Last week, I reached out several times to a Colorado woman whose name matched the name of the bride, by email and phone, to ask if Lorie Smith had designed a website for her wedding a few years ago. I got no response. (A person with the bride’s first name greets callers on the voicemail message.) Inquiries were also sent to Smith and to ADF. In a response sent to me last week by an ADF spokesperson, Smith acknowledged she had made the website as a gift for a family member and had subsequently removed it from her online portfolio before the lawsuit was filed. While ADF did not answer our questions about what knowledge its lawyers had of the website on Smith’s site, its official account did post a lengthy thread to Twitter last week, after I had sent the group my questions about the website.
“Lorie wanted to expand her portfolio to design for weddings,” the group posted, but added that “at no time did Lorie advertise or offer to create WEDDING WEBSITES for the general public—much less charge for doing so.” According to ADF, the destination wedding website is inconsequential to the argument its lawyers made to the courts because the website was a gift from Smith to the bride, included in her portfolio “to illustrate her design skills,” not a service she explicitly offered to others for a fee.
Yet the wedding website appeared on a page advertising Smith’s web design services, for anyone, and was undifferentiated from what Smith says is her commercial work. Whether or not Smith charged the bride for her services, the wedding website was, apparently for much of 2015, being used to advertise her services. A reasonable conclusion to draw is that designing wedding websites is one of them.