Web Design News

Late last week we were talking to a local signwriter who was telling us that he was about to resort to legal action against local web design business here in Hervey Bay. It seems that said web design business had taken much of the signwriters website and incorporated it into their own without bothering to ask.

Out of curiosity we wandered over to the offending site last night and got quite a surprise. There was a site promoting the web design business and it was littered with Google Adsense ads … including a rather eye-catching ad for the biggest web design business here in town.

There’s nothing quite like advertising your competition on a site that is supposed to be displaying your talens to prospective clients.

Web designers should always be interested in the number of people using the various web browsers and we should be designing sites that render perfectly in all browsers.

Some figures have just been released that show that Firefox users now account for around 19.65% of all Net users in the United States and 12.72% of users globally. There’s also another browser out there that is becoming popular – especially in China. It’s called Maxthon and just a few minutes ago Maxthon had been downloaded over 99 million times.

So how do your sites look in Maxthon?

We don’t often build new sites for clients online; usually they’re built here in the office and only go live once the client has signed off on the final version of the site. But this month we’ve been building one online for a client and it has already delivered the perfect result even before it was finished.

Toni called the client today to make sure they were happy with the final draft and was surprised when the client told her that the site had already started generating leads that had more than paid for the cost of the site design.

It seems that without any attempt to get it spidered the site has already been cached and is appearing at the top of the SERPs in Google for the terms the client wanted to target.

How could that happen? I’ll let you work that one out for yourself  

‘unavailable_after’ is a new Meta tag that Google is said to be releasing soon. It seems that it should be included on pages that have limited life and it tells Googlebot not to crawl the page once the offer made on the page has expired.

Here in Australia web design for real estate businesses is a fairly specialised industry and, because of the franchise structure of the real estate industry here, it’s almost a closed shop.

But in the United States things are a bit more fluid and there are a lot of local real estate sites run by independent real estate businesses and their websites are beginning to include some new and interesting features.

You can read more about that here

Should you bother to sign a contract or have a written agreement with each client who employs you to develop a website for them? Small Business Trends offers some good reasons why you should.

It’s an interesting question that David Risley is dealing with in a six part series over on Webby Online. Are they nothing more than an online brochure or will they actually generate leads for your clients?

I know that David is certainly against the idea of having a website that’s just an online brochure for your business but as local search grows in popularity even online brochures can work. However it really is far better to have a site that generates leads and pays for itself many times over than just having a brochure.

You can find the start of David’s series here at What’s the Point of Your Website?

If you’re wondering why you can’t register that domain name that your client would really like to have for their new website then maybe Kevin Ham, Scott Day or Yun Ye may have it.

Never heard of those guys before? Then you should find this article fascinating – our resident domainer certainly did.

… when you look under the hood.

I was just wandering through some of the listings over on Hervey Bay Information – local websites always interest me – and there was a listing for some tourist accommodation with this very unusual meta tags:

<META content=noarchive name=GOOGLEBOT>

Now I’m not sure why anyone would want to put that in their tags but Google certainly seems to be obeying the request and is not showing a cached version of the page.

And then there was another tourist accommodation website with 28 lines of meta tags – this may be a world record

It seems that we’ll be starting work on a website for a furniture store in the very near future so I was interested to follow a link from the SEOigloo Blog to this site.

It’s a very interesting site to look at and poke around in. It’s also interesting because it’s the product of a web design company run by one of the web’s leading SEO experts. You’ll find navigation links in three different areas on the page and which links appear in which parts of the page is also interesting.