Web Design News

The client is a pharmacy in a relatively small but growing town where the market place is predominantly older people who aren’t necessarily afraid to search online for the local services they required.

The owner of the pharmacy wanted to be the first pharmacy in town to have a website and after some discussion with him we agreed on three guidelines for the site.

1. It had to be very user friendly.
2. It had to rank on the first page of Google for a number of important local terms
3. It had to engage people who came to the site and market the business through persuasion rather than pushing the pharmacy down the visitors’ throats.

Before we started to design the site we looked around to see what others had done and apart from websites belonging to large pharmacy chains we weren’t able to locate any local independent pharmacy in Australia with it’s own website.

So doing our very best Captain Kirk impersonation we forged ahead and developed a website for a pharmacy in Hervey Bay that our client is very happy with and Google is loving.

Here’s a little quote that should be imprinted on the brain of every person who thinks that they can design a content management system.

Until web designers learn proper semantic markup, like H1, H2, are structural tags first and foremost, and visual elements second, an SEO is always going to have to come in and clean up the mess. Until designers learn how to use a CMS properly and separate content from context, an SEO is always going to have fix the nightmare they have created.

It comes from this post on Graywolf’s SEO Blog and the whole post is definitely worth reading.

On Friday we were approached by a potential client who wanted a quote to build a website and host a large amount of video for him and on Saturday we sat down with him to listen to his vision of what he wanted. It was soon clear that he had a great idea but was a bit uncertain about the technical details of how he would get his business online.

Fortunately for him we’ve had considerable experience in putting video online having worked with it back in the days when video on the Web was something new and exciting. Yesterday I sat down and wrote a primer for him that will help him understand what he needs to be looking for in hosting and the way he shoots video that is destined for the web.

It was good to be able to help him and it brought back a lot of memories of the fun and frustration we had working in the early days with video and webcams.

Today we’ll be writing a proposal for him to give him the costs involved in making his dreams come true.