Daily Gripe - amateur web designers

Why is it that anyone who owns Dreamweaver or some such software assumes they are a professional web designer? They begin advertising their services, sometimes for outrageous prices. In some cases, these (often young) amateurs actually do have some talent, but more often than not, their own websites are very childish and sometimes downright disasters.

Case #1: A young person who cannot even spell advertised that he would build sites for a fee. A sample of his writing skill: "i built websites." He claimed he had built many sites. When asked to provide links to sites he had done, he said he had done one for his mom who bought it from him. His mom? Nice, Mom. I appreciate your boosting your child's confidence, but to encourage him to go into business because he created one website?

So I tried to visit his site. I could not get in there. Something on the home page was hanging up my browser. BTW, I have IE, the most commonly used browser, which can handle anything reasonable. I couldn't get past this logjam. He explained it was a media player and his mom wanted it there. Ok. So I asked for an internal link so I could get in. He provided a page with the extension ".php". Now this is a format for things like forms, guestbooks, etc. Not appropriate for a static webpage. Again, I was unable to view the page. Another person tried as well, and found the same problems. She was able to get farther than me, and discovered very oversized photos.

I have to rant about spelling. This young person cannot spell, or doesn't try. I shudder to see what the site looks like if I ever get in there. There's nothing that peeves me more than poor spelling and grammer on a website. I can forgive an occasional misspell, but across the board is unacceptable. Hey, I'm not a perfect speller either, but I keep a dictionary handy. Capital letters where required, commas, periods, and paragraphs are simple things that make it readable.

I believe texting will be the demise of proper writing. Young people are so busy texting, they are forgetting how to form a sentence with fully spelled words and punctuation.

The next major fault of amateurs is images. As mentioned, this site's photos were way too big. For someone with a slow connection like me, that's a sin. A web designer needs to have the software and knowhow to properly optimize images. Even in this day of high speed connections, there are still many out here on dialup, and any webmaster worth his salt will build for everyone, not just their own computer.

So how do you tell a young person he doesn't have the talent or skills to charge for his work?

Case #2: A little over a year ago, I took over the maintenance of a club website. It was designed by a someone who charged professional fees for their services. This wasn't a pro, it was just a person who had web publishing software. I don't own any special software. I read and write pure HTML. In order to work with this site, I had to go through the entire thing and rewrite it. I had to weed out unneccessary and redundant code so I could see where the hell I was. I bet I cut the file size by half! This webmaster did have a good eye for design, but didn't have a clue as to how a webpage works. I preserved the original look of the site with a few tweaks. It's clean, loads fast, and easy for me to maintain. BTW, I'm not charging for this service. It's my contribution to the club.

Just because you own the software and built yourself a site, it doesn't make you a professional. Professionals earned (usually) the right to call themselves pros by taking classes, and proving they have the skills. Even though I have most of the skills, I'm self-taught and don't consider myself a pro by any stretch. Why do these people think they are when they don't even have the skills? All they have is some software. And they can't spell!!!