Web Design News

Last Thursday Eric Schmidt - the CEO of Google - spoke to investors. This is one of the things he had to say:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out in the next little while.”

Search and gaining good rankings for keywords and keyword phrases that are important to your business is going to get interesting this year … you have Eric’s word on that.

Building a website that looked good in all monitors used to be easy and only Luddites like me continued to build websites with fixed pixel widths. If you were really cool you you set your page width by percentages.

But it seems that it’s us Luddites who are having the last laugh because with all the new widescreen monitors that are coming out  people are finding that websites with page widths based on percentages are not looking good … in fact they’re looking downright aweful.

You’ll find an interesting article about what does and doesn’t work in the latest monitors here.

I can’t believe that it’s nearly two months since I had a chance to post something here but it is and my only excuse is that we have been totally flat out.

Most of the team have been focused on the rebuild of an online shop for a new client. They did have a an online shop built by someone who has since disappeared but that was such a mess of poor design and a hopeless shopping cart programme that the only solution was to rebuild it from scratch and that will go live in the next day or so.

While they have been busy on that I’ve been tied up with search engine optimisation work for several overseas clients. I even got to write the outline of an SEO e-book that will be coming out in the United States in the next month or so.

That was fun and a challenge because the search engines are beginning to make some big changes in the way they crawl and index websites and keeping up with that new information has been almost a fulltime job all by itself.

So we really have been one very busy web design studio in Hervey Bay and that’s going to continue well into the foreseeable future. But then we don’t mind that because all the clients we work for are seeing a real return on their investment and happy clients are what we always strive for.

Unfortunately we couldn’t make one guy happy … he had his website built by another designer here in town and I really did feel for him when he told Toni and me this week:

“I really wish I had found you guys before I went and wasted all that money on a site that’s just not working for me.”

Sadly that’s not the first time we’ve heard that lament - just before Christmas another potential client found that the cost of correcting all the mistakes made by another person in Hervey Bay who thought that they could design websites was going to be as much as it would cost to tear it down and start all over again.

The moral of that story is that if you want a website designed here in Hervey Bay … or anywhere else for that matter … then shop around and talk to people who have already done business with the designer you’re thinking of using.