Web Design News

Let’s face it … everyone wants their website to appear on the first page of Google’s search results for important terms. But for many small businesses and their websites there is an important feature that is often overlooked because, even though it is a string of text, it’s not one that web designers always think of.

When we design a website for a business we often think that the most important terms are those that are associated with what the business does so if the website is for an electrician we think about all the elctrical terms that people might enter into Google in attempt to find a website associated with an electrician.

If it’s a website for a plumber we think of plumbing terms and if we’re building a website for a mechanic we think of terms associated with car repairs and car servicing. And that’s all fine but we forget that the people who are searching for those terms usually want a local business so they want to see results businesses near them.

In fact Google understands that need and even if the person searching doesn’t specify a location Google will show them websites that usually belong to businesses that are close to the person doing the search. But how does Google know that a website might be relevant to someone searching in Hervey Bay for example.

Well when Google crawls a web page it looks for a street address … a suburb … a postcode … and a telephone number and from that information Google can tell if a website really is relevant … in terms of locality … to the person doing the search.

So what do we often overlook when we’re building a website for a small business that draws its client base from a local area? We forget the address and the postcode and the phone number. Sure, we might include it on a generic contact page but that’s simply not enough.

If you want your website to have a good chance of ranking well in the search results that are relevant to a specific area then you MUST include the address, postcode and phone number of the business in text (not as an image) on every single page of the website … and it’s best if you show those details somewhere prominent.

Hiding it down at the foot of the page isn’t good enough.

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.

Things have been a little quiet here on the blog for the last few weeks. A lot of new search engine optimisation work for two or our regular clients plus all the ongoing work we do for other clients has kept us rather busy.

Keeping up with some of the never-ending changes in the way the search engines look at your site has also kept us very busy and Toni and I … and two of our staff … are working today just to keep up with the demand.

Before I head off to get stuck into some more of it here’s a little tip for anyone who is looking for a web designer. It can apply here in Hervey Bay or anywhere else around the world for that matter.

At your first meeting with a web designer don’t be afraid to tell them that you’re inspecting them to see if you and the designer will be a good fit. It’s quite possible that you won’t work well with them and when that happens it inevitably costs you money.

So assess them carefully and if you’re uncomfortable with them be prepared to move on.

A potential client came to see us last week after spending several thousands of dollars having a site designed by one of our competitors. It was only after the work was done and paid for that he realised that the designer was quite bright but had little experience and didn’t listen to what the client wanted to see in his website.

Now it’s a case of putting up with a site that he has no confidence in … because getting the designer to make even the most minor of changes is extremely difficult … or spending a lot of money to have the site rebuilt by someone else.

Being able to listen to the client and produce what the client wants comes with experience and you can usually tell whether your web designer has that experience or not.

Web Directions South 2008 is on in Sydney right now. Unfortunately neither Toni or I could make it but we are following what’s going on down there thanks to Twitter.

One take-away from the conference is something that every web designer should already understand … but many don’t.

“when designing for the web – remove everything that isn’t contributing to telling the story”

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 …”

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!

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 run a 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 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.