RE: UKNM: Incorrect Use of Client Reference Sites

[Robin Edwards]

Kirstie, although I cannot speak for everyone, I have a feeling that this is a 

widespread problem. We had a similar case whereby on turning up at a sales 

meeting and going through our portfolio, the prospective client said "Oh, you 

must know XXX, because his company worked on that site too."


Bemused, I asked him what he meant (because we had produced the site from 

scratch, and no other agency had ever worked on it), and he produced the 

portfolio from the other agency which included some lovely screenshots of one 

of our sites. Upon choking with surprise, the prospective client called this 

agency to ask what was going on. The agency said it was a genuine mistake, and 

that they had done some pitch work for our client. Somehow they had printed out 

the 'wrong' screenshots. It wouldn't have been so bad, but the prospective 

client said they had almost dismissed the agency on the basis that their 

portfolio was not very good, with the exception of the screens from the site we 

produced! Just think - if I hadn't been there, the other agency might have got 

work based solely on the quality of the work we had produced.


Fortunately I was there, and we have had a long standing relationship with the 

new client ever since.


There are lots of examples of several agencies pointing to the home page of a 

company and listing them as a client without explaining what they did for them. 

Often they produced a sub-section of a site, a game/screen-saver/banner, or old 

work which isn't even there any more. In this case they should, in my opinion, 

only link to the bits that they did, or relegate the name of the client to a 

non-linked list of past clients. Naming names is definitely a subject for 

conversation at a future UKNM get together! The only way to counter this that I 

can think of is to ask your client for a name-check at the bottom of their home 

page. Not all will do this of course. Failing that, you need to keep on the 

boil and seek out agencies who are effectively passing off your work as theirs 

and ask/order them to stop doing it. Using a search engine that can list links 


to your client's home page is one option, but it can be a laborious task.


The thing that annoys me the most is the practice of using the names of the 

major agencies in the meta tags of a home page to suck in people who are 

searching for that agency. We fall foul of this in several places, as do many 

other agencies - try it and see! I'm not sure if this is illegal, but perhaps 

it comes under miss-use of a trademark? If it does, I can feel a conversation 

with a solicitor coming on. Does anyone else know for sure?


Regards


Robin

--

Robin Edwards

Clockworx Design Limited

T: +44 1543 252370          F: +44 1889 578789

E:

robinclockworx [dot] co [dot] uk

    W: http://www.clockworx.com/




On Tuesday, March 31, 1998 6:03 PM, Kirstie Hill 

[SMTP:

kirstie [dot] hillissolutions [dot] co [dot] uk

] wrote:

> Just wanted to check with you guys to see if you'd experienced the same.

>

> We have recently found a number of web development companies who have

> been listing reference sites within the clients sections of their web

> sites, but actually not having done any work for them at all.


<snip>


> I am appalled that companies

> like this are getting away with it, and I wondered if anyone else had

> experienced anything similar ?

>