Web Design News

We live and work in an interesting town here in Australia. Local search as the Americans and Europeans know it isn’t available here in Australia yet and in this town not many people search the Net for local businesses. Instead most people still rely on the old information sources.

But that’s going to change; local search will come and gradually people in this town are beginning to search online for the local information they need. As more people begin to search locally we will also see a change in the terms that people search for. More common local terms will be used – some terms that will become important are those that may only be common within this town or this district.

So are the web designers in this town including the factors that are important for local search into the sites they are building for local businesses? Are they including those local terms that could become important in their search engine optimisation?

Sadly most aren’t – in fact there are still web design businesses in this town that are producing sites with designs that were popular years ago but lack the functionality that is so important today. And search engine optimisation is something they can talk about but obviously don’t understand.

Now is the time to be building sites that will continue working effectively long into the future. Now is not the time to be building sites that were beyond their use-by date years ago.

There are definitely times when I seriously envy those web designers who only have to think about Google.com. I fully realise that getting a good placement on the first page for any query on Google isn’t easy but spare thought for those of us who have to contend with this:

This is Google.com.au and it’s the default page that Google sends all Australian searches to. Sadly for web designers and search engine optimisation specialists the search engine results pages for Google.com.au can be somewhat different to the search engine results pages that you get in Google.com.

But wait, there’s more. See the little radio button marked ‘pages from Australia’? If a searcher clicks that button and then searches for the same term they did when the button was not clicked they will more often than not get a completely different listing to what they did when they first searched Google.com.au.

You might think that differing results should be expected, after all Google is only searching for terms that appear on pages from Australia if that radio button is selected. Sadly though you would be wrong – Google also returns pages from the US even if you select that radio button.

Now spare a thought for those of us who need to produce a website that appears at the top of the listing for all three versions of Google – a site such as one built for a tourist attraction in Australia that wants to attract people from overseas and from Australia as well – one that ranks at the top of page 1 for some important search terms in Google.com and Google.com.au but is nowhere to be seen if that ‘pages from Australia’ button is selected.

How much does Google know about you and the sites you build/design/own … and does it affect the way Google looks at, and ranks, your sites?

Back in November one of Google’s spokesmen revealed that they know far more about webmasters than the vast majority of us ever released. That’s something that Toni and I have been looking at ever since and others have been too.

But what could it mean for web designers and webmasters? Google is not an Algorithm: Google Imparts Intent is definitely worth reading.

Here in the town where we operate our business there are two other web design businesses that offer their clients hosting as part of a package deal. Both of them seem to have some difficulty in understanding how things work on the Net.

If you were to enter any of the URLs of businesses that they host as:

http://www.domainame.com.au

you would see the client’s website without any hassles .

But if you were to enter the URL as:

http://domainname.com.au

you get something entirely different. From one host you get a custom 404 page that tells you that the site is experiencing difficulties and will be back online soon – although if you keep on entering the the URL without the ‘www’ it never does. For the other you get the generic 404 page.

It’s not rocket science to ensure that a client’s site comes up regardless of which way you enter a URL but somehow it seems to elude them.

If I’m building a site for an Australian business who wants to market their goods or services in another country should I be designing on the basis of what ‘works’ in Australia?

It’s an interesting question that my partner considered and wrote about several years ago. Back then she compared two shop windows and suggested that there was a lesson in those windows for anyone who was building websites. The shop windows she was talking about where two that we saw quite frequently.

One window belonged to a typically western-culture shop while the other was a riot of colours, contents and even smells and it belonged to a shop that catered for the local Chinese community … and the shop behind the window wasn’t much better. I know that we wondered how anyone could possibly find anything that they were looking for in a shop like that but the Chinese community certainly shopped there.

Anyway, like most husbands tend to do, I didn’t pay much attention to what Toni wrote but now I’m beginning to see that she was definitely on the right track and perhaps well ahead of many other people in what she was thinking about.

You see, the big noise now in search engine marketing circles is that what appeals to western cultures doesn’t appeal much to the Chinese and neat, clean websites like Google are not appealing to the Chinese at all.

You can read more about it in ‘A Tale of Two Cultures’ and it should certainly think about what your target market is for the sites that you design.