Today I’ve put together a particularly horrifying web design process. Please don’t actually follow these steps (if you can help it).
- Start the project by creating some visual mockups. Don’t worry about the content yet. You can just plug that in later when the website is completed.
- Adjust the mockups based on each and every criticism made by the person responsible for the approval. This is especially important if the person requesting the changes has no design training.
- Once the mockups are approved, build the website. Make sure to use dynamic drop-down menus, or create the whole website in Flash.
- Start writing the content. Someone in the company can steal text from competitors’ sites, or scribble some notes and hand them off to the designer to fix up. This is also the perfect time to brainstorm and come up with new sections, pages, features and functions to add to the website.
- Find some pictures to put on the website. There must be some laying around somewhere, so dig them up. The designer will be able to clean them up in Photoshop if they aren’t that good. There are also may cheap stock photography websites out there that have some good pictures.
- Plug the content into the website. Whoops! It doesn’t exactly fit. Rather than going back and redesigning the site from scratch, recode each of the pages to make it fit. If there are pages or sections you failed to include in the navigation just add the links somewhere and make them flash or blink to get the visitor’s attention.
The website is finished! It doesn’t look very good and isn’t user-friendly, but it’s a website!
Have any additional steps to add? Let me know.
Website redesign for GPS Fleet Services Company
I created this website for a restaurant in Danville. They have now expanded to a fourth restaurant, so you know the food is good. I’ve been there and can attest to the great food, great service and great atmosphere. And if you’ve never been to downtown Danville… Well, downtown Pleasanton definitely has some competition.
There has been some talk in the seo industry about Google PageRank becoming obsolete due to their exclusivity rights to the patent expiring this year. They can renew those rights, however (not sure why they wouldn’t). Even if they do, the patent expires completely in 2017, at which time any search engine can start using PageRank.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with PageRank, it was the concept that launched Google into the forefront of the search engine universe. It is the part of the ranking formula that counts links pointing to a website as part of that website’s relevance to the search phrase, as well as sign of that website’s authority on the subject. It made what is linking to a website more important than the content of the website itself, when it comes to ranking in competitive searches.
The thing is, that in the years since PageRank’s invention, the overall algorithm has become so complex, PageRank itself is now only a small piece of the puzzle. Looking at that little green bar is a favorite pastime of seo neophytes, but they soon learn that PageRank obsession is unproductive, and can often be an exercise in wheel spinning. PageRank SchmageRank, I say. I’m tired of hearing about it! As an SEO that needs to get results, PageRank is more a thorn in my side, especially when clients are familiar with it, and fixate on it, sometimes to the expense of the overall promotion campaign.
Ok, this concludes my first and possibly last post from my iPhone. Boy are my thumbs tired!
Campaign Web Design
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Attorney Website Design
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Criminal Defense Attorney Web Design
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I tweaked the design I created to promote the services of a swimming pool construction company to add room for news, features and special promotions.
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Attorney Blog Design
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