Being honest with what you do is more important than ever. Up until recently you could get away with an occasional lie covered under a thick blanket of marketingsauce.

Luckily that time is now over. With the Web as it looks like today any attempt at dishonesty will be uncovered and damage you in a way that was unthinkable before.

Recently when looking at a potential project I reviewed a pretty flat website in need of advocacy supporting features. The only feature they had was a ‘before and after’ function where you can view the effects of their product.

Not a bad idea and one of the best ways to show a potential buyer what they can expect.

Any sane company would nowadays of course allow the before and after images to be posted by actual users rather than images provided by the manufacturer, but that was one of the reasons we were asked to provide a helping hand.

The horrific part was that in just a couple of seconds I noticed that the ‘after’ images were seriously edited to put the result in a better light. Some people taking a look might miss it. But hey, come on.. some people will notice and guess what happens then? There will be blog posts and tweets and facebook posts about it. If it is juicy enough one or two newspapers might pick up on it as well.

For all it is worth the manufacturer might have done this with good intentions. Maybe they did not have a good picture to use so they reverted to photoshop instead. I don’t know. I never asked and decided that I wont work with this company.  Nor do I choose to disclose which company it is. I am not a user of their products so I leave it to one of their users to highlight this problem. Last time I checked online it had already started…