Some ideas, advice, information and the occasional rant
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.