Web Design News

If you’re a web designer and you’re setting your clients up on hosting that uses Plesk then you really must read this post over on Webmaster World.

K9cuisine.com is a small but successful online retailer that was featured in a story over on Search Engine Land today. K9cuisine is a business that relies on a local web design team for all the work that gets done on their website and the owner of K9 had this good advice for anyone thinking employing a web designer to build a website.

“The most important thing is to have a clear idea of what you want the end product to be. The vision needs to be clear and you need to be able to articulate that to designers. The biggest mistakes I have ever made in development was when I started and tried to figure it out along the way. Communication is also critical. A good design team has to be able to communicate the pros, cons and alternatives. My group never says something can not be done. They may scratch their heads and give me a cost but they never say it can not be done. They are also extremely good at articulating alternatives. I am very careful not to micro manage them …”

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

As I just said on Twitter … why do so many web designers fail to understand that finished a website for a client is just the start of a relationship and not the end?

Another unhappy client from a web design business that describes itself as “an industry leader” and claims to have won awards has just signed on with us.

If you’re a web designer and you’re serious about what you do and you really do want to give your clients the very best outcomes that you can possibly provide then what are you doing about search?

The search landscape is changing every single day so are you really keeping up with the changes or are you still producing sites that didn’t work last year and aren’t about to work any time in the future?

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.

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.

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.

Apart from web design, web hosting and copywriting we also do quite a bit of search engine optimisation work for our own clients both here in Hervey Bay and around the world. We also do quite a bit of SEO on a sub-contract basis for other web support businesses and it seems that our work is just as effective for them as it is for our own clients.

A little over two weeks ago we did some work for one of those web support businesses where we had to target 21 different keyword phrases. Yesterday they wrote to us about the work we had done for them.

Here are some rankings for xxxx. We already have some nice results. I am quite pleased with these fast results and rankings. It usually takes longer than this to see these kind of results.

It seems that in a highly competitive area we had achieved:

•  12 listings on the first page of the search engine results pages for those terms
•  7 listings on the second page
•  1 listing on the third page
•  1 listing on the fourth page

Of course we would like to see all of them on page one of the search engine results pages but 12 out of the 21 isn’t bad for some pages of a site that have only been live for two weeks.

If you need some quality search engine optimisation work done on your site then you know where to come