Fox News - Robert Westmore of Southern California designs websites for a living -- but he was shocked to learn that he had designed a new homepage for the reclusive North Korean regime.
“I had no idea,” he told FoxNews.com in an interview. “Honestly, I didn't even know North Korea had a website.” While the notorious totalitarian government continues to spend hundreds of millions on failed rocket launches, North Korea skimps in other areas, notably web design. Indeed the country spent just $15 redesigning its national homepage, korea-dpr.com -- a fact accidentally discovered by an unsuspecting college student. Son-il built the site, he said -- along the way paying that $15 to Robert Westmore, a freelance web designer from the West Coast who had posted the template for general consumption on ThemeForest.com, an online exchange where designers can show off their wares.
Such templates are primarily intended for personal blogs on WordPress or Blogger -- not for government or international regimes.
What the hell! $15, either North Korea drives a hard bargain, or I got ripped off and someone owes me $60, because that's how much more I paid for this template, meanwhile North Korea's over here delusionally working on world supremacy and shaking down America's web designers.
I'm dumbfounded, I honestly don't know which is more embarrassing, that North Korea, a whole country, spent less on web design than a guy who blogs as a hobby each morning before work, or, that I paid 5x the price Kim Jong Il negotiated and his site looks like Fire (for a blog anyway, for an official government domain its a bit of a joke).
