Re: tobacco sales

Okay,

A lot of other people have chimed in with thier 2c worth on this, so I guess
it's my turn...

Malcom, in one of your most recent posts, you ask:
>>> Finally, one person who says they'd have a problem selling tobacco! Does
this mean you would refuse the client's business? After all, you're not
actually selling the tobacco. This is really what I was getting at when I
stirred up this thread in the first place. I am curious to know what clients
would get turned down. Porn sites? Alcohol? Political organizations? Any
other industries?<<<

My business is small, and was basically built from my playing around with
making a friends soft-porn site look better than what he had. From that one
site, I now have a number of clients, including a national club (with
world-wide members, oddly enough), a realtor, a travel agency, a furniture
dealer, and a few personal sites. Of course, I still have my friend's
soft-porn site as a client, too.

My opinion on this matter is that I am the judge of what what I will and
will not accept for clients. I base this on what kind of image I want to
associate my company with. I've turned down a strictly adult site already,
as I didn't want the hassles of finding an adult server and really didn't
want my company associated with adult sites alone. All of my clients fit
into a niche community, though (the gay community), even though their sites
are not specifically gay-oriented. I've thought long and hard about my
clientelle and their sites, and have decided that while I will keep my
friend's soft-porn site as a client, I will probably not add additional
adult-specific clients, unless it was a lucrative contract.

As for dealing with the tobacco industry (or any others that can bring up
moral questions), if the work is within your abilities, and you have no
strong moral opposition to doing the site, you might as well do it, since
you as the designer are merely a subcontractor. The site's design reflects
upon you mostly, where the site's content is the responsibility of the
site's owner(s). It is not up to you to police the sites you design for
people, and you should not feel you have any responsibility to ensure that
this or that porduct is sold or marketed to the proper people, other than
discussing appropriate safeguards with the client, and ensuring the minimal
necessary guards are in place (such as RSACi and SafeSurf tags) -- it's up
to the parent of the children who may visit these sites to take the
responsibility to keep them out of them (RSACi is built into MSIE 4.x and
above, and SafeSurf is built into Netscape 4.08(?) and above). The parents
need to set the limits on these controls, and to actively monitor their
children's activities on the 'net.

As a website designer, your main job is to please the client and to provide
a pleasing site for visitors. You can, but are not required to, worry about
how the site will be used, unless it will directly impact you or your
business. These are the issues I think you should be considering, not
whether tobacco sales via the internet can be abused by minors. If the
parents do not or will not take the necessary steps to limit access to these
types of sites, that's not your problem. Children are getting smarter every
day. They are figuring out ways around the safeguards we put in place as
fast as or sometimes faster than we can implement them. But that's not OUR
problem. It's our client's problem to ask for these safeguards, and the
parents' problem to use them.

Just my 2c.

Kehvan M. Zydhek

HTML: hwg-business mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA