X-Linked Lethal:  weaving creativity’s tangled webs – Chawm Ganguly                             

xlinedlethalGetting a website made is a real pain in the http. The good guys don’t have any time for you, busy as they are catering to the whims of overseas clients – not that you can match the kind of money they charge, the exchange rate being what it is. That leaves you with two kinds of web vendors – the first, a briefcase agency that has spent its happy years as a classified ad collector to become a self-styled provider of digital solutions and the second, a novice armed with diploma in web-design from an academy where he/she doubles up as the instructor/councillor.

If you hire the second guy you are doomed, as he takes flight even before you can say Bangalore and takes your ftp access and password with him. The net result being that you can neither have necessary changes made to your site nor have it renewed when the time comes, forcing you to start again, with a new domain name and another green horn.

In case you opt for the first guy, then too you go through the rigmarole, for the first guy invariably outsources the job to the second guy, usurps his part of the cake and leaves you high and dry in the God forsaken graveyard of dud websites.

Either way, you get a site that downloads a one-size-fits-all kind of free templates and forces your content to fall in line. The stock images have no semblance of belonging to the site, sourced as they have been from stock sites and the content, the same tale of cut and paste. When enquired about possible Copyright violations, one so-called digital agency owner had hit it on the head with typical nonchalance, “in India, the right to copy is copyright”.

Needless to say, in such a scenario it is foolhardy to talk about either Search Engine Optimization or Social Media Integration, where your website is the landing page from where takes off your flights of Internet of Things; where your site’s content and images are ingrained with a view towards engaging the web crawlers of the net, or where, at the very least, your site is aesthetically designed to please the eyes of the beholder and communicate your message effectively.

Thus, when the guys from X-Lined Lethal approached me for work, it was with a lot of skepticism that I had engaged them. Skepticism that was addressed to very great extent, in the way they had highlighted their life views and prowess in their website.

“Our work is our silent protest against the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V syndrome” they claim and go on to rub it in, for good measure, when they say, “Sorry, we don’t do downloaded template driven websites. We don’t do websites that are lifted from the farthest corners of the net. We don’t lift images or rub watermarks to pass off as glasses of our vintage creative juices. We don’t do stuff that you needed yesterday, living as we are in the day after tomorrow”.

“Each site that we do is unique. Built from the scratch. With exclusive photographs and Search Engine Optimised, Social Media Integrated Content” phew!

But hang on, there’s more. “All our lives have been one long journey to escape from the ordinary – a conscious effort to give the middle finger to everything hemmed-in between the far extremes. We are not your average, run-of-the-mill, also-ran’s and have-naught’s. We are not here because we want your work so that we can earn our keep”.

“We are here because … what the heck? We owe no one no explanation. So let us mind our own business (or the lack of it) and you can stuff your inquisitiveness you know where”.

“Thank you for reading this far (the sites web-analytics tell us that 97.2 % of the visitors have not ventured beyond this point). We appreciate your patience and salute (you and all those) who did not consider us and embraced the ordinary. After all, even being a retard is a choice”

Attitude, attitude. Dudes, like the way you guys speak (love the bit about the retard, too) but do these guys have in them, what it takes to deliver – walk the talk? Well, I for one am satisfied to the hilt. They have stuck to their guns and made cracking explosive stuff out of every assignment handed over to them and have no qualms in recommending them, not the way Einstein had recommended the Nazis, but in a more wholesome, whole hearted manner.

And what I love the most about these guys? Their websites are not the end in itself kind of portals. On the contrary the sites they create are more of stepping stones, portals to the cloud; that are designed to teleport your message to the farthest ends of the net. Chromosomes of Creativity, really.

For More Information Visit:

www.xlinkedlethal.com

PS. I have decided to Mentor these guys. If you people have work, you can try them out.

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