[gee_totes]

I was involved in the case involving Carlos 'Storm' Martinez, who is an amazing post sound mixer and a stand-up guy. I am a little perturbed to see him mentioned on the site.

The design of the site in question was good, no doubt, but it was also riddled with a stolen Neutraface2 font face and the HTML didn't validate. And there was no RoR backend; the whole site was hosted on a GoDaddy shared server.

From my understanding of the dispute, the site was delivered many months late, and then the designer doubled his price. When Storm refused to pay double for late work, the designer linked in an overlay from a file hosted on Dropbox that announced 'This site was stolen'. That was the 'kill switch'. The designer also made a few blog posts and tweets bragging about his 'kill switch', which he later took down.

This lead to a panicked call from Storm to me to move the site over to my servers until the dispute could be resolved. A few days after that, I received a very aggressive e-mail from the designer threatening to sue me for stealing his work.

What iwasntpaid.com needs is links to conflict resolution and contract negotiation books, which are important freelancing skills that the designer sorely lacked. You never introduce yourself to a fellow freelance web programmer with "Hi, my name's Jeff, and I'm going to sue you over this dispute I have with another party".

Given the designer's history of posting complaints about how he's been screwed out of $500 and then taking them down once he realizes that it might be bad for his reputation, I wouldn't be surprised of that post about Storm gets taken down as well.

Also, from my web-stalking around this issue, I wouldn't be surprised if the hours that the designer put in trying to smear Storm across the internets, billed at the designer's normal rate, exceeded the payment he was expecting from Storm.

tl;dr: Settle on a rate before you start doing work, and if it's not a flat rate, keep the client up to date with projections of the final bill.

PS Carlos 'Storm' Martinez and his team at Creative Mixing are amazing, talented people and I would recommend them to anyone looking for post-sound work. It saddens me to see the post on iwasntpaid.com

[thoughtsimple]

You didn't mention if he really lost the case in court as noted in the post. Did he? Has he refused to pay the settlement? Was there a contract that he refuses to pay? Seems to me that you will have a hard time excusing the details if any are true.

[gee_totes]

Only Storm and the designer would be able to answer those questions about the court case.

But in my experience doing web work for Storm over the past five years, I have never had any payment disputes. We also have an ongoing relationship because he does post-sound work for my films. It's a shame to see him smeared in a public forum because I don't think he deserves it.

[john_flintstone]

>and the HTML didn't validate

Stupid as it is to go down the publicly naming route, what has the HTML validation status of the code got to do with anything? This is a measurement that only means something to guys who measure things - it has nothing to do with business generated, traffic, or the user experience of a website (the true yardsticks of good work).

[gee_totes]

True, it doesn't have anything to do with anything. It was just a pet peeve of mine.

We need to adhere to standards, dammit!

[anthonyb]

If a site doesn't validate, it might not appear properly in some browsers, reducing your customers' experience of your site. In extreme cases, it might also mean that they can't (eg.) see your buy button, killing your sales.

[timdev2]

Validity is completely orthogonal to utility. It's trivial to craft a broken page with an invisible buy button that validates. I don't know of any major ecommerce site that validates.

[anthonyb]

No, it's not. You might as well say that it doesn't matter if your programmer doesn't use version control, or your surgeon doesn't clean under his nails.

Major e-commerce sites will have tested under every major browser anyway, so invalid HTML won't matter so much to them. Smaller shops don't tend to do as much testing, so it's more important that HTML validates.

[hammock]

So what you're saying is it doesn't matter if the HTML validates as long as you test well.

[anthonyb]

How many one man dev shops (which is what we're talking about here) test well, or even in in multiple browsers? So yes, if you get a web site from a one man web design shop, then you should make sure it validates.

If it doesn't, it's probably rendering in quirks mode, and you'll have all sorts of problems with the layout if you need to change it.

[jenius]

html doesnt validate if you put in a single facebook opengraph tag. css doesn't validate if you put in a vendor prefix. these tools are outdated and useless.

[samlev]

Every time I hear the term "kill-switch", it instantly lowers my opinion of the developer. Something about it just irks me.

[jacques_chester]

The ex-law student in me smells the sweet golden smell of defamation in the air.

[sheldonh]

I would like to see the following unfounded claim supported:

"Given the designer's history of posting complaints about how he's been screwed out of $500 and then taking them down once he realizes that it might be bad for his reputation ..."

[gee_totes]

At the time, I didn't bother to take screenshots of the tweets that were later deleted or the blog posts that were removed (since I didn't care enough and the designer had a relatively small audience).

In my heart of hearts, I was hoping the designer was just blowing off steam. I've been in the same situation before, where I think I'm right about a payment and the client disagrees, and it sucks, and I learned from the experience. I certainly didn't expect the designer to still be sore over it six months later, even after he claims he won the court case.

[jenius]

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen - since he forgot to introduce himself, let me introduce you to Lee Gillentine (http://www.fishburd.com/). He is the one who made the above post, and is a little angry that I called his design crappy, and that I caught him trying to steal from me.

I certainly do not blame Mr. Gillentine for the numerous errors he made in the above post since most of this was just regurgitated from what he heard from Mr. Martinez, but unfortunately, almost everything he said was wrong. I have very clear documented evidence that this is so, which is why I won the court case. Let's take it point by point.

- The font was licensed

- It was written in html5, cross-browser tested, and worked perfectly

- Mr. Martinez's previous site was hosted on a godaddy shared server, and that site was made by Mr. Gillentine. Since I know godaddy hosting is horrible, I switched his hosting to FatCow before putting up the site. So not only was this inaccurate, but Mr. Gillentine is the culprit for his own criticism.

- The site was not delivered late, and my price wasn't doubled. I charged hourly, and made the rate clear in the contract that Mr. Martinez signed. I have documents in which he says that his time constraints are "asap", and that he doesn't have budget constraints. No final price was ever discussed, I just recorded my hours worked, put them on an invoice, and sent it.

- What Mr. Gillentine did was attempt to steal the site for Mr. Martinez by removing the stolen notice and re-hosting it on his own servers. Whenever you find yourself ripping someone's html and hosting it on your own website (much like Curebit did to 37signals), you must know that you are clearly doing something wrong. And yes, if you find someone trying to steal your work, you do typically send them an aggressive note telling them to take it down. And it worked.

- There was a rails back end, it was hosted elsewhere because (as I assume most people here know) you need a different server setup to handle a rails environment. The other host was mapped to a subdomain on the site.

- I never took down the site. In fact, I didn't even have access to the site, since Mr. Martinez tried to change all his hosting passwords and steal the site from me (that was why I triggered the stolen notice). Mr. Martinez took his own site down and parked his domain because it was better than facing the embarrassment of having a huge notice over your site telling everyone that you are a thief. I would have loved to have that notice stay up for longer.

- I have no "history of posting complaints about how I have been screwed out of $500 and then taking them down". This is 100% baseless, and makes no sense, I don't even know where he came up with this. Everything I post has and will stay up until I receive payment.

- I have spent, by my estimates, about 30 minutes in total telling this story over the web. In fact, I would assume that Mr. Gillentine's time "web-stalking" the issue far exceeded my time spreading the word about it. The bulk of my time spent on damages from this was spent waiting around in the courthouse, which takes forever.

And for the person who asked below, I did win the court case, I have the court order saying he has to pay me, and it has been over a month and I still have literally not heard a word from him. I didn't want to have to call the police, and I even reached out to his friends to ask them to put me in contact with him so I didn't have to do this, and they said no. Too bad.

[nfriedly]

Just a friendly word of advice from a former contractor: if you ever feel the need to put a kill-switch in a site you're developing, it's time to stop, cut your losses, and find a new client to work for. It just isn't worth it. Send them a bill for the work completed so far if you want, but don't expect it to get paid and don't worry about it when it doesn't.

As for how to do that and still make a living: double your rates and require 50% up front. That way you've gotten "full" payment by your current rates if the work goes sour, and a nice bonus when it doesn't.

In our line of work, there are a lot of good clients out there. Life's too short to deal with the bad ones.