We are all aware of the sayings “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” “Different strokes for different folks” and “There is no accounting for taste.” Unfortunately, although these sayings are universal, the associated insights don’t seem to be. This is nowhere more apparent when designing something for someone else. What looks “professional” to one person, can easily be boring, ugly, or even unprofessional to a different person.

As a web designer you learn that almost all descriptive terms are useless in completing the nuts-and-bolts task of creating a design the pleases the client. You need them to show you what they like, and you need to show them how you interpret that, and there the actual dialog begins.

Over and above pleasing the client, the designer’s task is to make the client realize that their taste is not universal, and their target audience may not respond positively to what they think looks good, or cool, or whatever. More important than pleasing themselves  (or their partners, employees, spouse,  friends or mother) is creating a design that communicates the desired message to the target audience.

What can be even more of a challenge is the tendency for inexperienced website buyers to be fixated on look-and-feel, or the visual design, to the neglect and expense of useability. The desire to speed through, or skip the boring task of information design and content creation to get to the visual mockups is extremely common and uniformly disastrous. Then, when the website flops, of course it is the visual design that is the problem and needs to be fixed.

As a web designer, the best thing you can do to save the client from themselves in such cases is to try to explain with examples, and if that doesn’t work, stick to your process regardless of the pressure to do otherwise.

I designed this website for a criminal defense attorney.

This custom WordPress Theme was designed for a Wedding Photographer’s portfolio blog.

UPDATE: I am out of gift cards for now. Will be getting some $75 credits soon, so check back. Please note that I need your mailing address, not your email address. Businesses in the U.S. get priority. Sorry – SEO and Web design companies are not eligible.

As a Google Engage partner, Google gives me $100 Google Adwords Gift cards to hand out to my clients. I have a limited number of left. To get yours:

1. Go to http://www.tpdesigns.net
2. Click on the “Contact” link at the top of the page
3. Fill in your contact information – put your mailing address in the “Message” field,

That’s it! I’ll mail you the gift card. Supplies are limited, so do it now. The $100 is only valid until January 31.

I had my first experience with a Google Adwords Strategist recently. As a Google Engage partner, Google issues me Adwords credits to pass out to my clients. The credits are only good for first time Adwords users.

I had just started to set up an Adwords campaign for one of my clients and issued them a $100 credit, when they received a call directly from Google. Google now offers free setup support for first time users, and this Google employee called my client to offer their services. My client is busy however, and after failing to contact them via phone, the Google employee emailed them a lengthy list of ways they could improve the campaign I was in the middle of setting up for them.

My client put the “Adwords Strategist” in contact with me, so we could work together to optimize their campaign. Here are the good and the bad ideas I got from our collaboration:

Good

1. Use all of the tools Google makes available to you to maximize click through ratio (CTR). This includes ad extensions (phone, location & sitelinks). It takes more time to setup, but for competitive keywords it should help your CTR. I think the major advantage to using all of these extensions is that it makes your ad larger than competitors who aren’t using them.
2. Negative keywords. This bit of advice was given as part of what I consider a bad strategy for this particular campaign, but I’ll give credit where credit is due.

Bad

1. Increase the budget. (My approach is to create a tight, efficient campaign and THEN increasing the budget, when the ROI is proven).
2. Forget about the niche, long tail keywords and only go after the highly competitive (aka expensive) keywords. ( OK, I can see now why I would need to increase the budget!)
3. Use broad match modifier type keywords to get more impressions and clicks, and add negative keywords to control CTR.

At that point in the campaign I was experimenting with exact match and phrase match keywords, and many of the phrase match keywords were giving me way too low a CTR, even with negative keywords. So how was I to control the CTR, and therefore the quality score, with broad match modifier keywords, which are less targeted, if I was already having trouble with phrase match? I didn’t get an answer to that question, just the repeated advice that I increase the budget and aggressively go after those competitive, broad match modified keywords and negative keywords.

I think the problem is that Adwords Strategists are low level customer services employees, well trained by Google in the mechanics and general strategies of running an Adwords campaign, but without a lot of experience in running campaigns for a variety of businesses. In addition to that, their strategies are not only aimed at making you a successful Adwords advertiser, but also maximizing earnings for Google.

For those of you who would like to take advantage of Google’s free Adwords setup support, and maintain the campaign yourself, keep in mind that Google’s advice will generally tend to:
1. Cost you more money and
2. Push you towards the higher traffic, higher cost keywords.

That has been my experience anyway.

This website was design primarily as a sales tool that features shipping software video tutorials. The website is available in English and Spanish versions.

The Flash video features a custom player with full screen capability, as well as custom overlays that display calls to action when the video is paused, and when it completes.

This project was a website redesign for a non-profit organization that works children, parents and teachers to promote a character-building methodology. The key function of the website is to provide educational document downloads. The site also includes an events calendar, an online shop and photo galleries of the organizations numerous events.

This website was created for a non-profit organization dedicated to feeding the hungry. Key components of the website are a custom interactive map feature, the ability to publish news articles to multiple categories and the ability to accept donations.

This Website was created for a company offering a wide range of services including damage repair, home detailing, general contracting and much more. Key features of the website include project galleries, coupon downloads, and a mailing list manager that allows the company to send mass emails to their customers.

Almost a month ago Google removed the keyword referral data for searches made by logged in Google users.  At the time Matt Cutts estimated that the overall effect as a percentage of the overall keyword data would be in the single digits. WRONG! At least for me.

My initial test for the couple of days it had been running when I wrote the first article showed minimal effect, along the lines of Matt Cutts’ statement. However as my weekly reports came in, I found that “(not provided)” was always on top, and was an alarmingly high percentage of the total. So high, in fact, that the data was functionally useless to me. In fact, over the month since the keyword referral data has been removed, the total percentage that is “(not provided)” is 24%.

So, think fondly of the days when Google supplied you useful data that would help you improve your web site promotion efforts and better serve  your business, customers and partners. Google just poked you in the eye!

Hey, maybe NOW you’ll start using Adwords!