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12 06 08

Majority of Devon Web Designers are amateurs

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Majority of Devon Web Designers are amateurs.

Doing a search for "devon web design" in Google produces a list of 386,000 entries. Obviously these are not all Devon based businesses. We ran out of Devon located designers on page 50. However, this is still 500 people offering web design. This is not a particularly scientific test, we simply looked at the top 100 sites for issues such as "black hat" search engine optimization, meeting W3C Web Standards validation, legal accessibility and checking the companies statements against their visible skills and quality of their portfolio.

The vast majority could easily be seen to be complete amateurs.

  • They generally do not have design or programming qualifications
  • Have very little actual design skill
  • Use off the shelf or open source solutions
  • Have a portfolio full of what I can only describe as complete rubbish without even a minimum design quality, usability or technical ability.
  • They break current illegal accessibility laws (it is their clients who will end up being sued!)
  • Lie about the size of their company and their clients
  • Use freelancers or even outsource to the third world without disclosing this
  • Claiming to be "Award Winning" when the awards in question are handed out to anyone
  • Use phrases such as "professional web design", "leading web design company", "top web design company" when their is no evidence to back this up.

I am sure that most of these people will try to deny the above. I have already received a number of emails from local companies threatening us with some sort of action or other. This is particularly strange as we have not yet named a single company...

I am sure we all frown on such practices and would wish to clean up our industry. To this end Integralvision is taking steps to draw attention to these companies. These will include:

Reporting them to Google
Reporting them to Trade Associations (local and national)
Reporting them to Trading Standards
Reporting them to Business Link
Reporting them to their clients
Publishing their company names on the Web along with screenshots of their methods
A nationwide media campaign to clean up our industry.

There will an announcement shortly regarding a new website we are developing to focus on these issues.

information

Google Webmaster Guidelines Google strongly encourages you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines", which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalised.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.