Marco.org

Tumblize reacts to criticism of the quality of their work, and how it casts doubt on the validity of their $999 pricetag to develop Tumblr themes:

We hadn’t IE bug tested a couple of the Tumblogs we’ve done in the past - which is admittedly a major oversight - but I’ll point out that almost every theme we’ve done so far has been for friends or ourselves.

This is supposed to justify the complete lack of cross-browser testing.

I’m sure this doesn’t come off as being very professional to the casual onlooker, but any paid work we’ve done were fully bug tested and bullet-proofed

I object to this. First of all, the tone is condescending and dismissive: “to the casual onlooker” implies that professionals wouldn’t fault you, and we (?) mere amateurs aren’t qualified to judge the quality of your work.

Why is it acceptable for you to make sloppy amateur mistakes in unpaid work? You’re using it as examples when soliciting design work at a very premium price. You’re effectively saying, “I want you to pay a lot of money for our premium service, and here are some examples of my work, but it’s not very good because I did it for free. Don’t worry, though. I’ll be better when you pay me $1000.”

That shows a lack of good craftsmanship and pride in your work. It’s not that your work has flaws — nobody’s perfect. It’s your attitude toward them: “I don’t need to fix those. They’re not important. That job wasn’t worth doing acceptably.”

I wrote Marco.org’s CMS for free, for myself. By your standards, I shouldn’t put any effort at all into it. But it’s not full of SQL injection vulnerabilities, PHP strict notices, and O(n²) algorithms. I fixed a minor CSRF vulnerability in Instapaper before anyone had ever exploited it — not because I needed to, but because it was there, and its mere presence was unacceptable to me.

I take pride in my work, even if it makes me $0 and I’m the only one to ever see it.

Why are you excusing major flaws in your work for the same reason?

(This is also a great time to gently remind you that the preferred generic term for a Tumblr site is “a tumblelog”, not “a Tumblr”. The latter use can cause problems.)