About two months ago, I had a fight with a douchebag online. Scott from TUAW had asked how much a custom WordPress template should cost him, and I said a few hundred dollars. The douchebag chimed in with this:

@blankbaby you get what you pay for…. anything under 1000.00 is probably a little sketchy.

A little bit sketchy? A grand for a WordPress template? I called his ass out on it…

@macgasm $1000 for a fucking wordpress template? Stop it. You web designers crack me up.

Note the wink, btw. I said it in as good naturedly a way as possible, but you have to think that someone who would charge $1000 for a blog template is taking advantage of people who don’t know how to do something. The idea that someone can make a CSS sheet and call it a $1000 job is ridiculous.

Do I have the skills to do it? Nope. I certainly don’t, nor do I claim to. I don’t claim to have any design skills beyond tweaking a template that’s prefabbed for me. I’ve never done one from scratch, nor do I care to. I actually write / do video / take photos. I’ve always been a content guy and when it comes to appearances I either get templates from legit free sources or have someone who knows what they’re doing take care of that sort of thing for me.

Anyway, he starts in, and the conversation moves to the fact that, in his words, no designer worth his salt wouldn’t charge that much, and then he starts in on my site because, you know, it’s fun to poke fun at people who use free themes. Apparently the look of my site isn’t up to snuff for our professional designer.

Anyway, I was begging him to show me a thousand dollar template. After all, he claims to be a designer worth his salt, so it shouldn’t be hard to give me an example of what $1000 gets me. Here we go:

(Click here so you can experience its full beauty)

Yep. That stellar amazing design, that as of 2 months ago wasn’t even close to finished and, as far as I can tell still isn’t finished, is worth $1000. What you don’t know is that he’s going to do some amazing things with it very shortly. After all, he’s a designer worth his salt. Ask him. He’ll tell you.

So you’re probably wondering why this douchebag is even on the radar.

Well, from time to time I like to drop in on assholes and see if they’re still full of shit, so I ended up at Macgasm.net today. Macgasm used to be a podcast that produced an episode weekly and moved on to produce occasional episodes whenever the mood struck. I’m guessing they’re out of the podcasting biz because they haven’t produced an episode since May 22 (I’m sure it’s the host’s stellar design business blowing up that really put the kibosh on that one).

As I scrolled down, I realized that ole Super Designer is now using a free template of his own. Makes sense after the complete mess of a design his last one was (that one was custom). I guess it didn’t quite work out for him and he decided to let someone more experienced put the face on his brand. If I were a designer, you wouldn’t catch me dead using a free template, but then again, if I claimed to be a web designer, I’d probably have some skill in doing so and the homepage for my company would be centered on the page. Oh, and I’d proofread it so I didn’t end up with language like this:

“Alpha-one.ca is a professional Web design company in Ottawa, ON that supplies services of web design and development, web application development, professional ecommerce online shopping systems, Flash multimedia, VRML 3D solutions, website hosting, search engine promotion (SEO), software development and graphics design.

Supplies services of?

Nice english.

I would never shred someone for using a free template. Frankly, I think people spend entirely too much time worrying about the look of their site and not enough time on its actual content (or the fact that, like Josh, they spell like a fifth grader and use apostrophes all over the place whether they need to be there or not; good thing he graduated college. SUCCESS!). It’s the old argument of sizzle without steak and flash without fire.

@vincenzof if you want free… go to the wordpress site a look up a template… cause clear insignificantthoughts.com did…

But in this case, for someone who railed against “free templates” and for someone who claims to be a professional web designer, the path to whose door is being beaten by people hungering for innovative $1000 web designs, the idea of using a free template, particularly one that’s so widely used that I recognized it should be counter to everything he stands for.

That would imply, of course, that he stands for something, and hypocrisy makes no allowances for principles.