Web Design News

Orders for more work from established clients are always great to see. It tells us that our websites are definitely hitting the mark as far as the clients are concerned and that means we’re keeping our clients happy.

Hervey Bay Jet Ski was originally developed towards the end of last year and last week Daniel and Rosie came back to us to have some new 2008 jet ski models and quite a few new pages added too.

As any business grows so their website should grow too and to think of a website as being something that’s static can be a mistake. New products and new services  should all added into a webiste as they become available and that’s what we’ll be doing over the common months for Hervey Bay Jet Ski.

It’s our practice to send each client who comes to us for hosting and search engine optimisation services a brief report at the end of every month and today as I was doing the research needed to compile those reports I found that a plan really had come together.

Usually the report to clients lists the number of visitors their site has received during the previous month, whether or not the client needs to consider moving to the next plan and whether or not the client’s website is on the first page of the results in Google for terms that are important to that client.

What terms are important for a particular client is something that is worked out with each client and once we know what the client wants we target those terms. Most of those terms include what you might call a geographic modifier that brings them down to a local level but not all want to focus on the local level.

For example ranking for the term ‘blue widget sales in Hervey Bay’ may be a term that’s very important to our clients … especially if there are a lot of businesses in Hervey Bay who have websites and who sell blue widgets.

For some clients … even though they might be here in Hervey Bay … it’s important to rank well for the term with no geographic modifier and so if they sell blue widgets then they need to rank for ‘blue widgets’ on a national level and achieving a good position on Google’s results pages for that broader term can be much harder.

It was pleasing today to write reports for two of our clients who need to rank well on a national level for several diverse terms and to inform them that we’d achieved the first step in getting them the ranking they wanted during January. Despite a lot of competition they are now right there on the first page and now the challenge is to get them up to within the top four places.

So if you need to get your business website to rank on the first page of Google then talk to the team at CopyTextOnline and Total Website Management. We really are the search engine specialists here in Hervey Bay … we have a proven record of success

The first working draft of HTML 5 has been by the World Wide Web Consortium and it’s definitely looking interesting. The final form of HTML 5 isn’t expected to be released until 2010 but the evolution from now to then is going to be worth following.

You can read more about the release here

As you may or may not know inbound links can be very important to the success or otherwise of a website but getting those links is not always easy.

Sometimes they’re given because the ‘giver’ sees some real value for the people who visit his website. At other times links are given because someone writes begging for a link exchange and today I got one of those begging emails imploring me to exchange links with some website in the United Kingdom that I’ve never heard of.

The request came from Media Run Search … a search engine optimisation company and their employee was begging for a link exchange on behalf of a client. I’m afraid they won’t be getting it.

You see, they forgot to tell me which site they hoped I would place their link on and they also didn’t bother to tell me how any of my Australian sites could be the least bit relevant to a company that sells van roof racks in England.

So David from Media Run Search no link for you old son … for a link to be of any value it to your client or to me it needs to be relevant and it also needs to be somewhere other than buried on a links page. God I thought that idea disappeared before Noah set sail.

Every person who owns a website will get silly link requests sooner or later and almsot always they will want a link to them on a nice juicy page while they want to bury their link to you on a page that no one in their right mind will ever visit.

My advice when you get emails like that is to consign them to the trash … instantly …  because that’s the only place that they belong.

I’m sure that we’ll all agree that this is a business … and it’s one that’s highly competitive. In this town it’s very competitive and there are a lot of individuals looking for work as web designers even though they may have very little … if any … experience.

Last week one of those came into our office. It seems that she’s “done a course and got a certificate”, she knows all about “the importance of including javascript in all the websites I design” but she “can’t understand why a design might look great in her wide-screen but looks horrible in an ordinary monitor.”

Now she wants to go into business for herself but she doesn’t know how much she should charge for her work.

She was sure she could complete a website in just one day so she thought Toni might tell her what she should charge.

I guess she picked the right person to ask because I probably would have just burst out laughing. Toni, on the other hand, tried to suggest that Javascript was bad web design and that doing a course and getting a certificate was not enough experience to go into business for herself … but she wouldn’t be told.

Needless to say we did not bother telling her what we charged because the level of service she would offer clients is nothing compared to what we do for our clients and we hate seeing people get ripped off by inexperienced people who simply have no clue.

So Internet Explorer 8 is on the horizon and it’s said to handle CSS standards much more efficiently than previous versions of Intenet Explorer have.

I guess that means that, when it finally does appear, we’re going to see a rush of clueless designers who start incorporating at lot more CSS into their designs forgetting that a large proportion of the world will still be several steps back and using IE7 or IE6.

In fact we took a client back to IE6 (from IE7) yesterday after his important Gmail account stopped displaying in IE7. It wasn’t an isolated case either - it seems that quite a few people have been calling our computer tech with the very same problem.

A month or so ago Gmail had a major update and in the last week or so Microsoft have been pushing out an update for IE7 … I guess somewhere along the line the two got out of synch.

Just before lunch today I stopped off at one of our clients to show him a print-out of some search engine results pages. His site is less than five weeks old and already it’s appearing at positions three and four for important terms in Google.

When our client came to us he basically wanted a website that would give him some local exposure for his business and we knew that we could him that local exposure with no trouble at all. Today in those print-outs I was able to show him that we had achieved national exposure for him with a number of very very important terms that people are searching for.

And then he hit me with some words that any web designer worth his salt would love to hear from a client.

“Since you guys put my site online I’ve had far more phone calls from people who have seen the website than I’ve ever had from any newspaper advertising.”

Thanks Daniel from Hervey Bay Jet Ski - the only place for jet ski sales in the Wide Bay … you definitely made my day!

An email discussion list I belong to was recently discussing whether or not it was right for web designers to add the name of their business - and a link to the business - to the bottom of every page on  web sites that they design for clients.

I was surprised to see that there were quite a few people who felt that web designers had no right to add their name and link to sites that they designed and the points they made didn’t convince me that we shouldn’t.

In fact I’m now more than ever convinced that adding our name and link to the bottom of every page is something that we really should be doing. A local web design business recently posted out a shiny multi-page brochure to every business they thought might be interested in having a website built for them. In the brochure they listed all the local businesses that they had already built sites for.

High on that list of clients that they had built sites for was one of our clients. I certainly hope prospective customers will check out that list because they’ll see our name on the site and not the name of the web design business who had absolutely nothing to do with the site they’re claiming.

In just these three short sentences there are two important lessons for web designers. Can you see them?

“Writers using short words and short sentences tend to sell more.

It is easy to think that if you just do more and add more value that you will make more money, but sometimes doing more just means simplifying and clarifying your words, or publishing in a more friendly format. If you want people to take action, to believe they can afford it, making them feel confident and comfortable works.”

The quote comes from this post on Aaron Wall’s SEO Book blog

Just lately I’ve come across several new websites where the designer has included a blog for their client. While blogs can have a very positive impact for some businesses they can have quite the opposite effect for others.

In at least two of the sites I looked at there had been very few posts added to the blog. In one case it was quite obvious that the business really had nothing to say in their blog and in the other it was obvious that the people behind the business were devoid of any original thought because all they did was post about what they had read on other blogs.

In both cases the blogs were really sending the wrong message to potential clients. Perhaps as web developers we should know when to recommend a blog and when to not even mention the idea to a person we’re building a site for.