Most reputable internet marketing companies take pride in their work and enjoy great satisfaction in generating traffic and sales and an offshoot of that is that we will retain our client base. We have always tried to instill to both clients and staff that as well as ensuring all the technical building blocks and check lists are in place for SEO, a website should always be looked at from a much wider perspective with regard to internet marketing and conversion. Where possible content should be derived not only from a keyword phrase perspective but be as natural as possible and with potential online customers in mind. It’s effectively your shop window and you need to dress the window and entice those customers to buy!

Clients seem to be happy to engage in the design of a website as that’s a fun part but when it comes to providing relevant copy for the site and good product information it always seems to be an uphill battle and an area they do not have the time for..We have countless times received copy from clients that is just copied and pasted from other sites.We then spend a great deal of time on a project writing content for them out of goodwill and without extra charge just to get the project live and running without delay!

Roll out Panda and it seems that all the talk is now about unique, rich and engaging content which is to be applauded and will hopefully help us persuade our clients how important the content on the site is. Clients are the experts in their industry . Agencies can help as much as they can but we need a reasonable base to work with unless we are charging for the complete marketing integration. It benefits everyone if the client engages with its SEO agency and gives time and resource to copywriting.
It’s much easier with a “sexy” product or for a business to consumer industry. Enter Social Media, attractive competitions , vouchers, twitter its easier to work with for both the marketing professionals and clients to come up with some great ideas, but for a somewhat dry business to business industry ,clients really need to spend time with their SEO marketing team to come up with new and interesting ideas.

W3C is a set of guidelines to which website owners and developers should try and achieve full compliance. W3C compliance ensures cross browser compatibility i,e those of you who do not have knowledge of the jargon that surrounds the web industry it will ensure that your website renders on all “browsers” which are the likes of the various Internet Explorer versions, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and so forth. It also tries to ensure accessibility for the disabled.

One should insist on 100% compliance of a new website however with the speed of technological changes and changes in programming code it is sometimes difficult in particular with a limited maintenance budget difficult to keep up and maintain a site with 100% compliance.

Our own experience indicates that there does not seem to be any correlation between a fully compliant W3C website and higher rankings versus those with errors dependant on the type of errors your website has. We have optimised old websites with many errors where the client does not have the budget for a rebuild and there have been no issues in achieving rankings.

W3C non-compliances will only cause an issue if they prevent reliable search engine crawler access. Errors which are that serious usually prevent the page from rendering properly – like close body tags () in the middle of the content and other such errors. A lot of errors occur because of older versions of a particular programming code being used particularly if the website is old.
With W3C errors, one or two issues on any given page can easily generate a 100 errors especially if the validator fails to find a few HTML tags closed. In these cases errors then proliferate through the page – when actually only a few issues are really present.

Minor W3C non-compliances like missing ALT tags, unclosed paragraph tags and un-encoded ampersands (&) we feel continue to have no bearing on search ranking, although as mentioned it makes sense to ensure that your website is as compliant as possible given your budget.

One issue we have recently found is that some of the new social sharing buttons like Facebook and Google +1 fail W3C compliance, so maintaining 100% compliance is very hard if we are to embrace these new concepts as and when they arise.

This new button acts much like the Facebook Like or Twitter Tweet button and provides your visitors with another opportunity to give your content a virtual thumbs up! The biggest difference with this service however is that the number of +1’s your site receives will soon be appearing alongside your listing in Google’s SERPs. This could be big news. Imagine the scenario; you run a search on Google and up pops the first page. One of the listings has a +1…which listing are you going to click on? Now imagine a list of your friends names displayed next to the +1 showing you exactly who has recommended that site. SEO just got social!

So it seems we all have yet another social media button to add to each of the pages, products, features, stories or videos on our websites but is it really worth it? Truthfully only time will tell. We’ve all seen how powerful a company’s social media presence can be; in particular the number of Facebook Likes a website receives and the way in which content can be shared in seconds on Twitter. With Google behind it, the +1 button is unlikely to fail but it might just change the face of search results forever.

I would just like to comment that whilst I have done my best to help her, I truly believe there is a fundamental issue of misunderstanding here as of course SQL is a well known almost industry standard database for these applications and may well be ON the server, but will NOT be “the” server.

As you will have read, I have tried to guide Nina who is really struggling to get to grips with a WordPress. The need to get the site back into HTML on Dreamweaver is a confusing question and a bit of a jumble. I wish I could persuade her to look at the browser and server set up before taking the giant leap into having the website re-developed and then learning just a tiny bit about WordPress as I’m sure she would have a manageable website with little cost.

 As I have Dreamweaver and my husband is starting to use Dreamweaver to design his web site (however, he is not that techie) so I am currently have to learn this system as well.  At least I know I have total control of my site with this as opposed to using a mysql server and that is why I would prefer to use Dreamweaver.

 Nina

Ah! Ok… so we need to help you get this current website (in its current configuration?) into HTML and built in Dreamweaver. One would need then to pay a developer to do so?

 Alan

Hello Alan

How much approx would that be?  I currently have 432 pages on the site

 Thanks

 Nina

Heck… Nina it could be a lot of money. You’ve clearly built it up over time.

 The answer really would be to ask 2 or 3 developers how much they would charge, but there’s a lot of work there to do it properly. 

 Does the website earn money or is it a hobby?

Alan

Hi Alan

 It is purely a hobby, the most I get is a drink when someone who is researching their family from the villag, actually comes to the village and we meet in the local pub. It’s a history of our village with all the birth and death records along with census returns, photographs and history of the village. 

 What I probably need is someone to set up the core CSS templates and index page and then I just copy and paste the HTML over from WordPress.

 Thanks for your assistance

Regards

 Nina

Ok Nina, I do know someone who is a wiz with WordPress and he could most certainly help (he’s not too expensive either) let me check and I’ll refer him to you.

Best regards

Alan  

Woul you be able o advise on the typical cost of an e-shop 2sickbastards.com is the type of template I would like to follow for my own pieces of work. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards

Dan

Hi Dan,

 I’ve been asked to respond to your question and happy to help. Indeed I agree its a big question, but I think the best stance or “response” is to say that one should look at what you are getting for the money.

 In this instance the website you refer to is quite substantial, but that in itself is no measure of cost as the company could and probably would have populated it themselves, thus it’s the functionality that could cost more; things like variants and multi-variants can be quite complex as is functionality to create special offers etc. By way of example, some of the T shirts are available as size (S,M,L) colour (white, blue etc) which is two variants and pretty standard, simple stuff.

 Staying with this theme (and I promise I’ll get to the cost thing!) a shirt that was available in size/colour/neck style/arm style/packing options/plus a card etc, etc would require a deal more programming and consequently impact on the cost of the project.

 And so to cost of design and creation of an e-commerce website. I would suggest that if you paid £5,000 to £6,000 for design and creation of a simple e-commerce site you SHOULD be getting something stable and worthwhile. Anything less and I would be wondering which corners were being cut and that would not include product population. If you were looking for a really polished web design then truthfully the design alone could cost £2,000.

 I hope my reply is helpful to you Dan.

 Best regards

 Alan 

Hello Alan

Thank you for your response.  My problems are I do not know how to use WordPress and can’t even find the simple things such as how to back up the system.  So how I upgrade the SQL is well beyond my capability.  What I would like to do is switch from WordPress back to Dreamweaver, where I am somewhat familiar with some of the coding.  

The page I desperately want to change is the front page with the new computers this design is not practical.  When would be a good time to contact yourselves and discuss my requirements.

Thanks

Nina

And my reply….

Hi Nina,

 I do apologise for the inordinate delay as I’ve been out of the Country and upon coming back… inundated (including moving house!), you are certainly struggling though aren’t you and I’m sorry for that.

 I wonder if you would tolerate me making a further suggestion and then failing that we could chat, because WordPress is a really good package for people who want to update their own website. I might not recommend it for large commercial applications, but it is good and I think ideal (don’t scream) for your needs. Could we explore the idea of someone helping you fix the website you have or at the least showing you how to make changes? Even if it cost you one or two hours of someone’s time I feel that would give you control of the site and allow you to move forward.

 With best regards

Alan

Enquiry: My site was put onto SQL server which I find has hindered my site from being found by search engines.  I want to return it to FTP and obtain some basic instructions in designing my site.  I don’t need the site managed.

Dear Nina,  I have been asked if I can give you and answer or somehow help with your question to the Web Design Directory, although I have to start by saying I think you are a little confused:

 We use SQL all the time and I don’t believe this would ever be the issue and FTP is just a file language used for uploading the website etc (file transfer protocol). However having looked at your website we (one of my developers and I) believe that your site was developed in an older version of PHP V4 and the new server is running a newer version. We believe the solution is to correctly identify the version of PHP and ensure your server is running a compatible version.

I hope that sorts things for me, but please let me know if it doesn’t

I am planning to set up a website that specialize in selling gift items like lets say something [Example:www.exoticgifts.com].when buying domain names how much memory space must i opt for.will the web designer tell me what size memory space i need for my site

Hi Collin, the chaps at the Web design directoy asked me to respond to your question;

 The domain name as such has, and will not have any influence on the memory you will require for your website. You will just reserve and effectively “rent” the domain (I digress, but please ensure that YOU are the registrant and do NOT allow your web developer to register the domain in their name – this is critical) however, your web developer will be able to advise how big they think the website will become and how much space you will need on the server.

I hope that helps, but please refer back if not

all the best

However, Saroj,

 I do feel the directory article http://www.web-design-directory-uk.co.uk/blog/2011/01/18/choosing-a-website-name/ will explain more than I could write here.

One would then go to a website such as www.uk2.net and search to see if your name is available. If this doesn’t answer your question please refer back and I’ll do my best to help.

Good luck