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.
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.
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.