[Phpwm] criticising other agencies

[db_developer at o2.co.uk]

When does it become acceptable to critisize agencies and their work? I 
have inherited some code from a well known agency in Birmingham and 
just thought I'd let off some steam.

The agency in question (who shall remain nameless) is quite famous: 
well at least they appear quite high in search engine results if you 
are a one the many hapless businesses or individuals searching for 
someone to carry out some web work for you. Their work "looks" really 
nice. It's compliant with various standards, the designs are very 
modern, the javascript probably works really well if you have a modern 
browser. But my problem came when I looked under the hood of one of 
their projects: it was a mess. It is badly organised, has very poor use 
of inline tags, has loads of sql queries where they don't appear 
necessary, there are hundreds and hundreds of scripts, and the database 
structure is horrid. After that description you can relax, breathe 
calmly again in the safe knowledge, no it's not you. 

Looks pretty: like this week's 'new shape' Vauxhall, if you know what 
I mean.

I stick to the old design principle 'Form Follows Function'. So when 
building a project for someone, first I set down how the application 
will live and work: will there be a project lifecycle, how will it get 
maintained. A 'boxy but good' solution.
I'm having a bad time maintaining this project and not looking forward 
to doing an audit. I guess they didn't think about audits when they 
"Designed" the website.

I think it  is easy to critisize; maybe this design agency provided 
something that I have missed, maybe they were really cheap or delivered 
the project to very tight deadlines. Sure there are times when one is 
forced to write a kluge, but you need to autograph it with a comment 
and apologise to the next developer. But how one makes a whole web 
application into giant-sized xxxx up I don't know! Maybe I should ask 
the Win 8 design team.

Rant over.

TS