By David Ponce
You’re a Photoshop guru, but CSS, XHTML, microformats and semantic markup elude you? You can put a web design together, but detest stringing coherent code? Well, startup XHTMLized might be able to help you out. You send them your design, in any format, and 5 days later, they return a fully validating, cross-browser tested template. All for as little as $150. You don’t like the result? You don’t have to pay.
They achieve this magic by outsourcing your design to any of 12 coders scattered worldwide, though the bulk of them reside in the US. It is possible for you to request to have your design rendered faster; obviously it does not take five days to code a site, but the five day figure is provided as a buffer. Don’t go thinking this is a sweat shop either. Coders make a good living, and you can go here for the official line on this.
For once, I’ll chime in with an opinion. I think this is a great service. I’m convinced there’s a niche out there that these guys will quickly fill. At the same time, their service seems to have pissed a lot of people off. Why? Jealous freelancers? Quite a few have said that they could do this themselves for free. I bet that’s true. And you could do your own plumbing, your own car repairs and your own laser eye surgery, yet many people pay others instead. Opinions, anyone?
