In addition - this design firm put out a ad the day before my project started looking for a new designer. If this person was so good, why didn't they just fill that job?
Her email address was not out in the open. It took some digging through basecamp for me to figure it out. My main issue was that I looked through the portfolio of the person they were going to have to do it and she wasn't any good.
I also didn't really think it was worth letting her attempt to do it and then fighting them at the end of I wasn't happy.
Ahh. Interesting bit of clarification. In either case, it's hard to argue as everything is theoretical at this point. Maybe they could not have justified taking on your project at all if they didn't farm it out to this freelancer.
So, for your budget (and I'm way over simplifying here) you could have gone elsewhere and gotten work more or less of the caliber of this person working through a lesser firm, or gone to this name-brand firm where the work would not have been done by an a-lister, but the project management and creative oversight would have been handled by them. Theoretically, they would have ensured an outcome on-par with their reputation, even if they potentially had to do some internal re-work if her output wasn't up to snuff.
This sounds, to me, like the scenario where the design firm was trying to expand their business a little bit and was doing so on a trial basis, with you and her both effectively as guinea pigs. I've seen this work really well and really poorly. If their signature is at the point where it can be easily reproduced under guidance, then you missed a good opportunity. If their style cannot be implemented by anyone other than these 4 or 5 people, you got lucky.
If I had to flip a coin though, I'm guessing you gave up a good opportunity here...
You'd be surprised what people with any talent at all can do under the thumb of their betters. I'm with the other responder thinking you likely just missed out.
I'd also like to throw my name in to the mix. I've actually been pursuing this idea and have talked to some golf course management companies/golf courses.
There are certainly some serious apprehensions I have about the business. It worries me that there is no one out there searching for this and that it would boil down to a 100% cold-calling sales gig. Also, most, if not all, of these golf courses have the worst looking websites, which leads me to believe that there is no one looking after any web presence or anything web-related.
This actually touches on a bigger issue which I'd love to discuss. What you have here is a very profitable niche, one in which a few early 90s web companies took over, gobbled up all the market share, and then stopped innovating. I see this in a lot of ignored niches.
The thing I don't get with all dating sites is they all seem to be exactly the same - mediocre design, some plugged in dating script. I can't tell if this means there's room in the marketplace if you did it the right way or if it's just totally over-saturated.
Yeah, that's actually a really good point. I can't think of any good examples though where this would work. Like if you go to Borders and look at their magazine racks, there are tons of specific niches that cater to mostly, if not all, female (there are like 8 different magazines on knitting), but I'm having trouble seeing how you could apply it in the dating realm.
