me give any assessment besides things I can google and speak from experience.
But maybe some americans can provide better feedback Jason Knight for example.
I agree with Jason Knight wholeheartedly. I have a few comments to add involving the non-technical stuff.
In my opinion, this should all be part of the contract. When you create a contract for work with someone, specify exactly what you are looking for! The more specific the better. This does a few things:
That's how I would handle it - everything else is subjective and water over the dam... Also, this is probably the only way you could win a lawsuit successfully because as you noticed "developer" is not a protected term meaning that there is no special license or credentials someone needs to call themselves that, unlike a Doctor or Attorney which require special credentials. So instead of relying on the title, rely on the specifics of the job which are clearly spelled out in the contract. Otherwise, get a recommendation from an acclaimed developer so you know you aren't dealing with a dirtbag.
The problem is now that no matter what we say - if you sue one one these guys, their defense will be "Well, I did it to the best of my abilities, I have 50 other happy customers, and this is standard practice." That's a pretty good defense when there's no contractual obligation otherwise.