Web Design News

A couple of weeks ago I had to dive into the source code for a page on one of our own websites and nearly choked when I saw how rough the coding had been. It was something I’d done years ago and, while the page still rendered well in all the browsers. the coding was terrible.

Yesterday I ran into some more very very bad coding when a client asked me to give him a price on extending a site that had been built by another designer here in town. This designer had used a content management script that he had developed himself and, once again, the pages rendered quite well in the major browsers but the coding was aweful and the CSS was nothing like I had ever seen before. I’m not sure I have interpreted it correctly but it looked like it used a whole bunch of empty tags to position elements on the page.

So there’s some bad news instore for the client - extending this site is not going to be as cheap as he had hoped would be the case. Dreamweaver choked on the code and I doubt that I could make enough sense out of it to do anything by hand.

And there’s a lesson for any business looking for a web designer to build a site for them - make sure that you have a guarantee that everything that will be done for you can be worked on by any other web designer.

No, I’m not talking about a UFO, the fish that got away or the truck that just went down the road outside our office. What I’m doing is using our server consultant’s favourite expression to describe an advertisment that was sent to one of our clients for inclusion on their website.

They forwarded it to us of course because we handle all the updates, advertising and maintenance on their site and they wanted us to see if we could put it somewhere on their site. One look at the ad … which was a graphic … and the answer was a polite no.

You see the graphic was over 1300 pixels in length, almost the same in width and came in at over 300kb in file size. In the words of our server consultant “it was bloody huge!”

Sometimes it’s nice to have a server consultant who can express themselves so eloquently in the common vernacular.

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.

Here is a site that my partner found in her travels around the Net. It’s produced by a state government here in Australia and it features some navigation that … well … is very different.

I wonder how many people have trouble reading it?

Late last week we were talking to a local signwriter who was telling us that he was about to resort to legal action against local web design business here in Hervey Bay. It seems that said web design business had taken much of the signwriters website and incorporated it into their own without bothering to ask.

Out of curiosity we wandered over to the offending site last night and got quite a surprise. There was a site promoting the web design business and it was littered with Google Adsense ads … including a rather eye-catching ad for the biggest web design business here in town.

There’s nothing quite like advertising your competition on a site that is supposed to be displaying your talens to prospective clients.

Next door to our computer shop is a sales office for a large land development here in Hervey Bay. For quite some time now the sales team have been complaining that the marketing team is out of touch with reality … and they certainly do have some grounds for making a statement like that. Their marketing is definitely under-performing because it’s targeting the wrong demographic.

Fails on keywords
Their website is also underpeforming but for a totally different reason … it was never really built to perform. It fails on all the important keywords and keyword phrases that it needs to rank for  and it fails because they’re simply not included in the text on the pages.

Instead it attempts to rely on keywords that the desighner has stuffed into the keyword Meta tag. Now I should point out that Hervey Bay is one of the sea-change capitals of Australia so there are lifestyle issues here and it’s also promoted as the whale watching capital of Australia so perhaps that’s why the designers thought it important to fill the keyword Meta tag with these key words:

hervey bay, harvey bay, harveybay, herveybay, investments,
land sales,house and land, fraser island, wide bay, fraser coast,
whale watching, augustus, augustus land, lots for sale,
blocks for sale, sections for sale, pialba, builders,
homes, new homes, for sale, display homes, lifestyle, parks,
walkways, forest, schools, cbd, local shopping, hospitals,
golf club, golf course

Fails on marketing
It fails from a marketing point of view because it stresses the features of the land development rather than the benefits that flow to someone who might buy a a block in the development.

Fails on price
But then I guess I shouldn’t be surprised - for a multi-million dollar land development they only paid $750.00 for the website.

 At the moment one of the sales team’s own websites ranks better for one of the keyword phrases than does the development company’s own website. How sad is that!

Unbelievably bad so it seems.

For a small web design business like Copy Text Online business can be generated at some unusual times and events. This last weekend Toni and I hosted a surprise party for Toni’s parents to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary and now we’re working on two websites for people who attended the party.

One is for Toni’s sister who runs a bricks-and-mortar business and has had a website associated with the business online for four or five years. The site has never performed anywhere near their expectations, it’s never ranked in the first 10 pages for any important search term, nothing but the index page is currently appearing in Google and traffic numbers are tiny.

She and her husband asked us to take a look at it and it was immediately obvious why their site was doing so poorly. Our report to them covered five pages but the important points were:

• All navigation was via Flash buttons - there was no sitemap.
• The index page consisted of one small Flash banner with an embedded ‘enter’link’ and no text so no search engine spider could find its way inside.
• There were broken links and some navigation buttons only appeared at the bottom of several internal pages.
• The site used frames.
• There was a complete lack of sales text, there were no calls to action and the site failed to give surfers the street address of the business (The products offered by the business could not be sold online and customers needed to visit the business to complete their purchase).
• Keywords and keyword phrases were also missing.

Now you wouldn’t design a site that lacked all those essentials now would you?

We’ve been involved in web design for a long time now and we’ve come across some incredibly bad examples of web design by businesses who claim to be professional web designers. Here’s one from a ‘professional’ web designer here where we live.

The blue bar at the top of every browser window is known as the title bar. It displays the text that a designer places in the title tags on a web page.

 Any designer worth his salt will tell you that the title bar is prime property when it comes to achieving good search engine placement. It’s definitely not the only factor in achieving good search engine placement but it is very important.

Any designer worth his salt will also tell you that what you consider to be the title of a page and what should actually appear in that title bar are usually quite different. What should appear in that title bar is a short, well written snippet that includes keywords or keyword phrases that are important to your site and the title bar should change for each and every page on your website.

What shouldn’t appear in the title bar on your website is what you see here - the address of the business.