Web Design News

If you’re a web designer who is also seriously into search engine optimisation (and not just paying lip service to SEO) then you’ll know of the problems involved in getting Google to crawl a website that uses a lot of Flash.

Only last week I was asked to review a local photographer’s website that is uses a lot of Flash throughout the site. I found that in four years Google has never been able to get beyond the index page because the designer had not provided any work-around for the search engine spiders to to crawl the site and so the search engine rankings for the site were basically non-existant.

But now there’s some good news for Flash based sites. Adobe - the company that produced the Flash technology - has now provided a way for Google to crawl Flash sites. It’s not the complete solution but it is a step in the right direction and it’s still no excuse for failing to provide a text link to a sitemap that Google can follow.

You can read about Google crawling and indexing flash content here and here

As I just said on Twitter … why do so many web designers fail to understand that finished a website for a client is just the start of a relationship and not the end?

Another unhappy client from a web design business that describes itself as “an industry leader” and claims to have won awards has just signed on with us.

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.

Here’s a little quote that should be imprinted on the brain of every person who thinks that they can design a content management system.

Until web designers learn proper semantic markup, like H1, H2, are structural tags first and foremost, and visual elements second, an SEO is always going to have to come in and clean up the mess. Until designers learn how to use a CMS properly and separate content from context, an SEO is always going to have fix the nightmare they have created.

It comes from this post on Graywolf’s SEO Blog and the whole post is definitely worth reading.

On Friday we were approached by a potential client who wanted a quote to build a website and host a large amount of video for him and on Saturday we sat down with him to listen to his vision of what he wanted. It was soon clear that he had a great idea but was a bit uncertain about the technical details of how he would get his business online.

Fortunately for him we’ve had considerable experience in putting video online having worked with it back in the days when video on the Web was something new and exciting. Yesterday I sat down and wrote a primer for him that will help him understand what he needs to be looking for in hosting and the way he shoots video that is destined for the web.

It was good to be able to help him and it brought back a lot of memories of the fun and frustration we had working in the early days with video and webcams.

Today we’ll be writing a proposal for him to give him the costs involved in making his dreams come true.

Anyone who has read Toni’s and my ramblings in other places will know that neither of us are big fans of Google. Sure, we play their game and abide by their rules but that doesn’t mean we like them or that we would do a whole lot of mourning if they just went away. And if the history of the Internet is anything to go by then perhaps one day they will … but till that day comes we keep up-to-date on what’s happening with Google and the way they crawl web pages.

So it was interesting to see that on Friday Google announced that they have begun to crawl HTML forms. Now there is no guarantee that they’re going to index what they find at the other end because, in their words:

If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.

Google also undertakes not to crawl beyond any forms that require passwords or the entry of personal details and seeks to reassure webmasters by telling them that Googlebot is “ever-friendly” and is always a good Internet citizen … hmmm.

Google also says that Googlebot obeys “nofollow directives”. I must say that our experience of Googlebot in relation to nofollow has been a little different.

Google also claims that they can now crawl Javascript navigation and that may be so but we’re still seeing a lot of pages with Javascript navigation out there on the Web that have not been crawled or indexed despite having been online for a year or more.

I doubt that we’ll be using javascript navigation on any of our sites any time in the foreseeable future.

A couple of weeks ago the people behind a typical online Mom and Pop business approached and asked us to redevelop their site. Sales were very poor and they had built the original site themselves.

Throughout the redevelopment we had kept in touch with them and, as we do with all our customers, at the midway point we showed them what the new site looked like. Apart from a couple of very minor changes they seemed quite happy with the new look.

Yesterday, with the redeveloped site just two days away from going live, one of them rang the office and spoke to Toni. They weren’t happy, they thought we had missed the point when it came to marketing what they were selling and they suggested that we didn’t have any experience in selling anything online. They even pointed to a site we had built for another customer and suggested that it was way “too cold” to sell anything.

I suppose we could have suggested that they call the owner of that website and find out just how successful the site has been. We could have pointed to our car and told them how it had been paid for by the online sales we have made and continue to make via affiliate marketing and our own online shops. But in the end if a client suddenly loses faith in your ability to produce what they’re paying for then there’s only thing you can do … and that’s what we did.

The client was invited to come into the office today and pick up a full refund.

You win some and you lose some but as long as you learn from your loses things haven’t been a total waste of time.

Late Thursday afternoon Toni and I were getting ready to shut up shop for the Easter weekend. We were sitting here planning the stuff that we had to pack in the car to take on the trip to visit our grandkids in the next state when the phone rang.

It was one half of a husband and wife team who are employing us to do a little development and search engine optimisation on their website and the work was to start this week so I presumed the call was about the work we were to do … but it wasn’t.

Instead the call was about a minor change I had suggested that they make to their website before we even touched it. The change really was very minor … just the addition of three words but it had produced what the client considered was an amazing result. This couple had been trying to get their website up to the first page of Google for a term that was very important to them for months and they had not succeeded.

So they had come to us and that minor addition of just three words had lifted them right up to position five on the first page. The client was ecstatic and that’s what we aim for … clients who can see real value in the work that we do for them. It was definitely a great start to the Easter weekend for us.

It really doesn’t matter where you’re business is situated; if your website needs some search engine optimisation to get it onto page one of Google then call or email us to see if we can achieve the results you want. We can’t guarantee that just three words is all it’s going to take to get your website onto the first page of Google but we will give you an honest appraisal of what will need to be done.

Apart from web design, web hosting and copywriting we also do quite a bit of search engine optimisation work for our own clients both here in Hervey Bay and around the world. We also do quite a bit of SEO on a sub-contract basis for other web support businesses and it seems that our work is just as effective for them as it is for our own clients.

A little over two weeks ago we did some work for one of those web support businesses where we had to target 21 different keyword phrases. Yesterday they wrote to us about the work we had done for them.

Here are some rankings for xxxx. We already have some nice results. I am quite pleased with these fast results and rankings. It usually takes longer than this to see these kind of results.

It seems that in a highly competitive area we had achieved:

•  12 listings on the first page of the search engine results pages for those terms
•  7 listings on the second page
•  1 listing on the third page
•  1 listing on the fourth page

Of course we would like to see all of them on page one of the search engine results pages but 12 out of the 21 isn’t bad for some pages of a site that have only been live for two weeks.

If you need some quality search engine optimisation work done on your site then you know where to come