Web Design News

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 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.

Well, after an incredible lead up to Christmas I actually have a few minutes today to sit down and add a few thoughts to this blog.

We worked over the Christmas - New Year period when all the other web design places in town took a break and that brought us some new and interesting clients. We sat down with one of them yesterday to get all the details we need to work up a proposal for an e-commerce site and it was interesting to listen to him talk about small business and what he thought of web designers in town.

He mentioned a site that a local designer had built for a friend and, after he left, I went searching for the site. I didn’t have the URL for the site but I knew what line of business his friend was in so I searched Google using a number of keywords and keyword phrases that would be relevant for that business … and I still couldn’t find it.

My partner finally located it after tracking down an advertisment the business had run in a local newspaper and then I discovered why I hadn’t been able to find the site listed in Google. There was not one single keyword or keyword phrase in the text on any of the site’s pages that was in relevant to the business.

The only time the keywords and keyword phrases appeared was on a graphic … and it didn’t have an alt tag. I couldn’t find it in Google because Google couldn’t see just what the site was relevant for.

Even if the client was going to use other ways to promote their website just a few keywords or keyword phrases would have made that site visible in Google for there’s very little local competition for the site owner’s business.

A brain snap or sheer bloody incompetence on the part of the web designer? Sadly, knowing the design company involved, I think it’s incompetence.

I hate to see small businesses that have very limited resources getting such poor service. A website should add value to a small business rather than costing a lot of money and delivering nothing in return. It takes so little effort to design a site that not only looks good but also adds that value that a small business is looking for.

Producing websites that not only look good but also sell a product or generate leads AND are extremely attractive to search engines spiders is a process.

Last week at a small business meeting here in town a rather prominent businessman asked me what the ’secret sauce’ was that we applied to our designs that enabled them to achieve those goals that I mentioned above. I must admit that I had to scratch my head for a few moments before the truth dawned on me … there’s no ’secret sauce’, there’s just a process that not only needs to be learned but needs to be understood.

Sure, anyone can label themselves anything they like in this industry and they can produce reasonable looking sites simply by emulating what others do. They can even make their clients happy … for a while. But invariably their sites fail in one or more vital area simply because the designer doesn’t UNDERSTAND the process.

Clients aren’t fools … it doesn’t take them long to realise that their sites aren’t working for them and then they become highly critical of whoever built their website … and they’re not slow to tell others that they’ve wasted money on a poor web design.

So if you want to be known as a web designer then take the time to understand the process of building effective websites otherwise you may not stay in business for very long.

Websites that market a business product to another business are becoming more and more popular but as web designers and developers should we be looking at a B2B site in the same way that we might look at a site that is selling a product to an ordinary consumer?

Just recently I came across a B2B website that had a rather in-your-face background to the text that appeared on the pages. It wasn’t even a particularly relevant background and had little to do with the services the business offered to others.

Should we really be decorating B2B websites in that way or are decorations like that totally irrelevant in a B2B setting?

I’ve certainly got my thoughts on the matter and even the text I write for a B2B site differs from the text I would write for a consumer targeted site but what say you?

There are some web designers and developers who lean towards functionality rather than pretty pictures. Then there are some who think that pretty pictures are far more important than functionality.

Whichever camp you fall into perhaps you should look at this site - http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ -

and then review the discussion that is going on here.

Personally I’m with the guy who made this comment “Business is not about pretty sites, it’s about making money.”

But of course your mileage may vary
With that said, the site is perfect.

It’s been one of those crazy weeks here at Copy Text Online where the work coming in has just not stopped. If anything it’s actually increased and we’re seriously beginning to think that it’s time to take on more staff.

Not only have we been hit with a bunch of work from some of our overseas clients but we’ve also just been handed a project that is like a dream come true for us. We’ve been asked to do the redesign and text work for two local sites in major tourist centres here in Queensland.

One of the domain names cost the client many tens of thousands of dollars and the other didn’t come much cheaper and now he wants us to rebuild them. Hmmm it’s a challenge we’re looking forward to.

But I didn’t come here to brag about that. What I did hit the blog to talk to you about was banner blindness and that’s something that web designers really should be aware of. As most of you are aware, Jakob Nielsen is the leading usability guru on the Web today and when he speaks we really do need to listen.

Now he’s spoken again and you’ll find what he has to say here. You should read it not only because it talks about what people don’t see on web sites but there’s also a little gem hidden away in there about some of the useless navigation that web designers inflict on their clients.