encyclo - 8:38 pm on Oct 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

I got a call last week from another web developer in my home city who was looking to offload a bit of work that he "didn't have time to complete". I went over to visit, and he admitted that the reason he needed help was that he wasn't able to do the job because he didn't have the slightest clue how to.

He wanted a simple feedback form for one of his client's sites: pretty basic stuff, but I know that many developers who come from the print and graphic design industry don't have the appropriate skills. It was easy money, and the guy has got a load more jobs of the same nature to do in the future. A nice, simple little earner.

The problem is, the work is harder than it would at first seem, because the guy really has absolutely no clue whatsoever how to do anything related to web development. He sent over his page for the feedback form, and it was so poorly-built that I has to redo it from scratch. He uses Go-Live, but I don't think he knows what HTML is. He'd adjusted the size of the main table so often that there were more than 40 td columns, each a few pixels wide.

If it was just that, I'd not be too worried - but there's the rest of it. He has apparently no sense of style: it's not just that it's exceptionally ugly (you could argue that it's a matter of taste), but it is verging on the unusable. He has no notions of information design. The site I built the feedback form for has a Flash splash page with no skip link (and no standard link either - no search engine could get past this page). After the splash page, he has a Flash menu positioned vaguely in the middle, a bunch of poorly optimized and jagged graphics, and the other internal pages have absolutely no navigation or links whatsoever other than an animated, spinning "Back" button (done with Flash, naturally). Text is dark, on a dark background (we're talking a real-estate site, not a gaming site). I could go on, but suffice to say that his other sites are much the same.

So, what approach should I take? The guy's got some good (but obviously clueless) clients, and he can offer me a good little supplementary income: but I could never publically associate myself with the work I do for him, and I'm risking finding myself improving his reputation - he who could be considered a "competitor" in some ways.

Do I tell his that his work is terrible, do I shut up and take the money, or do I just walk away? I had offered to do some basic SEO for him, but if he accepts, I'm going to have to tell him that I'd need to completely redo his site.

Any thoughts?