WDANZ

The newly formed Web Designers Association of New Zealand Ltd seems to be off to a very shaky start.

First of all it has hired a major league spammer to work for them. Brendan Battles was listed as one of the top 200 spammers in the world from 2000 to Sep 2005 and at one stage was sending 50 million spams a day.

He has been spamming in NZ also, and denied being the same person as the US spammer until he confessed to TVNZ.

Secondly there are concerns that despite the term “association” in their name they are a limited liability company. That means that only the owner get to make any decisions on the organisation, not the web designers who will be paying WDANZ $250 a year.

Arguably by not using “Limited” on their website WDANZ are in breach of Sections 21 and 25 of the Companies Act 1993.

Sarah King has a lot of discussion on this issue on her blog.

The owner and CEO of WDANZ is Dennis Smith. He is the only person in NZ to have had a .nz registrar forcibly de-authorised.

People can make up their own minds on the worth of paying money to WDANZ Ltd.