I had a curious question on here, I've been in discussion recently with a few designers whom I know.
Now I tend to steer towards using the Zend framework for any contracts I get, however I also have used my own minor frameworks on small - few day - jobs. I am by far no designer and often admit that if questioned.
The discussion I was having was related to my friend - arrogantly saying, "you should just buy templates and do the code behind them, templates are used most of the time". Now he considers himself to be a webdesigner , not a developer. So naturally he claims to offer services of SEO, Social Media and Webdesign.
He thinks the time spent developing a design is wasted when he can just buy a template and make the same amount of money and then put that on his portfolio. He's even gone as far to declare a limited company and store all these wordpress templates on his site and claim them as his own "designs".
I was just curious how common is this actually becoming because the more I talk to designers who are entering the field or who have already been in the field are claiming this. Don't get me wrong, what works for them works for them, I personally just do PHP, Ruby work on a system where the designers already done his "stuff", and this is by no means a full time career as I'm still at university.
Was wondering what you chaps thought seeing as I know there are quite a few people on here with very good experience in programming / design?
Well, it isn't very common really. Or not as far as I am aware.
But that Designer friend of yours is doing:
1) Breaking the law by breaking Copyright
2) Lying.
3) Wasting money.
Well, from a Web Designer's point of view, what your friend does hardly constitutes Web Design. Web Design itself is the iterative process of building a custom website which has a design tailored specifically to the company you're producing it for. 'Designers' who go the cheap route and just use template PSDs undermine Web Design as a profession and undermine their clients as well. Design is to facilitate communication with the target audience. Generic, potzy template designs rarely do this well as they're not designed specifically for the company nor their goals or audience, they're just broad, generic designs which say very little and can apply to a broad range of different sites. This depends on the site and the design of course (ie: a wordpress magazine layout is definitely more viable than some cheesy 90's corporate site with stock photos of varying genders and racial descents).
I can understand a web developer may want to give a client a more fully rounded package by chucking in a decent design, which I think is absolutely fine so long as they license it properly and don't claim ownership over the design. Buying a license to use a template does not make you its author nor give you any claims of ownership over the design itself, and claiming that you're a designer because you use templates is unethical and downright misleading; anyone can pay for a template and charge a fee on top of it.
I tend to think of frameworks as a whole different thing altogether. Admittedly I'm by no means a back-end developer so my opinion on this particular subject should be taken with a grain of salt, but a framework still requires a veritable shit-tonne of work; it just lays a foundation for rapid development and allows you to focus on the application. Frameworks are different from PSD templates, where you change some Lorem Ipsum to some text about the company and then ask for money.
[B]tl;dr:[/B] Claiming ownership of a template you haven't made is like claiming ownership of the development framework your web application is built with. I think trying to claim either is ridiculous.
Your friend's an idiot. Basically.
Although, my real pet peeve is people offering "SEO" services when they don't really understand the first thing about SEO.
Well that's good to hear I'm not the only person who thinks the claims I keep seeing about using templates is a bit of kibosh. But some valid points, re: iamacybord, I totally agree that really peeves me off quite a bit. One reason why I mention to the odd client that I can offer minimal SEO services as I'm not a specialist in that field and wouldn't charge as such.
Last time I checked, the very first rule of design is that you're not a designer if the creative work is someone else's.
[QUOTE=iamacyborg;32355978]Your friend's an idiot. Basically.
Although, my real pet peeve is people offering "SEO" services when they don't really understand the first thing about SEO.[/QUOTE]
And I have still not understood why you would need somebody especially for the SEO? Shouldn't the designer + the developer take care of that?
[QUOTE=commander204;32377334]And I have still not understood why you would need somebody especially for the SEO? Shouldn't the designer + the developer take care of that?[/QUOTE]
Because SEO is quite a long process and to get any good results you need to link build. Designers and Developers might be able to sort out the on-page aspects of the template, but they won't be able to suggest the best ways to write articles, the best ways to optimise certain pages for certain keywords, etc.
~web 2.0 social media seo guru~
[QUOTE=H4Z3Y;32390778]~web 2.0 social media seo guru~[/QUOTE]
The worst part is the "guru" bit.
Almost as bad as "web ninja". Whatever the hell that is.
[QUOTE=commander204;32377334]And I have still not understood why you would need somebody especially for the SEO? Shouldn't the designer + the developer take care of that?[/QUOTE]
There's more to SEO than clean markup and meta tags.
[QUOTE=KmartSqrl;32391965]There's more to SEO than clean markup and meta tags.[/QUOTE]
I'm rather tempted to write an SEO guide for dummies. Might be useful for some people.
[QUOTE=iamacyborg;32396309]I'm rather tempted to write an SEO guide for dummies. Might be useful for some people.[/QUOTE]
SEO guide for the perfect world: "Don't write shitty content, jerk."
[QUOTE=StinkyJoe;32396436]SEO guide for the perfect world: "Don't write shitty content, jerk."[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but you can still rank well for a term with shitty content if you know what you're doing.
Will get writing stuff in a google doc and share it for input, might help some people here, particularly when you start adding weird rel tags into the mix, like pagination and authorship.
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