Web Design News

Just before lunch today I stopped off at one of our clients to show him a print-out of some search engine results pages. His site is less than five weeks old and already it’s appearing at positions three and four for important terms in Google.

When our client came to us he basically wanted a website that would give him some local exposure for his business and we knew that we could him that local exposure with no trouble at all. Today in those print-outs I was able to show him that we had achieved national exposure for him with a number of very very important terms that people are searching for.

And then he hit me with some words that any web designer worth his salt would love to hear from a client.

“Since you guys put my site online I’ve had far more phone calls from people who have seen the website than I’ve ever had from any newspaper advertising.”

Thanks Daniel from Hervey Bay Jet Ski - the only place for jet ski sales in the Wide Bay … you definitely made my day!

According to CNet Firefox has now reached critical mass

Although Microsoft’s Internet Explorer remains the dominant Web browser, the open-source rival has achieved a critical mass of users–Firefox has been downloaded more than 400 million times–and it’s now common for designers to make sure their Web pages work with the browser.

Are you making sure that the sites you design work in both browsers? I’m still coming across sites by local designers that are failing miserably in Firefox.

Producing websites that not only look good but also sell a product or generate leads AND are extremely attractive to search engines spiders is a process.

Last week at a small business meeting here in town a rather prominent businessman asked me what the ’secret sauce’ was that we applied to our designs that enabled them to achieve those goals that I mentioned above. I must admit that I had to scratch my head for a few moments before the truth dawned on me … there’s no ’secret sauce’, there’s just a process that not only needs to be learned but needs to be understood.

Sure, anyone can label themselves anything they like in this industry and they can produce reasonable looking sites simply by emulating what others do. They can even make their clients happy … for a while. But invariably their sites fail in one or more vital area simply because the designer doesn’t UNDERSTAND the process.

Clients aren’t fools … it doesn’t take them long to realise that their sites aren’t working for them and then they become highly critical of whoever built their website … and they’re not slow to tell others that they’ve wasted money on a poor web design.

So if you want to be known as a web designer then take the time to understand the process of building effective websites otherwise you may not stay in business for very long.

An email discussion list I belong to was recently discussing whether or not it was right for web designers to add the name of their business - and a link to the business - to the bottom of every page on  web sites that they design for clients.

I was surprised to see that there were quite a few people who felt that web designers had no right to add their name and link to sites that they designed and the points they made didn’t convince me that we shouldn’t.

In fact I’m now more than ever convinced that adding our name and link to the bottom of every page is something that we really should be doing. A local web design business recently posted out a shiny multi-page brochure to every business they thought might be interested in having a website built for them. In the brochure they listed all the local businesses that they had already built sites for.

High on that list of clients that they had built sites for was one of our clients. I certainly hope prospective customers will check out that list because they’ll see our name on the site and not the name of the web design business who had absolutely nothing to do with the site they’re claiming.