What Web Design Clients need to know.
Most of the clients I work with have limited computer skills. They know how to email, how to use some basic programs such as word processing, maybe spreadsheets, their webbrowser (usually IE6 unfortunately) and maybe a simple photo or scanning program. What they don’t know is what runs a webpage. So how do I tell them why it’s important to have “a new engine under the hood”? They have no clue what a stylesheet is, or why it’s important. They have no clue what a search engine spider is looking for when it munches their code.
Often my clients come to me because their site is underperforming. Either it doesn’t get visitors and/or it’s barely ranked in the search engines, or the code and images are so bloated that only the broadband surfers can access the content, or the site is set up in an ancient frameset and is inaccessible to the spiders, or, my favorite, everything on the index page INCLUDING THE NAVIGATION is in flash. One client had nothing but an image map on his index page. The image that made up the map was 750k, the rollovers (yes, rollovers) added another 200k or so in images, and there were well over 100 table cells making up the map areas, which made the html and its rollover javascript (yes, javascript) another 60k or so. To put this in perspective for those of you who aren’t code wizards, almost all of the pages I design total less than 80k in html, images and scripts put together, so this one entry page represented the same load time as over 12 of my pages. The site was designed in a five year old version of Adobe GoLive- and was put on the web around 8 months ago. And the client had paid money for the design of this site, actually more than I would charge to design a site using up to date standards compliant code. Very few visitors to that site were getting past that front page, and, since there was no text whatsoever, not even an “alt” tag, there was nothing there for the search engine spiders to munch on.
Web design clients need to be educated about what makes a good site. But how do you go about it? The language of standards and css and accessibility are so intimidating for the average small business person that they instantly break into a cold sweat and start filtering out any word that has more than one syllable.
I use analogies. I did it to some extent in the first couple paragraphs. My favorite is “Spiders eat text and links. They digest these and follow them to find more text and links. If there’s no food the spider goes away.” This is something that the average person can picture, even if they don’t quite know what a search engine spider IS. Simplistic? Definitely. But effective? You betcha. Once this hurdle is jumped it becomes easier for the savvy standards compliant web designer to show the 6 pages of source code that makes up the client’s current entry page and ask them to find their phone number. Can we say “eye opener”??? This is immediately followed by showing them two pages of source code for a page the savvy designer has done that has the business name, address and phone number all easily seen within the first half page of code.
The web is changing fast. Things we had no inkling of 6 to 7 years ago are now happening. People can access webpage information with their wireless cellphones and PDAs, providing the information is presented in current code. Who knows what surprises are in store for all of us in the next few years? That makes what we do as standards compliant designers all that much more important. Separating the information on the page from the appearance of the page is not just good coding practice, it’s good business sense. More people accessing the information in whatever fashion means more business can be done off that website, or, if it’s an informational site, it means more people will get the message.
Have you gotten the message? Learn more.
The Semantic Web explained
The Semantic Web
