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.

A statue outside of The Art Institute of Chicago

My photo of a moose at Skansen. An open air museum and zoo in Stockholm.

I posted some photos on Flickr. Although, the photos did not turn out ideally, (what do you expect from an amateur at night?) you can still get some idea how incredible it was.

Of course, I am just one guy who is probably just jealous that his guinea pigs did not make it to the international news spotlight. But I am working on it.

On the bright side, talk of the Obama’s future pet has pushed some of the “Dancing with the Stars” headlines out of the spotlight. Whew!

*Disclaimer: Don’t let the sign fool you, I am an Obama-ite.

I’m pumped.

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!