A pickle
I’m building a little site for someone and was about to fire off a near-final comp when I noticed an old boingboing post about a couple moving to a van down by the river. It’s a neat little site and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there.
The only problem, it looks very similar to the one I just built.
The colors, the layout, even the Google map. It got worse. I then noticed that it was a WordPress theme. This is not good. I don’t feel comfortable presenting what appears to be a modified free theme, however attractive, to someone promised a custom site. On the other hand, they like it, I have quite a few hours into it and I legitimately didn’t know it existed until today.
I’m going to have to give this some thought. Clearly I can’t proceed as though I’m not aware of the similarities, but then again, I’m not going eat the hours.
Your comments
hmm… that is picklish, isn’t it. /searching for sage advice.
you built the backend, right? so that’s one area that is custom. the aesthetic (that you state they like… and perhaps are expecting from you) is another thing. i’d have to look at a screen shot and then compare the two sites and judge it from there.
if you’re really uncomfortable about using a free theme, then you have little choice but to scrap what you did and begin again.
just my .5 cents. I suspect you’ll just go with your gut on this, so go to it. :-)
Fortunately, I built the thing before I looked at the markup of the theme. After a closer look my pages are structured very differently and the client decided to proceed.
I’m going to fiddle with the palette and move the nav.
In the end it isn’t my decision and while I’m not happy there is no reason they shouldn’t get what they paid for.
About this entry
This is an individual entry and was posted September 17, 2007.
This entry is tagged with: business, themes, wordpress
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I really need to put something here. Something about myself, something about this site. Something.
Maybe right after I add site navigation... say, a week from never.
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