Web Design News

Anyone who has read Toni’s and my ramblings in other places will know that neither of us are big fans of Google. Sure, we play their game and abide by their rules but that doesn’t mean we like them or that we would do a whole lot of mourning if they just went away. And if the history of the Internet is anything to go by then perhaps one day they will … but till that day comes we keep up-to-date on what’s happening with Google and the way they crawl web pages.

So it was interesting to see that on Friday Google announced that they have begun to crawl HTML forms. Now there is no guarantee that they’re going to index what they find at the other end because, in their words:

If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.

Google also undertakes not to crawl beyond any forms that require passwords or the entry of personal details and seeks to reassure webmasters by telling them that Googlebot is “ever-friendly” and is always a good Internet citizen … hmmm.

Google also says that Googlebot obeys “nofollow directives”. I must say that our experience of Googlebot in relation to nofollow has been a little different.

Google also claims that they can now crawl Javascript navigation and that may be so but we’re still seeing a lot of pages with Javascript navigation out there on the Web that have not been crawled or indexed despite having been online for a year or more.

I doubt that we’ll be using javascript navigation on any of our sites any time in the foreseeable future.

A couple of weeks ago the people behind a typical online Mom and Pop business approached and asked us to redevelop their site. Sales were very poor and they had built the original site themselves.

Throughout the redevelopment we had kept in touch with them and, as we do with all our customers, at the midway point we showed them what the new site looked like. Apart from a couple of very minor changes they seemed quite happy with the new look.

Yesterday, with the redeveloped site just two days away from going live, one of them rang the office and spoke to Toni. They weren’t happy, they thought we had missed the point when it came to marketing what they were selling and they suggested that we didn’t have any experience in selling anything online. They even pointed to a site we had built for another customer and suggested that it was way “too cold” to sell anything.

I suppose we could have suggested that they call the owner of that website and find out just how successful the site has been. We could have pointed to our car and told them how it had been paid for by the online sales we have made and continue to make via affiliate marketing and our own online shops. But in the end if a client suddenly loses faith in your ability to produce what they’re paying for then there’s only thing you can do … and that’s what we did.

The client was invited to come into the office today and pick up a full refund.

You win some and you lose some but as long as you learn from your loses things haven’t been a total waste of time.