E-commerce SEO is something of a hardship for many, long hours more often than not leading to little if any reward and return on investment. However marketing your e-commerce site correctly and making a few minor changes to your site / coding and you will soon see your ROI improve by a huge margin.
Avoid Manufacturer Descriptions – we all know it’s so tempting to copy and paste what you are given from the distributor or from some other website but don’t! If you really can’t think of anything to write at least rewrite the text enough to make it unique … but make sure it still flows and isn’t full of jargon! – Product descriptions should compel the user to want to buy your product.
SEO Friendly URL’s – although not always easy to implement having user and machine friendly url’s can make the difference between someone remembering your site (or linking to it) or not. Either way this can mean you get a sale or conversion of some kind or not! – and if you really must pass parameters in the URL ensure that they are at the end and it doesn’t effect browsing if they are missed off!
Create a product RSS feed – so your a website owner/manager or just someone who’s used the internet and you think an RSS feed is just the subscription to your favourite blog … well you are wrong. An RSS feed is simply an XML script which can contain anything from latest blog posts on SEO to a product feed, including images and links! (then go and submit the feed to Google Base).
Tag your products – With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
Link within product descriptions- Create keyword heavy links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords. NB: make these absolute aka use http://
Don’t use “view” and “more” type links- ok, so that has your attention you wondering what you should use… well the answer is I lied do use them they are expected and you are there to feed but also defy expectation of your user … everyone has these and so should you but go further make sure any images link to the product page as with the title of the product! - all links should also include title tags.
Optimise your images- if you can make the file size small without destroying quality do so – every second spent loading your site is a second wasted and second you are closer to loosing a conversion! Also include alt tags to all images these are vital for search engines… after all this is how they index them.
Embed User Tracking- tracking your user is easy with cookies and javascript – do a quick search and you will find many tools that can record what your users are doing and where they click … or if you don’t want all that trouble use Google Analytics and after a while view the overlap map to see what people have been clicking. Also keep tabs on your statistics, but don’t expect miracles remember SEO is a journey and not a destination!
Don’t Use Flash (ahhhhhh saviour of the universe NOT!)- most search engines have no capability to index flash, google and yahoo have little but more often than not don’t pass the first thing they see (meaning they don’t click the links!). With this in mind keep flash to a minimum and definitely don’t use it for your primary navigation.
Make Checkout Simple – many people using the internet will trust paypal and google checkout but linking across to them sometimes makes users feel unsafe and insecure, using integration to your site such that the user doesn’t leave your site keeps these people a little happier. Further to this keep checkout to a minimum don’t force users to register to use your checkout, have a guest checkout and if you can keep checkout to 2 or less pages… who wants to go through 5 pages before you have a confirmed purchase… and with mobile internet growing rapidly a single page checkout means a single load and users are more likely to convert.
All fairly simple ideas as you can see but each one will bring you closer and closer to success and those huge conversion numbers you are driving for, not just one or two a week! (if your lucky)
Finally if you are wanting a cheaper gateway than google and paypal can offer then hop over to Crystals Merchant Services and ask about the online gateway system we can offer. Going further if you own a shop or two also ask about the reduced merchant service costings and rates on credit and debit card terminals.
Over the past few months I’ve preached about breaking the rules of design. I’ve spoke of how “normal” is boring and how sometimes just sometimes breaking the rules makes for a perfect website. Well this post is pretty much summing up the web design do’s and dont’s in terms of SEO … again these rules are here to be broken but most designers and developers won’t (usually with good reason).
Designs should be Clean and Simple – this does not mean it needs to be boring!
Avoid Splash Pages – these annoy people and can stop you being indexed by Search Engines.
Limit usage of Flash – it takes time to load and isn’t indexable.
Don’t (totally) re-invent the wheel of navigation – people need to know where things are.
Clever White Space – white space is your friend not your enemy, use it wisely.
Break it Up - break long pieces of text with images to elaborate your subject.
Use ALT tags – easy to use and amazing for SEO.
Layout and Design are a Constant – your layout shouldn’t change without good reason.
Clean the Code – ok not really design but clean code means faster loading.
Remove Distractions – anything flashing or distracting will draw the user away and search engines.
Pretty simple to follow I think, but then when you know how a lot of things are easy.
If you have any design rules to add to this list simply leave them below or tweet me @andykinsey and I will add them.
Firstly, I feel I must point out that I am a follower of most “Web Conventions” … this is to say I will knowingly chuck them out of the window to make the best site around, but where standards and “normal” sites are concerned I will follow web conventions.
Secondly, I have never really gone out to break conventions of the web, I’ve just designed the best I can … and sometimes this leads to the breaking of said conventions… and sometimes clients force you to break them.
When you access a website you do so with certain preconceived thoughts of how it may look and feel, you expect things to be in certain places … layout is a convention most websites conform too. From having your navigation on the left or at the top to having a search bar in the top right … not forgetting the logo in the top left!
Sometimes your thoughts are correct, at others they aren’t … either because a convention has been ignored or because the site just isn’t what you wanted it to be. And lets be honest it should be what you want it to be you are the user! However, just because things aren’t in the right place doesn’t mean it’s wrong or broken.
spirit-retail.co.uk
Take for example the recently launched Spirit Beauty website. Although we’ve played the rules with certain conventions such as the logo and search, we moved the main navigation to the top right, above the search. Next we looked at colours of the site, all other “salon sites” are dull and boring apparently, so we gave the site a fresh clean look with bright but almost muted colours. Moving into the pages you find the content on the left with a right-hand side bar… fairly normal, until you realise these aren’t adverts they are a 3rd layer of navigation, your shopping cart or a link to another part of the site such as the Spirit Training Academy. Finally, we move to the footer, again against convention we have our logo to the right and the main navigation just right of this … no underlines on any of our main navigation… just a slight change in colour and a change of cursor. (Visit the site and let me know what you think!)
So now your wondering why I am telling you about breaking conventions and why I feel that ignoring conventions can lead to a successful site*. Well it’s simple, I want to make clear that following in conventions can be good for a site, but blindly following them can kill a website and make you look like every other site on the internet. Dare to Defy and Win.
*not all sites will see a success, it depends on your target market.
Want to see a further example of breaking convention? Hop over to my other site andykinsey.co.uk
Finally, just before I sign off this post I want to let you all know it’s christmas … and i’m very excited!
However, this isn’t my point… I want to let you all know that I’ve put together 73 Tips, a good number of which are already released to the public via @xmasseo on twitter … however I want to urge you to visit the website Christmas SEO and take a look at how your site could improve in the run up to Christmas with the help of XMASSEO.
Now I’ve held off this post for sometime, mainly because I couldn’t quite decide who should be on my list…or why I preferred some people over others.
Anyway my list is complete …
TOP 5
1. Matt Cutts – The Google head of webspam
2. Michael Gray – GrayWolf … a great SEO
3. Lee Odden – Always worth more than a single look
4. Jennifer Laycock – An SEO Whizz
5. SEOmoz – The website of this company is superb
See the full list here – http://twitter.com/andykinsey/top-seos/members
—-
Visit our Christmas SEO site – http://xmasseo.co.uk
With 2009 drawing to a close (a little to quickly if you ask me) I am once again being bombarded with a number of questions about how a company can “update” the look and feel of a website / brand.
I first wrote this type of post around this time last year, and it well down a storm … so with my inbox full of the same questions I think it’s just about time I approached the question again! – don’t you?
Over the past few years I’ve come across many perceptions of what happens after a website goes live and it still staggers me that around 95% of my clients believe “it’s done with” … “it’s complete nothing needs to be done now until we need a new one” … erm well “can I ask you to read my articles” is my general response to this. They soon realise they shouldn’t just leave it sat doing nothing for them or their company image. However, generally by this time it’s a little late (which is why they come to me).
This article is intended as a “rough” lecture on the more important aspects of website redesign.
A website is not a static entity.
A website is an ever evolving being, the content should be updated often as should the design (or aspects of), if it becomes static you could be harming your online presence and brand image.
There are many reasons for a redesign here are a few
Splash / Intro Pages
Always good for the 90′s splash pages are those little “welcome to” pages you get on older sites. Generally they appear on multiple domains too, acting as doorway pages (very grey seo tactics). Mostly created using flash, video and/or audio these pages are also pretty damn hard to make accessible & waste your users time and energy in trying to find you “skip intro” or “enter site” link.
Old Content
As you move through the weeks / months / years your content will begin to slowly become irrelevant and more often than not will have no place in the modern world. (I recall one client site was still apparently selling dot matrix printers which he hadn’t stocked since 2001! and this was just a few weeks ago!). Still not convinced? Imagine your a user trying to find the latest information about a football club … you get to the site but the news is from 2003, you wanted last nights score… keep your content upto date and relevant for your audience.
Table Layout
For a number of years before the take up of CSS table layouts were the building blocks of a website, as were spacer gifs (1×1 pixel images for spacing). These designs are likely to not only look old and boring but are also not accessible, you will be making your users life and the search engines life harder than it needs to be.
Frames
Embedded frames (iFrames) are used to show content from one page in another … or rather they used to be. Now they are seen as a nuisance because of accessibility and search engine issues. Add to that there are now easier and more friendly ways to include content and you will see frames are a bad idea!
Little and Often is enough!
Now it sounds a cliché, however its true. If you make little content changes, little design modifications then you will not only be optimising your website for your user – and so increase ROI – but you will also keep search engines happy as fresh content is something they love.
A great example of minor design changes which are little and often are the Google Logo changes … every few days or weeks Google will adopt a “new” logo for a few days, each one with a different meaning. This idea was adopted by Bing (formerly MSN / Live Search) who on their homepage use full images with interesting facts around them.
Content Management
One of the primary reasons when I ask website owners why content is not updates is understandable… they don’t have a content management system, and the designer wants X amount to update the content. Well now whilst I can understand a charge per month for maintenance (which is necessary in most cases of new sites) I fail to grasp why a designer/developer would leave a client without a method of changing content.
Content Management Systems (CMS’s) have been around for long enough now for all fairly new sites to be using them, even if only for part of a site! They are freely available if you want a simple site, or you may need something totally bespoke (as many of AK Designs clients do). Either way you are left with a solution where you can update: text, graphics, video, sounds, add and remove pages and much more!
Remember when talking to a designer: a website is for life, not just for christmas.
Search Engines not giving you any love?
Another common reason for a redesign and/or content change is that search engines love fresh things. Search Engines love accessible code, they don’t like inaccessible flash or javascript, they just want your content as fast as possible.
Another thing to consider in your design is that if you design for SEO and with SEO in mind your efforts to keep SEO maintained in the future will be halved. An initial setup for SEO means the journey of SEO is with less hardship and effort that if you have to go back and “inject” SEO into an existing website.
Under performing aspects of a site
Websites are funny, sometimes things work sometimes they don’t… thats life. Take a call to action in 2005 like “free trial” … still sounds useful to some people … however a more successful CTA in 2009 has been “XX days free” or “Try me Now for Free” … people are seeming to be scared of trials … and free trials makes people think are they hooked into something after the trial. - Just updating this CTA can reap dividends.
Maybe part of your site is a store, but the layout doesn’t load properly because it was designed for Internet Explorer 5 … so in IE7 or 8… or any browser today it doesn’t render correctly … or some script doesn’t work or is insecure! … many payment gateway modules written pre-2007 are now insecure and dangerous to use.
A Competitor has just redesigned
This has to be the most common reason I am given when I ask why they want a redesign. They want to regain that “competitive edge” over the competition who have just redesign and it looks much much better than the clients site.
Now this appears on the surface to be a worthless reason if ever there was one. But when I’ve scratched the surface in 99% of cases it is just the straw that broke the clients back and convinced the board to take action which someone has been trying to push through for months sometimes.
One of the major things I say to these particular clients is that they should never attempt to simply “photocopy” an existing site, all sites are successful in some respects and not others, sure take some good bits but leave the bad. Oh and the last thing you want to be thought of (as a company) is that you are copy-cats or that you steal your competitors ideas, no matter how good they are.
This is post one of two in the series, next time we take a look at planning a redesign and taking a design forward.
If you are interested in redesigning your website visit the Andy Kinsey Designs website @ http://andykinsey.co.uk
Ok so before I begin this post today I want to pay tribute to an amazing web developer whom recently passed away, he will be massively missed by everyone who knew him and the web community as a whole… @leunix
Today I was looking around the web, nothing really exciting here if we are honest. However I stumbled across a site that I really with I had seen before because I scared the heck out of me… there are 73 Days until Christmas!!!! … its scary because I’ve not bought presents… the only good thing is I have already started my Christmas SEO strategy sometime ago.
So I have began my next big long term SEO strategy with all of my clients (not so much my own sites if I am honest), and already with quite a few sites we are seeing the results we really wanted too… not least a good number of e-commerce sites turning up for number one for “gifting” keyphrases.
This year as part of my aim to help everyone out a little I will be posting a little tip or hint each day on twitter (which I will explain here every week).
The tweets have begun with the 12 days of christmas series at the time of writing this, by the time you read it there may be a few more tips online, generally I will post one or two a day … the final tweet it excitingly going to be Christmas day itself!
E-commerce SEO is something of a hardship for many, long hours more often than not leading to little if any reward and return on investment. However marketing your e-commerce site correctly and making a few minor changes to your site / coding and you will soon see your ROI improve by a huge margin.
Avoid Manufacturer Descriptions – we all know it’s so tempting to copy and paste what you are given from the distributor or from some other website but don’t! If you really can’t think of anything to write at least rewrite the text enough to make it unique … but make sure it still flows and isn’t full of jargon! – Product descriptions should compel the user to want to buy your product.
SEO Friendly URL’s – although not always easy to implement having user and machine friendly url’s can make the difference between someone remembering your site (or linking to it) or not. Either way this can mean you get a sale or conversion of some kind or not! – and if you really must pass parameters in the URL ensure that they are at the end and it doesn’t effect browsing if they are missed off!
Create a product RSS feed – so your a website owner/manager or just someone who’s used the internet and you think an RSS feed is just the subscription to your favourite blog … well you are wrong. An RSS feed is simply an XML script which can contain anything from latest blog posts on SEO to a product feed, including images and links! (then go and submit the feed to Google Base).
Tag your products – With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
Link within product descriptions- Create keyword heavy links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords. NB: make these absolute aka use http://
Don’t use “view” and “more” type links- ok, so that has your attention you wondering what you should use… well the answer is I lied do use them they are expected and you are there to feed but also defy expectation of your user … everyone has these and so should you but go further make sure any images link to the product page as with the title of the product! - all links should also include title tags.
Optimise your images- if you can make the file size small without destroying quality do so – every second spent loading your site is a second wasted and second you are closer to loosing a conversion! Also include alt tags to all images these are vital for search engines… after all this is how they index them.
Embed User Tracking- tracking your user is easy with cookies and javascript – do a quick search and you will find many tools that can record what your users are doing and where they click … or if you don’t want all that trouble use Google Analytics and after a while view the overlap map to see what people have been clicking. Also keep tabs on your statistics, but don’t expect miracles remember SEO is a journey and not a destination!
Don’t Use Flash (ahhhhhh saviour of the universe NOT!)- most search engines have no capability to index flash, google and yahoo have little but more often than not don’t pass the first thing they see (meaning they don’t click the links!). With this in mind keep flash to a minimum and definitely don’t use it for your primary navigation.
Make Checkout Simple – many people using the internet will trust paypal and google checkout but linking across to them sometimes makes users feel unsafe and insecure, using integration to your site such that the user doesn’t leave your site keeps these people a little happier. Further to this keep checkout to a minimum don’t force users to register to use your checkout, have a guest checkout and if you can keep checkout to 2 or less pages… who wants to go through 5 pages before you have a confirmed purchase… and with mobile internet growing rapidly a single page checkout means a single load and users are more likely to convert.
All fairly simple ideas as you can see but each one will bring you closer and closer to success and those huge conversion numbers you are driving for, not just one or two a week! (if your lucky)
Finally if you are wanting a cheaper gateway than google and paypal can offer then hop over to Crystals Merchant Services and ask about the online gateway system we can offer. Going further if you own a shop or two also ask about the reduced merchant service costings and rates on credit and debit card terminals.
Over the past few months I’ve preached about breaking the rules of design. I’ve spoke of how “normal” is boring and how sometimes just sometimes breaking the rules makes for a perfect website. Well this post is pretty much summing up the web design do’s and dont’s in terms of SEO … again these rules are here to be broken but most designers and developers won’t (usually with good reason).
Designs should be Clean and Simple – this does not mean it needs to be boring!
Avoid Splash Pages – these annoy people and can stop you being indexed by Search Engines.
Limit usage of Flash – it takes time to load and isn’t indexable.
Don’t (totally) re-invent the wheel of navigation – people need to know where things are.
Clever White Space – white space is your friend not your enemy, use it wisely.
Break it Up - break long pieces of text with images to elaborate your subject.
Use ALT tags – easy to use and amazing for SEO.
Layout and Design are a Constant – your layout shouldn’t change without good reason.
Clean the Code – ok not really design but clean code means faster loading.
Remove Distractions – anything flashing or distracting will draw the user away and search engines.
Pretty simple to follow I think, but then when you know how a lot of things are easy.
If you have any design rules to add to this list simply leave them below or tweet me @andykinsey and I will add them.
Firstly, I feel I must point out that I am a follower of most “Web Conventions” … this is to say I will knowingly chuck them out of the window to make the best site around, but where standards and “normal” sites are concerned I will follow web conventions.
Secondly, I have never really gone out to break conventions of the web, I’ve just designed the best I can … and sometimes this leads to the breaking of said conventions… and sometimes clients force you to break them.
When you access a website you do so with certain preconceived thoughts of how it may look and feel, you expect things to be in certain places … layout is a convention most websites conform too. From having your navigation on the left or at the top to having a search bar in the top right … not forgetting the logo in the top left!
Sometimes your thoughts are correct, at others they aren’t … either because a convention has been ignored or because the site just isn’t what you wanted it to be. And lets be honest it should be what you want it to be you are the user! However, just because things aren’t in the right place doesn’t mean it’s wrong or broken.
spirit-retail.co.uk
Take for example the recently launched Spirit Beauty website. Although we’ve played the rules with certain conventions such as the logo and search, we moved the main navigation to the top right, above the search. Next we looked at colours of the site, all other “salon sites” are dull and boring apparently, so we gave the site a fresh clean look with bright but almost muted colours. Moving into the pages you find the content on the left with a right-hand side bar… fairly normal, until you realise these aren’t adverts they are a 3rd layer of navigation, your shopping cart or a link to another part of the site such as the Spirit Training Academy. Finally, we move to the footer, again against convention we have our logo to the right and the main navigation just right of this … no underlines on any of our main navigation… just a slight change in colour and a change of cursor. (Visit the site and let me know what you think!)
So now your wondering why I am telling you about breaking conventions and why I feel that ignoring conventions can lead to a successful site*. Well it’s simple, I want to make clear that following in conventions can be good for a site, but blindly following them can kill a website and make you look like every other site on the internet. Dare to Defy and Win.
*not all sites will see a success, it depends on your target market.
Want to see a further example of breaking convention? Hop over to my other site andykinsey.co.uk
Finally, just before I sign off this post I want to let you all know it’s christmas … and i’m very excited!
However, this isn’t my point… I want to let you all know that I’ve put together 73 Tips, a good number of which are already released to the public via @xmasseo on twitter … however I want to urge you to visit the website Christmas SEO and take a look at how your site could improve in the run up to Christmas with the help of XMASSEO.
Now I’ve held off this post for sometime, mainly because I couldn’t quite decide who should be on my list…or why I preferred some people over others.
Anyway my list is complete …
TOP 5
1. Matt Cutts – The Google head of webspam
2. Michael Gray – GrayWolf … a great SEO
3. Lee Odden – Always worth more than a single look
4. Jennifer Laycock – An SEO Whizz
5. SEOmoz – The website of this company is superb
See the full list here – http://twitter.com/andykinsey/top-seos/members
—-
Visit our Christmas SEO site – http://xmasseo.co.uk
With 2009 drawing to a close (a little to quickly if you ask me) I am once again being bombarded with a number of questions about how a company can “update” the look and feel of a website / brand.
I first wrote this type of post around this time last year, and it well down a storm … so with my inbox full of the same questions I think it’s just about time I approached the question again! – don’t you?
Over the past few years I’ve come across many perceptions of what happens after a website goes live and it still staggers me that around 95% of my clients believe “it’s done with” … “it’s complete nothing needs to be done now until we need a new one” … erm well “can I ask you to read my articles” is my general response to this. They soon realise they shouldn’t just leave it sat doing nothing for them or their company image. However, generally by this time it’s a little late (which is why they come to me).
This article is intended as a “rough” lecture on the more important aspects of website redesign.
A website is not a static entity.
A website is an ever evolving being, the content should be updated often as should the design (or aspects of), if it becomes static you could be harming your online presence and brand image.
There are many reasons for a redesign here are a few
Splash / Intro Pages
Always good for the 90′s splash pages are those little “welcome to” pages you get on older sites. Generally they appear on multiple domains too, acting as doorway pages (very grey seo tactics). Mostly created using flash, video and/or audio these pages are also pretty damn hard to make accessible & waste your users time and energy in trying to find you “skip intro” or “enter site” link.
Old Content
As you move through the weeks / months / years your content will begin to slowly become irrelevant and more often than not will have no place in the modern world. (I recall one client site was still apparently selling dot matrix printers which he hadn’t stocked since 2001! and this was just a few weeks ago!). Still not convinced? Imagine your a user trying to find the latest information about a football club … you get to the site but the news is from 2003, you wanted last nights score… keep your content upto date and relevant for your audience.
Table Layout
For a number of years before the take up of CSS table layouts were the building blocks of a website, as were spacer gifs (1×1 pixel images for spacing). These designs are likely to not only look old and boring but are also not accessible, you will be making your users life and the search engines life harder than it needs to be.
Frames
Embedded frames (iFrames) are used to show content from one page in another … or rather they used to be. Now they are seen as a nuisance because of accessibility and search engine issues. Add to that there are now easier and more friendly ways to include content and you will see frames are a bad idea!
Little and Often is enough!
Now it sounds a cliché, however its true. If you make little content changes, little design modifications then you will not only be optimising your website for your user – and so increase ROI – but you will also keep search engines happy as fresh content is something they love.
A great example of minor design changes which are little and often are the Google Logo changes … every few days or weeks Google will adopt a “new” logo for a few days, each one with a different meaning. This idea was adopted by Bing (formerly MSN / Live Search) who on their homepage use full images with interesting facts around them.
Content Management
One of the primary reasons when I ask website owners why content is not updates is understandable… they don’t have a content management system, and the designer wants X amount to update the content. Well now whilst I can understand a charge per month for maintenance (which is necessary in most cases of new sites) I fail to grasp why a designer/developer would leave a client without a method of changing content.
Content Management Systems (CMS’s) have been around for long enough now for all fairly new sites to be using them, even if only for part of a site! They are freely available if you want a simple site, or you may need something totally bespoke (as many of AK Designs clients do). Either way you are left with a solution where you can update: text, graphics, video, sounds, add and remove pages and much more!
Remember when talking to a designer: a website is for life, not just for christmas.
Search Engines not giving you any love?
Another common reason for a redesign and/or content change is that search engines love fresh things. Search Engines love accessible code, they don’t like inaccessible flash or javascript, they just want your content as fast as possible.
Another thing to consider in your design is that if you design for SEO and with SEO in mind your efforts to keep SEO maintained in the future will be halved. An initial setup for SEO means the journey of SEO is with less hardship and effort that if you have to go back and “inject” SEO into an existing website.
Under performing aspects of a site
Websites are funny, sometimes things work sometimes they don’t… thats life. Take a call to action in 2005 like “free trial” … still sounds useful to some people … however a more successful CTA in 2009 has been “XX days free” or “Try me Now for Free” … people are seeming to be scared of trials … and free trials makes people think are they hooked into something after the trial. - Just updating this CTA can reap dividends.
Maybe part of your site is a store, but the layout doesn’t load properly because it was designed for Internet Explorer 5 … so in IE7 or 8… or any browser today it doesn’t render correctly … or some script doesn’t work or is insecure! … many payment gateway modules written pre-2007 are now insecure and dangerous to use.
A Competitor has just redesigned
This has to be the most common reason I am given when I ask why they want a redesign. They want to regain that “competitive edge” over the competition who have just redesign and it looks much much better than the clients site.
Now this appears on the surface to be a worthless reason if ever there was one. But when I’ve scratched the surface in 99% of cases it is just the straw that broke the clients back and convinced the board to take action which someone has been trying to push through for months sometimes.
One of the major things I say to these particular clients is that they should never attempt to simply “photocopy” an existing site, all sites are successful in some respects and not others, sure take some good bits but leave the bad. Oh and the last thing you want to be thought of (as a company) is that you are copy-cats or that you steal your competitors ideas, no matter how good they are.
This is post one of two in the series, next time we take a look at planning a redesign and taking a design forward.
If you are interested in redesigning your website visit the Andy Kinsey Designs website @ http://andykinsey.co.uk
Ok so before I begin this post today I want to pay tribute to an amazing web developer whom recently passed away, he will be massively missed by everyone who knew him and the web community as a whole… @leunix
Today I was looking around the web, nothing really exciting here if we are honest. However I stumbled across a site that I really with I had seen before because I scared the heck out of me… there are 73 Days until Christmas!!!! … its scary because I’ve not bought presents… the only good thing is I have already started my Christmas SEO strategy sometime ago.
So I have began my next big long term SEO strategy with all of my clients (not so much my own sites if I am honest), and already with quite a few sites we are seeing the results we really wanted too… not least a good number of e-commerce sites turning up for number one for “gifting” keyphrases.
This year as part of my aim to help everyone out a little I will be posting a little tip or hint each day on twitter (which I will explain here every week).
The tweets have begun with the 12 days of christmas series at the time of writing this, by the time you read it there may be a few more tips online, generally I will post one or two a day … the final tweet it excitingly going to be Christmas day itself!
