Web Design News

Any web designer worth his salt will understand that there are some very basic fundamentals when it comes to designing a website for a client and here are just two for you to think about.

1. When a stunning view is part of the attraction for people to come and spend money at your business why wouldn’t you include at lease one image of that view in your website?

2. When your address and phone number are important for people who want to come and spend money at your business why would you only display them on one page? Why wouldn’t you display them boldly on every single page of your website … especially when the web designer takes up a great chunk of real estate on every page to display his business name that links straight to his website?

It sometimes makes you wonder who and what some web designers were thinking of when they sat down to build a site for a paying client.

… no matter how cheap they may seem.

Over the last few weeks we’ve had a number of enquiries from local businesses who have been dissatisfied with the work done on their websites by other local designers.

These people have spent anywhere from $1500 to $5000 dollars on sites that have turned out to be absolute failures. They neither rank well in the search engines or make sales or generate leads and the sites owners come to us in the hope that we can work some miracle without costing them any more money.

Sadly we can’t because our time is just as valuable as any other small business and all too often the site designs are so bad that they need to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Even if the design can be recycled the cost of re-writing the text on the site is often more than the site owner can afford.

So if you’re about to pay a web designer to build a website for your business you’ll find 85 Reasons Why Website Designers/Developers Keep SEOs in Business in invaluable read for it will give you some guidelines that will help you to avoid wasting money on a clueless web designer.

Some of the reasons given in the article:

3. They develop navigational menus that are invisible to search engines

5. They ask the client to provide them with website copy (it’s the designer who should develop the text based on the concepts that you give them).

6. They have the client provide them with what pages they want on their website.

10. They think that SEO is submitting (the site) to search engines.

12. They put the same title on every page of the website.

18. They find it easier to use paid search.

I could go on with more but then I’d be breaching the fair-use rules of copyright so just let me encourage you to follow the link and read those 85 points. Unfortunately we’ve come across every one of them in the last few weeks.

We actually turned work away today … not because we’re too busy to handle any more (which we just about are) but because it was too late to do what the new client wanted us to do.

This website owner had employed someone else … a friend I think she said … to build an online store for them and now that the store was complete they wanted us to do some SEO work for them. One quick look at the site was enough to tell us that there was going to be very little in the way of search engine optimisation that we could do for the site.

The site was built using a shopping cart script that we’re quite familiar with and it is possible to make sites built with this script do really well in the search engines but ….

To make that happen the search engine optimisation people have to be there from the start. They need to have some say in the overall design of the site and not be left out till the very end because by then it’s just way too late. With this particular script there are too many important variables that become non-variable once the site is ready to go live and there’s very little search engine optimisation anyone can do from that point on.

And that’s why we turned this work away. It would have been a waste of our time and the clients money to have pretended otherwise. I did point out to the client though that she would find plenty of people who would claim that they can do things to improve the search engine rankings for the site but they were all snake oil salesmen.

So remember, when you’re having a new site built be sure to include the search engine optimisation people right from the start because once the design work is finished it’s way too late to start thinking about achieving a good position in any of the major search engines.

Everyone has heard the old saying that an image is worth a thousand words … but what are the images and photos on your business website telling your customer?

Are your images and photos really enhancing your website or are they actually detracting from the impact of your site?

Way too many people try to save money by taking their own photographs for a business website. Sure they pay a professional web designer to design the site but they think that their photos are good enough to display on their new site.

Unfortunately all to often the photos are not as good as the business owner might think. Just recently we were given a number of photos to include in a basic website for a client. The lighting and the sharpness were all fine but most of them had problems:

• the subject was too far from the camera
• there was clutter in the foreground that drew your eye away from the subject
• the background was littered with things that shouldn’t have been there or distracted the viewer - an upturned chair - a car park full of cars - doors that were left ajar
• there were thing to the side of the photographer that found their way into the photographs and couldn’t be cropped out
• important items in the background were not centred in the image - a sign with the client’s business name was off-centre so not all of the name appeared in the image.

These are all things that a professional looks for when setting up to take the photos and they’re all things that do nothing to enhance a website.  If you want to take photos for your website then be sure to look before you take the photo and remove the junk that is going to get in the way.

And don’t be afraid to use a professional photographer rather than take some happy snaps yourself and hope for the best.

Here at Total Website Management and Copy Text Online we’re pleased to be able to say that we work with Freddie and Gordon Kitson from Vizionz and they are two of the best commercial photographers in Hervey Bay.

Last Thursday Eric Schmidt - the CEO of Google - spoke to investors. This is one of the things he had to say:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out in the next little while.”

Search and gaining good rankings for keywords and keyword phrases that are important to your business is going to get interesting this year … you have Eric’s word on that.

Building a website that looked good in all monitors used to be easy and only Luddites like me continued to build websites with fixed pixel widths. If you were really cool you you set your page width by percentages.

But it seems that it’s us Luddites who are having the last laugh because with all the new widescreen monitors that are coming out  people are finding that websites with page widths based on percentages are not looking good … in fact they’re looking downright aweful.

You’ll find an interesting article about what does and doesn’t work in the latest monitors here.

I can’t believe that it’s nearly two months since I had a chance to post something here but it is and my only excuse is that we have been totally flat out.

Most of the team have been focused on the rebuild of an online shop for a new client. They did have a an online shop built by someone who has since disappeared but that was such a mess of poor design and a hopeless shopping cart programme that the only solution was to rebuild it from scratch and that will go live in the next day or so.

While they have been busy on that I’ve been tied up with search engine optimisation work for several overseas clients. I even got to write the outline of an SEO e-book that will be coming out in the United States in the next month or so.

That was fun and a challenge because the search engines are beginning to make some big changes in the way they crawl and index websites and keeping up with that new information has been almost a fulltime job all by itself.

So we really have been one very busy web design studio in Hervey Bay and that’s going to continue well into the foreseeable future. But then we don’t mind that because all the clients we work for are seeing a real return on their investment and happy clients are what we always strive for.

Unfortunately we couldn’t make one guy happy … he had his website built by another designer here in town and I really did feel for him when he told Toni and me this week:

“I really wish I had found you guys before I went and wasted all that money on a site that’s just not working for me.”

Sadly that’s not the first time we’ve heard that lament - just before Christmas another potential client found that the cost of correcting all the mistakes made by another person in Hervey Bay who thought that they could design websites was going to be as much as it would cost to tear it down and start all over again.

The moral of that story is that if you want a website designed here in Hervey Bay … or anywhere else for that matter … then shop around and talk to people who have already done business with the designer you’re thinking of using.

It’s been an absolutely crazy two weeks here at Total Website Management and Copy Text Online. We were on deadlines for clients in the US and in Spain and we also had a crazy deadline to make for stage one of client’s site.

Just to add to all the mayhem we decided that it was time to upgrade a server over in the United States. The old server was still working well but to keep up our standard of service we decided that it was time to make the move to a better server now before the old one began to break down.

Server moves in days gone by have been traumatic and a lot of work but fortunately these days server moves can be almost seamless. However the wait between shifting everything to the new server and waiting to see it come online can be as traumatic as waiting for a baby to be born … anything and everything can go wrong.

Fortunately this baby was born with only a couple of minor glitches and they were fixed within minutes of the new server going live.

So it’s been a crazy time but in the middle of all that craziness we got a letter from the Gayndah and District Historical Society. We did their Gayndah Museum site last month and they wrote to tell us:

“The members who have computers and have had a look all agree that the colour schem you have chosen is spot on and the layout is very easy to follow and appropriate.”

We love it when a plan comes together!

At a recent search engine conference one of the speakers presented the SEO’s 10 Commandments. It was interesting to see that most of them are applicable to web designers too and number 5 is one that we all should live by.

5. Thou shall honor your client’s wishes and goals.

The Online Digital Business Initiative Translation:
Listen to your customers and respect their opinions. Do not pretend you live in an ivory tower, but rather give back to your customers and they will give back to you ten fold.

You can read all 10 of them here

Now there’s an interesting question to ask your web designer. Obviously Google is the leading search engine on the planet but what come in at number two?

If you’re designer tells you that it’s Yahoo! or MSN/Live then he’s either out of touch or he doesn’t care and either way you really don’t want him working on your site. In the last couple of weeks Yahoo! has slipped to the number three spot and something quite different to your normal search engine has taken its place.