Taperouge Editorial Desings

Quality fine

Listen. I know this web site might not be the greatest in the world. It might not be the most beautiful, nor the most organized, and maybe not even the most interesting. But I do worry about doing things right, to the best of my knowledge.

Today I had the opportunity to take a look at a design agency's portfolio site. They were trying to pitch a sale of a web service application and I was curious to see how they worked. Obviously, the first thing I noticed was that in their e-mail signature was the address to their web site. So there I went.

My first impression was OK. Strong graphic design. But as soon as I started to go through the menu, page after page came up with "404 page not found" messages and "500 server error" messages.

"Are they trying to sell web applications?", were my thoughts.

"Well, let's take a look at what's wrong..." EVERYTHING! The most basic tags were missing. Definitely not a good sign.

When contracting web services try to ask someone for help to evaluate the quality of what is being offered if you are not sure. This simple snoop under the hood can reveal a lot about what's going on. It might even give you a hint as to whether the services will be rendered as promised or not.

To me, looking at other people's work is always a way to measure my own work. To evaluate if I'm doing things as I should or if there's a better way.

Can you guess if they got the job?

24Apr2008| share this!