Spam: spæm
1. Trademark. a canned food product consisting esp. of pork formed into a solid block.
2. Noun. A disruptive, esp. commercial message posted on a computer network or sent as e-mail.

I get a lot of spam, as  I am certain anyone stumbling across this post does, as well. I usually identify, select, and delete without much thought. However, I often receive spam from our Fisticuff Design web site and, I have to admit, I find it pretty amusing receiving emails attempting to sell us on web development services.

I mean, I receive a lot of emails. Some from potential or existing clients. Some from job seekers. It is one thing when freelancers contact looking to be an additional resource (it is always good to have reliable assets available in a pinch), but it’s a whole different scenario if you are trying to sell a web developer a new web site. It seems to me it is much like trying to sell TG Lee Dairy a gallon of milk.

Now I realize that it is entirely unlikely that the “person” sending the message even exists or actually visited our web site. I am sure it is originating from a web crawler / bot / whatever that is sending this to as many email addresses as it can before the powers that be shut it down. For me, though, it does not really diminish the comedic value.

Well, I am simple folk and I suppose I am easily amused.

Following the initial post, we contacted the design company who offered to pay us. This was certainly not about money, for us, it was a matter of respect. Needless to say, we declined and asked that they simply do the work they were originally hired to do, create a unique website for their client. They did not.

At the time of this initial post, we did not feel the need to contact The Flying Steamshovel, directly. Perhaps we should have, but we felt Empire New Media (the thieves) should own up to their actions of their own accord.  No such luck.

Fast forward to August 2009. I received an email from The Flying Steamshovel expressing their concern for the way our post made them look and asked that I remove direct mention of their name in the text. Which I agreed I would do IF they agreed to redesign their website. To quote them,

“what matters here most is making things right on our end.”

and

“The General Manager of The Flying Steamshovel is on board with making major changes to the website, as soon as possible.”

Feeling good about humanity, I decided to uphold my end of the bargain, and referred to The Flying Steamshovel as TFS so that their customers would no longer find my blog when searching for their British Columbia based pub.

Well, it is now June, almost one year later and there have been no updates to the look of The Flying Steamshovel website. I think as a whole, Rene and I have been quite understanding and generous in allowing either Empire New Media or The Flying Steamshovel to rectify the situation. So today, I returned my blog post to its original text.

With that, I would just like to implore all web designers to just do your own work. If that is beyond your ability, then perhaps you are in the wrong line of work.

The Flying Steamshovel

I suppose I should begin by “thanking” Empire New Media (empire-newmedia.com ^*) for their apparent compliment to the design/programming abilities of Rene and myself. Yesterday, I was checking some web stats for Fisticuff Design Co. when I came across a site, which I had never heard of, that had links to us on several pages. I decided to navigate over to The Flying Steamshovel^*** to see what they had to say. I was quite surprised to see a blatant ripoff of the Fisticuff site. As I looked through the site, I realized that Empire not only took the background texture, various flourishes, and overall look of the site, but when I looked at the HTML source code, I realized that they copy and pasted the entire structure of our code, even the CSS file.

Fisticuff Design Co.

I am a firm believer that the most integral part of any successful design is research. I believe that learning from and gaining inspiration from one another is an integral part of how we grow as designers. I do not condone, nor will Fisticuff Design stand for, fraud, thievery, or other sorts of dishonest behavior.

To their credit (hint of sarcasm), Empire did take the time to change a class and id name here or there, (like “narrowcolumn” and “widecolumn” to “smallcolumn” and “bigcolumn), in some effort to cover up their deceit. However, the entire style sheet was left in the same order, the same format, the same font size values, etc. Really, almost everything. Feel free to view some side by side comparisons.

You may be asking yourself, “why would Empire steal your design concept, copy your code in its entirety, and then decide to provide a link to the Fisticuff site”? That is an excellent question, I immediately asked the very same thing. The brief answer is, they did not. Rather, they did not do so intentionally.

When examining their (our) code, I noticed in the footer of each page of the The Flying Steamshovel site, Empire neglected to change an href tag from fisticuffdesign.com to the new domain. See below.

Click to see larger image

Click to see larger image

Perhaps it is merely the price one pays for building a positive reputation through hard work, dedication, and truly believing in what one does. Or, on the other hand, is it more likely that Empire New Media are simply too lazy, and possibly incapable, of doing quality work of their own?

I have only one item left to add: Bad form, Empire New Media. Bad form indeed.
^*Authors Note: I deliberately left out the hyperlink to EmpireNewMedia.com. I see no reason to give them the benefit of a link-back. Does that make me petty?

^**EDIT:Meaning no disrespect to the CLIENT, I have abbreviated all text referencing them as: TFS. My intention here is not to tarnish their name. Rather, I want to show the sort of web “riff raff” that is Empire New Media and expose Empire’s apparent “work ethic” (or lack thereof).

^***EDIT:The above edit (**) has since been removed due to The Flying Steamshovel neglecting to live up to an agreement made that they would redesign their website.

New Projects

• That’s Rentertainment Inflatables added to the portfolio
• Casa del Lago web site added to the portfolio
• Barfly Bar Catering updated in the portfolio (we completed the site redesign)

New Functionality

• Javacript updated to degrade a bit more gracefully
• Addition of slider for the portfolio thumbnails
• Added an AJAX project loader

More to come and we’re still working out some of the kinks. Let me know if you come across any bugs.

Regards!

• On Command Shift 3 we have currently won 500 out of 654 battles. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what that means exactly, but it must be cool. I mean winning is good, right?
• Web Designer Wall
• Sawse.com gave us some excellent kudos in this post.
• CSS 2.0
• Don’t Get Stuck currently has us featured on their “inspiration” side bar.

So, thank you everyone who continues to give us praise and recognition.

Thanks for the recognition!

edit: 11/10/2007

A quick update of the list of sites promoting Fisticuff (some may have been mentioned in the past):

• CSS Mania
• CSS Design Yorkshire
• The Best Designs
• ScreenFluent.com
• CSS Artillery
• Fave Up
• Designcentre
• CSS Container
• CSS Beauty
• Stumble Upon
• Most Inspired
• Snap2Objects.com – Why Your Site Should Have Personality?
  
• Snap2Objects.com – How to Destroy the Web 2.0 Look
• Typo9
• The Daily Slurp

Not to mention, we just heard that Fisticuff Design will be featured in the next publication by the Web Design Index. They’ve been putting out an annual web design index since 2000. It is definitely an honor to make into the ranks!

Again, to all those giving us props, Rene and I appreciate the love!

Recently, Rene and I have been working on a couple of new projects.

Stirling Sotheby’s hired us to design and build a new website for the Casa del Lago luxury residential community in Windemere, FL. The goal of this project is to compliment the ongoing marketing campaign Stirling has been developing for the community. They wanted Fisticuff Design to create a website with a soft and elegant look without a lot of bells and whistles. The site needed to be straight forward and to cleanly display a lot of community information.

That’s Rentertainment Inflatables, LLC.

Also in the works is That’s Rentertainment Inflatables, LLC. They are a small company based out of Leonardtown, MD providing inflatable houses and slides for a varitey of social events. We were hired to develop a complete branding and online presence from the ground up. So far we have created the logo, business cards, and marketing website.

That’s Rentertainment has a varying clientele, so they wanted a fun website, but such that it is not distracting from the necessary information.

Both websites are in the final testing stages. So, feel free to check them out. Let us know what you think, feedback is always appreciated.

Web design sees the same trends, whether we are talking about the “it� color scheme you see so much you think we went from 216 web safe colors to 2. Perhaps you see it in the hot new programming language that gives us so many new abilities that everyone is using them. Whether or not they should is debatable. Maybe, we see it in the way so many layouts start to look like they were sliced from a cookie cutter.

The web not only mimics fashion in its fads, but also in the way we are able to watch styles evolve. We see the fashion world evolve its styles so drastically, that eventually everything comes full circle to where it began. If memory serves me, bell bottom jeans made a brief come back in the ‘90’s.

Example: I recall making my initial leap from what I like to call “high school� web activities (you know, scouring the ol’ triple w for low res pictures of Elle MacPherson for my desktop wallpaper) to a genuine attempt to bring reall content, design, and user appeal to the online world. Back then, the average screen resolution we were designing for was 640 x 480. Gradually, we evolved to 800 x 600 and finally to 1024 x 768, which seems to be fairly standard these days. Now, with the ever expanding world of hand held devices becoming increasingly web capable, we once more must consider such miniscule dimensions in our design processes.

Don’t get me wrong. I love all of these gadgets. I was playing around on an ipod touch the other day to view the Fisticuff Design site, (it looked gorgeous, by the way), and I can admit that I cannot wait to have one. I suppose I just find these things amusing in that I just begin to get the hang of something and someone has to go and put everything in an uproar. I guess it helps to keep you on your toes.

Needless to say, we are quite pleased with this preliminary installment and, while we do have other features in the works (particularly in the portfolio section), we would be grateful to receive any feedback you have to offer.

So, without further ado, please check it out and send us your thoughts. Contact us through the web site’s contact form or directly via e-mail at email@fisticuffdesign.com.

So wish us luck and if you’re looking to contract out some work, look us up! (end: shameless plug)