Web Design News

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

According to CNet Firefox has now reached critical mass

Although Microsoft’s Internet Explorer remains the dominant Web browser, the open-source rival has achieved a critical mass of users–Firefox has been downloaded more than 400 million times–and it’s now common for designers to make sure their Web pages work with the browser.

Are you making sure that the sites you design work in both browsers? I’m still coming across sites by local designers that are failing miserably in Firefox.

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.