Web Design News

We had a meeting today with a client that we’re in the process of building a number of sites for. Each of these sites forms an important part of his overall business plan but some time after the project began a slight change in the client’s business focus suddenly made it more important for us to get one of the sites finished and online as soon as possible.

In fact it was so important to get this site online that the client get something up there even if it was rather rough and ready … at least it was something that was online and it could be cleaned up later.

So the “rough” version went fully live yesterday and the client is already using it to generate leads for his business. In his words:

“I love it … it loads fast and it’s so easy for visitors to find their way around and it displays my stock so well.”

The finished site for our client will be no different either. Clients don’t want commercial sites that are bogged down by huge graphics and lots of unnecessary flash. They want sites that will generate leads and make sales and that’s what we give our clients every time.

It seems that one of his suppliers liked the site architecture too and we may be looking at redesigning that business’ site too. 

It’s experience that counts and people who have been burnt by poor designs are beginning to wake up to that fact!

There’s a short but important discussion going on over at Webmaster World right now about the need to use this meta tag.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>

What people like Edward Lewis and Brett Tabke certainly make sense.

Google has announced that it can use speech recognition technology to transcribe videos from YouTube … and I guess other places … into text which it can then index.

Think about it for a while, could we soon see videos ranking at the top of Google search engine results pages because of what is said in the video?

There is no doubt that video has become an important part of marketing on websites … just look at the quotes on the top of this video production business’ website … but now it might have just become even more important.

I’ve never quite understood why some web designers insist on throwing up an index page for a client’s new website that consists of nothing more than a large ad for the web designer. Sure, as a site is being developed for a client there needs to be something on the index page but why advertises your own services instead of advertising your client?

Perhaps the worst example I’ve seen of it was a small business that had a great write-up in a local magazine … the article even included a reference to a website but when you went to the website all you got was a full  page ad for the web designer.

It doesn’t need to be that way … those interim index pages can be made to work for the client with very little effort from the design team. Those temporary pages don’t have to be fancy … they just have to advertise the client and not the designer.

 We’ve thrown up temporary index pages for two of our clients recently and both of them … a husband and wife team who gourment ready-made meals in Hervey Bay … and Wide Bay Imports have found that their sites are already generating leads and sales for them.

So perhaps it’s time to remember who you’re working for when a client comes to you to develop a new site and get their online business off to a good start with a temporary index page that actually advertises their business and not yours.

If you’re a web designer who is also seriously into search engine optimisation (and not just paying lip service to SEO) then you’ll know of the problems involved in getting Google to crawl a website that uses a lot of Flash.

Only last week I was asked to review a local photographer’s website that is uses a lot of Flash throughout the site. I found that in four years Google has never been able to get beyond the index page because the designer had not provided any work-around for the search engine spiders to to crawl the site and so the search engine rankings for the site were basically non-existant.

But now there’s some good news for Flash based sites. Adobe - the company that produced the Flash technology - has now provided a way for Google to crawl Flash sites. It’s not the complete solution but it is a step in the right direction and it’s still no excuse for failing to provide a text link to a sitemap that Google can follow.

You can read about Google crawling and indexing flash content here and here