Web Design News

The first working draft of HTML 5 has been by the World Wide Web Consortium and it’s definitely looking interesting. The final form of HTML 5 isn’t expected to be released until 2010 but the evolution from now to then is going to be worth following.

You can read more about the release here

As you may or may not know inbound links can be very important to the success or otherwise of a website but getting those links is not always easy.

Sometimes they’re given because the ‘giver’ sees some real value for the people who visit his website. At other times links are given because someone writes begging for a link exchange and today I got one of those begging emails imploring me to exchange links with some website in the United Kingdom that I’ve never heard of.

The request came from Media Run Search … a search engine optimisation company and their employee was begging for a link exchange on behalf of a client. I’m afraid they won’t be getting it.

You see, they forgot to tell me which site they hoped I would place their link on and they also didn’t bother to tell me how any of my Australian sites could be the least bit relevant to a company that sells van roof racks in England.

So David from Media Run Search no link for you old son … for a link to be of any value it to your client or to me it needs to be relevant and it also needs to be somewhere other than buried on a links page. God I thought that idea disappeared before Noah set sail.

Every person who owns a website will get silly link requests sooner or later and almsot always they will want a link to them on a nice juicy page while they want to bury their link to you on a page that no one in their right mind will ever visit.

My advice when you get emails like that is to consign them to the trash … instantly …  because that’s the only place that they belong.

No, I’m not talking about a UFO, the fish that got away or the truck that just went down the road outside our office. What I’m doing is using our server consultant’s favourite expression to describe an advertisment that was sent to one of our clients for inclusion on their website.

They forwarded it to us of course because we handle all the updates, advertising and maintenance on their site and they wanted us to see if we could put it somewhere on their site. One look at the ad … which was a graphic … and the answer was a polite no.

You see the graphic was over 1300 pixels in length, almost the same in width and came in at over 300kb in file size. In the words of our server consultant “it was bloody huge!”

Sometimes it’s nice to have a server consultant who can express themselves so eloquently in the common vernacular.

I’m sure that we’ll all agree that this is a business … and it’s one that’s highly competitive. In this town it’s very competitive and there are a lot of individuals looking for work as web designers even though they may have very little … if any … experience.

Last week one of those came into our office. It seems that she’s “done a course and got a certificate”, she knows all about “the importance of including javascript in all the websites I design” but she “can’t understand why a design might look great in her wide-screen but looks horrible in an ordinary monitor.”

Now she wants to go into business for herself but she doesn’t know how much she should charge for her work.

She was sure she could complete a website in just one day so she thought Toni might tell her what she should charge.

I guess she picked the right person to ask because I probably would have just burst out laughing. Toni, on the other hand, tried to suggest that Javascript was bad web design and that doing a course and getting a certificate was not enough experience to go into business for herself … but she wouldn’t be told.

Needless to say we did not bother telling her what we charged because the level of service she would offer clients is nothing compared to what we do for our clients and we hate seeing people get ripped off by inexperienced people who simply have no clue.

So Internet Explorer 8 is on the horizon and it’s said to handle CSS standards much more efficiently than previous versions of Intenet Explorer have.

I guess that means that, when it finally does appear, we’re going to see a rush of clueless designers who start incorporating at lot more CSS into their designs forgetting that a large proportion of the world will still be several steps back and using IE7 or IE6.

In fact we took a client back to IE6 (from IE7) yesterday after his important Gmail account stopped displaying in IE7. It wasn’t an isolated case either - it seems that quite a few people have been calling our computer tech with the very same problem.

A month or so ago Gmail had a major update and in the last week or so Microsoft have been pushing out an update for IE7 … I guess somewhere along the line the two got out of synch.

Well, after an incredible lead up to Christmas I actually have a few minutes today to sit down and add a few thoughts to this blog.

We worked over the Christmas - New Year period when all the other web design places in town took a break and that brought us some new and interesting clients. We sat down with one of them yesterday to get all the details we need to work up a proposal for an e-commerce site and it was interesting to listen to him talk about small business and what he thought of web designers in town.

He mentioned a site that a local designer had built for a friend and, after he left, I went searching for the site. I didn’t have the URL for the site but I knew what line of business his friend was in so I searched Google using a number of keywords and keyword phrases that would be relevant for that business … and I still couldn’t find it.

My partner finally located it after tracking down an advertisment the business had run in a local newspaper and then I discovered why I hadn’t been able to find the site listed in Google. There was not one single keyword or keyword phrase in the text on any of the site’s pages that was in relevant to the business.

The only time the keywords and keyword phrases appeared was on a graphic … and it didn’t have an alt tag. I couldn’t find it in Google because Google couldn’t see just what the site was relevant for.

Even if the client was going to use other ways to promote their website just a few keywords or keyword phrases would have made that site visible in Google for there’s very little local competition for the site owner’s business.

A brain snap or sheer bloody incompetence on the part of the web designer? Sadly, knowing the design company involved, I think it’s incompetence.

I hate to see small businesses that have very limited resources getting such poor service. A website should add value to a small business rather than costing a lot of money and delivering nothing in return. It takes so little effort to design a site that not only looks good but also adds that value that a small business is looking for.