22 replies to this topic

[SearchRank]

There are alot of companies in every type of industry with crappy sites - even many web site design companies. I never liked our corporate web design site until the last revision which is the fourth. I now like all of our company sites, the SEO one, the web design one and our Arizona construction portal.

Our SEO one was never really properly optimized until about 6 months ago. Sometimes people would ask why they can't find us if we are an SEO and the response was always two fold: 1.) there is alot of competition and 2.) there is never any time to work on your own stuff when you are working on client's stuff.

While I think everyone should have a great looking site that provides good usability, if someone does has a crappy looking site but it sells product or service for them, then the old adage works fine - "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

[idrive]

And those sites that look good on first impression often suck in SEO or usability. I get alot of compliments on my site...but I know that if I were a user and wanted to really get a strong idea of what this company could do for me...I wouldn't have a clue ;-)

I'm in soft launch mode - likely forever. It looks good on first glance; is slow to load IMHO and is not usable or accessible.... oh and by accident I landed a top five position for marketing jobs ottawa - wondered why I was getting so many resumes per day. I quickly "unoptimized" that page *grin*

[OldWelshGuy]

I find it really weird sometimes when i get cross jobbed, let me explain that i design and optimise websites, but we also design interactive CDROM, so on any given Sunday i could be working on a CD with absolutely no bandwidth restrictions, then later that day maybe some work on images for the web, freaks me out sometimes

I am of the old camp though, HTML based, Speed > Content> navigation> success, maybe it is a naive outlook, but i like it, and it seems to get results.

I do have a copy of Macromedia Director which i sometimes use for CD's running quicktime (YUK) for my thoughts on quicktime read 'spawn of the devil' lol.
Anyhow i can use flash, and do truly believe there is a place for it in moderation as part of HTML pages, but nothing else, however I still believe that people want information.

7 times out of 10 whoever visits my site will have either followed a link from a site I built, or found me on a web search high up the Serp's, so you are already half way to a sale, and. providing your site is not a pigs guts they will contact you.

I always ask the question, 'what would you prefer, a brilliant leaflet that no-one ever sees, or a below average leaflet passed out directly to people who are looking for your services?

The purists say 'I would never put a poor leaflet out' the businessmen say 'no contest' and choose the latter. lol

[mcanerin]

Go ahead, I can take it...

I've been planning to finish the site before putting it up for review, but since it's a "working site" I'm more than happy to take advice

Ian

[sitetutor]

Why do seo's have bad sites?

For the same reason that great web designers wonder every day, what it may take to get search engines to list them for some low-competition keyterms

[Scottie]

Welcome sitetutor!

Excellent point- it really does pay to know your strengths and weaknesses and hire a specialist when needed.

[Vinnie]

These are such good points. We get spammed on a daily basis, the spams that usually get through my filters I take a quick look at.
Interesting enough most of them are from "SEO's" so inevetibaly I go and check out their websites see what they are offering in case it's something new (it never is)You get to the site and it's crap.. I have a standard reply that I send out:

Dear (whatever)

Thanks for your unsolicited email, we read it with great interest. You promised us the world. We were all quite thrilled. Being a web development company that designs and optimizes sites for regional use we were quite pleased that another company had taken the taken the time to offer to push us further than we could possibly expect at this moment.
With great excitement and anticipation we went to your website for a look. We were greatly disappointed in what we saw, your own site was barely struggling in the search engines, your site design defied any logical order and did not render at all in some of our browsers.
May we offer you the chance to redesign your entire website at a costing that would be affordable for you?

We look forward to your reply.

Regards


We try and turn their spam into a sale for ourselves. It has only worked once with a small home based company in Florida who we ended up building a site for. On the majority they do not answer.

[bkernst]

I am sitting with the dilemma of always having to make the designs look good and get top rankings, which normally turns out to be a nightmare since everybody wants to edit the text, and I am supposed to get the rankings high without editing their text. Sometimes I can edit the text slightly, or I adjust it a long time afterwards when no attention is paid to it anymore.

My own corporate SEO site has got an interface which was created in 1999 (www.seaka.co.za), I adjusted it on some spots two months ago (got rid of those slow rollover images in the menu and replaced them with text links), nobody in the company noticed yet, which is another reason why sites look bad, because the peopel who created thjem considered them looking good when they were created, but don't actually look at the site itself for a long time since they know best that nothing on it has changed or is really noteworthy to look at.

Bernhard