Stephen Chatelain

I live in Findlay, Ohio which has a population of around 37,000. It's a small town, but definitely not a one stop-light village. We have eight companies that market themselves as web design firms - not counting freelancers and hobbyists - that have all been in business for at least a year.

It should stand to reason that eight companies would provide adequate competition and a nice variety of web design styles. However, after doing a little research, I have discovered to my dismay that most of these companies don't actually design anything.

Before I break it down, I must state that I believe in custom web design. What company seriously thinks it can brand itself with a template or stock site? Now for the breakdown:

• 2 use Wordpress for all of their sites
• 2 use Joomla
• 1 sub-contracts all work to one of the above Wordpress companies
• 1 uses Sitefinity which is an asp.net content management system (a la Wordpress and Joomla)
• 1 uses html templates
• and ONLY 1 builds custom web sites from scratch

Wordpress and Joomla have their place in the online world, but that is a very narrow place - blogs. They are too bloated and restrictive for fully-functional web sites. Compare the page-load times of a WP site to a custom one. I almost fall asleep waiting for all the WP plugins to load.

The use of templates is not fair to any client wishing for unique branding. And don't get me started on using Wordpress WITH templates. I wonder if those clients know they have a site that looks like hundreds of other sites.

Despite my barely restrained contempt for these 'fake' design firms, some of the blame has to lie with the clients themselves. They are hiring these firms and paying their bills, and are ultimately responsible for keeping them in business and peddling their stock sites. I have learned firsthand that local clients don't want to spend the money for quality web sites and the design firms have learned this, too. As a result, the firms use the cheapest methods they can to deliver their product.

If this is where web design is destined to stay, I don't have much interest in continuing to build sites. I would much prefer to build custom web applications for which I am solely responsible. Perhaps I can buld the next Facebook or Google. Even if I try and fail, it would be more rewarding than making money peddling templates.