Yesterday the well respected web designer that is Paul Boag wrote the post “Why I Don’t get SEO“. As I work a Bronco, primarily an SEO company, I was planning on commenting but originally felt I’d simply be covering the same ground as the other commenter’s. So instead I thought I’d write a response here and try to highlight why SEO is a necessity for many websites.
I think Paul’s post is mainly based on two arguments:
I don’t tend to get many phone calls from clients but when I do it always appears that the phone calls go on for much longer than they need to thus keeping me from actually doing the work I should be doing. Of course phone conversations are necessary at times to allow a more fluid conversation but both timing and content makes for some frustrations:
At the Speak the Web conference a bit ago I attended a session about HTML5. Although I knew a certain amount of what was happening with HTML5 there was one part that I didn’t know and I couldn’t quite figure out what affect it would have.
It’s frequently the first thing mentioned by a client when commenting on a new design and it quickly leads to a designer crying into their hands. On the face of it it’s really not that big a change to make but the reasons behind a client requesting it and the frequency in which a designer receives such a request is what makes it such a big problem.
In the past I’ve had little comeback for clients with such a request because I simply wasn’t able to communicate effectively a reason to not change the logo size. Why exactly would making the logo bigger ruin be a bad thing. Often I could see it unbalancing a page but this reason just didn’t do anything to convince the client. So instead I’d just make the change, too battle scarred to fight, and get into a stinking mood while doing it. After two requests from different clients yesterday I decided to have another look into it and see if there was a good reason out there that even the client could understand.
For many the code I’ll be putting on this post will appear pretty simple and it is. Yet not everyone is well versed in programming or they are just starting out and still learning the small tips and tricks that many of us take for granted. So here’s a little trick to make the dates on your website a bit more dynamic using PHP.
I’m using PHP because it’s still the most widely used server side language and if you get the theory behind the PHP version it’s usually simple enough to transfer that to a different language even if you need a little help from Google.
After having written a guest post for the guys over at One Extra Pixel I was suprised to get a few more offers to guest write. At first it seemed a lot of work so declined some offers but when Jacob at Six Revisions asked I simply couldn’t say no.
So after some hard work writing (as it takes me some time to write) the post I wrote for Six Revision is now live and concerns the best practices for hints and validation in web forms. I hope you check it out and find it useful.
I have to say thanks to Jacob for the better title as after writing the post I was struggling on the title.
