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By russell, August 22, 2009 4:25 pm

It’s because you need to allow time for any corrections and overruns. Launching a site on a Friday usually doesn’t give you the chance to make those final checks, or accommodate last-minute changes. And nobody wants to rush-launch a site full of glitches, no matter how complex the project (from simple blogs to database driven websites).

Flexibility is your friend…

Every experienced designer knows that things change during the course of a project. A client might want to alter the site colour scheme. Maybe they want a new section added in the navigation. Instead of selling t-shirts online, maybe they now want to offer discount cheese.

Whatever the reason, clear communication and adaptability is key. If you’re a client and want something added or removed from the site, then designers should be informed as soon as possible – the job might take longer than you expect.

Similarly, designers need to try and offer honest and accurate estimates on time and cost for any amendments. It’s important to remember that your clients may not understand the technical side of things as much as you do.

Last minute changes take more than a minute…

Here’s a list of a few last minute change requests or delayed info that we’ve received from clients days before the target launch date. If you’re a designer, you can nod your head in sad recognition. If you’re a client, it’s worth bearing these in mind when you ask for final alterations.

- “I hear blogs are all the rage and I know we launch tomorrow, but – can I have one?”

- “Here’s the content for all of the web pages. Can we launch this afternoon now?”

- “I’ve sent you our brochures and leaflets in the mail. That should be enough for you to add content to the site, right?”

- “Here are all the images you wanted. You can choose your favourites from the 3000 in this file.”

- “Can I add these cool new applications to the homepage that I saw online this morning?”

- “Actually, I think we want to have green headers and a red logo.”

- “My boss hasn’t seen the design yet. I’ll just get it signed off before we launch this afternoon.”

- “Is there any chance that you could just quickly write some content for us for the ‘about us’ and ’services’ sections?”

- “We’ve decided we’d like to sell stuff directly online. Could you add a shopping basket?”

Consider this article as a plea for greater communication between all web designers, web design agencies and clients. And don’t get me wrong – designers can be as guilty of bad communication as clients can.

No matter how huge the project, how big the company or how short the timescale, keep the channels of communication wide open to help produce the best possible results. And for the sake of everyone’s sanity, never launch your new site on a Friday.

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By russell, August 7, 2009 5:51 am

Search engine friendly websites is one of those often heard phrases, both from web site development companies and from their clients. Everyone knows that this is important to have, and yet it is one of the things that is actually often overlooked. Search engine optimisation companies actually spend a lot of their time analysing a website and removing barriers to the search engines ranking a site highly. At the web development level, it is possible to build a site that is perfectly search engine friendly. One of the hardest types of site to get right though are database driven websites. Listed below are ten of the most common issues that are created, often unknowingly, in the development process of a dynamically generated web site.1. Pages with duplicate content – not enough differential areas within the pages, so that only small areas of the page change from page to page. It is essential that enough of the page text changes for the search engines to see an appreciable difference between one page and the next.2. Pages with duplicate page titles – the page title is a great indicator to the search engines of the primary content of the page. Whilst this is often unique on sites such as e-commerce websites, it is often overlooked in other sites, particularly where small areas of the site are generated from a database, such as news pages.3. Pages with duplicate meta descriptions – again, this is easy to overlook and set a global or category level meta description. These give the search engines a reason to penalise your site for not giving them enough information, and again, creating a unique meta description for every page is an essential SEO task.4. Using auto-generation of pages as a shortcut instead of creating good content. This is linked quite closely to point 1, where it is possible to create pages that have only a tiny percentage difference between them. Databases are fantastic ways of storing information, but you still need to put the work in to fill them with content. Unique information about the subject of the page will immensely help both the long tail and the ability of the search engines to determine that a page is valuable.5. Creating pages that are hidden behind form submissions or javascript postbacks that cannot be accessed by a search engine crawler. This is far more common that is generally realised. For instance .NET creates postback links by default instead of proper links – potentially making huge sections of a site unreachable. Likewise, it is easy to hide lovely content rich areas of your site behind a drop down selector in a form that means certain areas of the site are not visible.6. Too many query strings – this is a common bugbear of the professional SEO, where complicated database selections create deep levels of pages, but with seven or eight &id= type strings. Additionally, some bad development methodology can leave pages with null query strings that appear in every URL but don’t do anything. The answer to this is generally URL rewrites, creating much more search engine friendly and user-friendly URLs! 7. Putting query strings in different orders when accessed through different places – this can create duplicate content issues, which can cause major penalties.8. Not using user language to generate automated pages – if you are going to create a database driven website that uses words in the query strings (or better in rewritten URLs) make sure that you use words that will help you with SEO – if you sell widgets, make sure you are using the word widgets somewhere in the URL instead of just product= or id= – keyword research can assist with this.9. Not allowing the meta data and title to be edited easily after the site build. It is possible to hardcode the generation of meta information into a database that doesn’t allow it to be edited later. Creating a mechanism for modifying this information initially helps everyone at a later stage when the information needs changing without shoehorning it into an already developed structure.10. Creating keyword stuffed pages by using auto-generation. Once upon a time, search engines quite liked pages with high densities of your keywords, but now these are likely to get you marked down rather than up. So be aware when creating pages that long pages with lots of your products on can create too high a density. For instance listing blue widgets, light blue widgets, navy blue widgets, sky blue widgets is going to create a page with a very dense page for the phrase “blue widgets”.These are just 10 of the commonest potential optimisation pitfalls when creating dynamic websites. There are many more facets to producing a great database driven site, including user friendliness, speed, performance and security, but they all add together to make the best solution to your needs.