Compass Designs .net

OK, so this is firmly in the rant category.

I recently got an email from a good friend of mine who is a veterinarian. She is starting her own practice and seeking website advice. I said I'd be happy to help, and in our emails back and forth she sent me a link to a site she liked.

I checked it out, and it was OK. It was created by a company that makes vet websites. I looked at some of their services, and a gradual sense of horror took over.

They are charging $3500 for a website (that's an average design using a Microsoft font logo) and charging for "updates". Hello? This is the 21st century people, we don't have updates. We build clients content management sites with things like Joomla and teach them how to easily update it themselves.

They have an awful lot of copy about SEO, and their SEO services. One bit of killer advice for their customers was to register multiple domains to "capture web real estate". Unless I miss something, at best this will get you problems with PageRank dilution, at worst a possible duplicate content penalty of some kind.

Speaking of content penalties, they also offer a service of "pet health articles" and "newsletters". It took me about 2 nanoseconds to find the exact same content on several hundred other vet websites. Somehow I don't think that Google is going to find that fresh, valuable content - as claimed. I also don't think its especially respectful to the vet's customers to be fed content from a library bank. The web is for original content thank you very much!

Everytime I go to Joomla conference, I always seem to hear one story or another about "web designers" offering lackluster services at inflated prices. It seems that for some reason the "web design industry" seems to have a prevalence of these scenarios.

• Are we missing some kid of licensure in our industry?
• How do these practices continue, do we need to educate the customers?
• Do you have a story like this to share?
• Is licensure a real word?