The past two weeks I’ve had an opportunity to proofread a paper by a friend who’s in University and studying Gender and Sport. She too has taken a great interest in the women’s side of bodybuilding and the topic that she was looking at was how female bodybuilders has the toughest time balancing out their femininity, their need to be competitive in sport and to be marketable. About a week or so ago, the National Physique Committee also known as the NPC, the IFBB’s amateur representative in the United States, held their national championships. It’s easily the biggest amateur National-Level show in the United States bringing together over 55 female bodybuilders to the stage this year.

Taking a look at the field you can easily recognize the strength these women possess and for the women that win their weight class, it represents years of hard work and preparation that cultivates into being recognized as the best in their field. Full muscles and curves are called up and flexed on stage at will in a choreographed routine to the delight of fans in the audience. As you watch on stage you can see two piece posing suits that are meant to accentuate their look on stage that combines with their skin color and tone, make up and hairstyle to show their beauty, strength and their femininity. The winners that the judges choose would represent the best look of the female bodybuilder of the day and possibly of the year.

Something that aroused my thinking is a comment made on one of the female muscle forums that I frequent where the poster mentioned that extreme conditioning and definition will not be rewarded unless the competitor was “really, really pretty”. The user then posted the overall winner who was backstage flexing her butt (or glutes) which from weeks of dieting showed extreme muscular striations and detail.

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I am leaving Northern Physique. Seriously.

More later.

It’s truly amazing to keep seeing good people get messed over by incompetent web people. The Wrestler “Ultimate Warrior” or “Warrior” is the latest fighter to be tricked by the inexperienced web person. I’m not truly sure what this person did to Warrior for him to be hired. But, boy did he screw up.

Quote From ultimatewarrior.com:

“I did the work myself because another designer brought on to handle HTML code editing, which Gianni could not do at the time, misrepresented themselves about their abilities. After several unusual inquires and too many requests for delay, it not only became clear that this ‘editor’ misrepresented their actual ability, they were also secretly trying to learn, through trail and error, the skills they, fraudulently, at first professionally claimed they held.

Okay. If you remember how Warrior’s website looked, it was pure HTML. Nothing much that was really scripted in javascript or PHP or ASP or anything like this. AND THE EDITOR SCREWED UP ON HTML? To an extent that he completely made them unusable? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!? And this is a wrestler’s site too. So he’s also kinda bigger and stronger and likely way more popular than the web guy as well. Sigh… I mean, what did he do to convince the Ultimate Warrior to hire him? He must have been a great actor or con artist and obviously it must have been some heck of a lie. I’m not inferring anything, but I’m just very suprised that these sort of things happen to high-profile people. Unfortunetly, it happens to plenty of other clients who may or may not be familiar with building websites.

The first thing that clients should always ask ANY web person is to check out their previous work and ask questions. Ask for references as well. I can’t stress that enough. Obviously for most, building a website is a serious undertaking and can easily ring up thousands of dollars depending on the solution. Think of it as a serious investment. If I was investing in something that big, I would keep a close eye on that investment to make sure that it’s going well. It’s just common sense.

It’s web people like these that really give us hard working ones a bad rap. Fortunetly, most of the good ones can be visually seen as well as our degrees and certificates that are hung in our offices.

As for Warrior, man, I really hope he can find a producer who can really relate to the epic persona that he portrays and bring out the epic warrior universe as it should be. I really love the simple flash screen with the music (which is very rare). Now let’s see The Warrior’s World using today’s technology.

End Rant.