In addition - this design firm put out a ad the day before my project started looking for a new designer. If this person was so good, why didn't they just fill that job?
Her email address was not out in the open. It took some digging through basecamp for me to figure it out. My main issue was that I looked through the portfolio of the person they were going to have to do it and she wasn't any good.
I also didn't really think it was worth letting her attempt to do it and then fighting them at the end of I wasn't happy.
I'd also like to throw my name in to the mix. I've actually been pursuing this idea and have talked to some golf course management companies/golf courses.
There are certainly some serious apprehensions I have about the business. It worries me that there is no one out there searching for this and that it would boil down to a 100% cold-calling sales gig. Also, most, if not all, of these golf courses have the worst looking websites, which leads me to believe that there is no one looking after any web presence or anything web-related.
This actually touches on a bigger issue which I'd love to discuss. What you have here is a very profitable niche, one in which a few early 90s web companies took over, gobbled up all the market share, and then stopped innovating. I see this in a lot of ignored niches.
The thing I don't get with all dating sites is they all seem to be exactly the same - mediocre design, some plugged in dating script. I can't tell if this means there's room in the marketplace if you did it the right way or if it's just totally over-saturated.