Saturday, May 01, 2004
Keep Your Hands Off My Profession, Asshole I use NetNewsWire Lite, a free Mac-specific weblog newsreader by a company cool enough to have a weblog about their industry, to monitor about 150 websites for recent updates. As you can imagine, most of them have to do with web design and it's how I stay up-to-date in my trade. One of the feeds I subscribe to is the listing of job positions posted on craigslist, since my new job is flexible enough for me to start looking around for freelance work on the side again and build out my portfolio with commercial work. I came across these two listings today, which I shall now christen Piece of Shit #1 and Piece of Shit #2, that I think exemplify the worst side of our industry, those soulless strangers to decency known as "Search Engine Optimizers." I was wrongly lead to believe that the promising headline in my feed ("Experienced Web Designers") meant that I would find a listing for a highly technical web developer position and all that I would have to do is (as usual) scan the ad to see whether it was for a full-time or contract position, then respond if it was for contract work. As you can see by my bile-ridden response below, this is not how the process went for me this morning. I wish I could get my hands on their website or even simply company name so that I could yell this from the mountaintops - I'll settle for passing on an amusing rant for my friends. Reprinted here in its entirety:To whom it may concern, Your salary rates for the "Experienced Web Designer" position is nothing less than shocking and is guaranteed to attract only the most inexperienced newbies willing to do shlock work. But then again you don't offer a link to your website so that a prospective applicant can browse your portfolio of work and judge for themselves whether you do quality work. You've posted another ad as well for a Search Engine Optimizer and although it's also well below industry standard rates, it's nearly double that of the position that actually creates the websites! How can you claim to increase a prospective client's search engine rankings when you employ the people that create the very fabric of their online presence the IT equivalent of slave wages? Newsflash: experienced web designers are so good at rocking new school XHTML/CSS tableless designs that they don't need the "search optimization" snake oil such as you sell. Here's Google's much more descriptive and less vitriolic explanation of how to make good websites in the first place: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html I'm afraid these tips will fall on deaf ears and that the real audience in dire need of these links are the suckers you call potential clients, ones that might be better served by Google's warning about fly-by-night outfits such as yours: http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html Feel free to contact me if you ever need to get reschooled on how not to piss off working web designers and developers that actually know their trade, thereby attracting the talent that would in turn earn the respect of your clients. Al Abut - - - - - http://alabut.com - - - - -