A. blurb

We’ve been doing this for almost 10 years, and today, looking at the site today I realized that only one of our romanian clients hold… the oops media group, the rest are gone to the wind… on the other hand, all of our foreign serious partners have at least a 4 year history with us.

Why?

Maybe because romanians think we’re expensive? That we have an attitude? That we don’t know what we’re doing? You tell me.

The first one to go was Neico Group. After 3 years of successfully creating their complete product range (from diaries to calendars to promotional effects), a couple of websites and acting in a very responsible manner, meeting impossible deadlines, dealing with other of their suppliers directly, generally behaving as a trustworthy partner, it all went to hell, why? Because we’re uped our prices with appox 30%. The market changed, the prices increased and salaries went through the roof, so it was a decent increase. What happened? Madalina Apostolescu, Neico’s CEO, a person I’d almost considered a friend, wouldn’t accept this, accused me of cheating them, wouldn’t pay anything more (we did, indeed, have a “gentleman’s agreement” running), and threatened to sue (while lying to my face that she didn’t have anything to do with it) when I wanted to charge for the source files of all the work we did for them (which noone does for design anyway). I was disappointed, did a favor for someone working there and let them have them for free. The result? 3 years from them they’re still using them!!! Even stuff that wasn’t accepted at first (their famous “children” line was just a proposal for one of their clients that didn’t get accepted… Everything looks bad, unprofessional and the site went to hell… why? Because she put money in front of quality, hired a third rate designer to hack away at our stuff and is probably loosing clients because she hasn’t come up with nothing of quality in ages…

Then there’s Mr. Radu Zernoveanu from Mastermind.ro… We built a very nice site for him several years back, very little updating needed, it all went smoothly. Last year he wanted a new site for his team building busienss (conaculbunicilor.ro) we gave him a price, he said it was too much, couldn’t afford, said something about more business he had, if only we decreased the price (by 40%, nothing less), we did, it was a simple job but we liked it, we drew a nice layout, sent it over, was agreed upon, but if only we could’ve changed some details, such as everything… I thought that the layout was nice and that it would have been enough, and since we did give him a substantial discount, I explained that we’d rather go with it as it’s a nie layout.
Then he called furious that we’ve had the nerve to not do something that he wanted (keep in mind that we’ve done alot of favors for him, change this, tweak this, upload that, because he was a nice guy and I liked him and his business) that he was paying and that we were basically his slaves bound to do whatever he asked… We dropped it… Good riddance, we offered him the site looking like the atatched picture for 500euros and he went ahead, showed his colors and ended up with http://www.conaculbunicilor.ro/ LOL!

And the last one, and most recent, are the guys at JKD Investments, creepy people… They contacted us to have their site redesigned, we provided a couple of very nice layouts and they forced us to copy a site COMPLETELY, I wasn’t too keen on it… but hey, it look easy, we already had a contract and wanted to finish it, we did it and then the changes came, sometimes 20 a day… small stuff, we had it all done in flash and wanted to use the standard components, but we were almost forced to build another text area component that wouldnt’ allow text to be copied… In the end it was too much and I said that the site is done, let’s finish, if not, I wanted to charge more for the changes. Then this gree guy (never, i mean NEVER work with greek guys) calls and yells at me in a bad english that he is paying for it… I told him in my perfect english to go fuck himself and droped this project also… What’s funny is that the guys at e-afacere took it and did the same copy, except that they don’t know flash (http://www.jkdinvestments.com), our version is here http://ays.gotdns.com/work/_jkd/ (fully administrable from php, mind you, database and everything), the very original is http://www.isv.gr and our original layout looks like the attached (they did pretend their color was that green)…
So I guess they did get their site…

So I understand about the greek dude… he came to this country looking for slaves… But Madalina and Radu? Do I have an attitude problem? Do they? What do you think?

Ps. In case you’re wondering I did not made myself look better and them worse, just told the facts from my point of view as objectively as possible…

Dan