Web Design Adelaide Blog

Here at DBG we’ve spent the last week using Google Chrome! I must say that I have really enjoyed using this new browser, it’s super quick and has lots of nice features. I’m not going to re-invent the wheel so I’ve provided a few links to the many reviews of the new browser developed by Google for you to check out.

Techradar.com’s Google Chrome Review
TechCrunch’s Google Chrome Review
Check out the live video demo of Google Chrome from Cnet Here!

Enjoy!

I like to conduct experiments on web related topics, this one is to see how you might get a high ranking on Google for a blog named “web design Adelaide” using social bookmarking techniques.

We created a new blog dedicated to providing business in Adelaide with web design advice called the web design adelaide blog and then bookmarked it on a few of social media sites to see how it would impact it’s ranking.

The blog initially was not listed in Google search index at all but after providing a couple of links it was included but is not ranking all that well just yet. It will be interesting to see over time how this blog ranks in Google. The new version of the blog will be going live soon as we are going to be saying goodbye to this blog. The new improved web design Adelaide blog will be all systems go form the 1st October 2008 so feel free to drop in and check out the latest advice for Adelaide busineses!

A client of ours recently asked for a bit of advice on an email newsletter they were about to send out to their customers. They have a great newsletter – catchy, pretty and informative. There are also plenty of links back to their website to increase web traffic, it’s all good stuff. 

As we were checking the newsletter links for them we noticed one went to a page on their website named “specialsex.html”!!! 

Now, once we had stopped our chuckling and put ourselves back on our chairs we clicked the link (purely to check it worked for our client) to find that the link wasn’t in fact a link to a page about “special sex” but a promotional page for special items that were exclusive of GST (“Specials Ex”). 

We informed our client that the page name may be mis-interpreted by their customers, and they agreed that although it may get a few laughs, it was probably safer to change the filename. Perhaps a good time to make use of the hyphen (-)!

If you thought I was going to give out some magical secret as to how you can achieve this result, sorry, I’m merely pointing out that it can (and has) been done!

Earlier this week I was analysing local web design firms in Adelaide, Australia, and I noticed something interesting about the website that came up in first place for the phrase “website design Adelaide.”

My blog article on SEOMoz created quite a bit of discussion, it also managed to spread the word of the great city of Adelaide around the world and even created an inadvertent plug for Mcleod’s Daughters! If that isn’t inspiration for you to start a blog I don’t know what is!

Read the full article on Getting Number One on Google with Frames here!

Google have created a lot of fantastic tools for various purposes but as a friend of mine recently discovered there are also negatives.

My friend had a client ring them recently up and exclaim “you’ve broken our website!”, confused my friend asked exactly how their website was broken… “all my form fields are yellow, why did you do that, please change them back to white!”, after explaining to the client that no updates had in fact been made to the site recently, my associate had a look to see what was going on, all looked fine on his machine so asked a few mates to check it out, all looked good on theirs too!

Eventually he went to the client’s office to look at the site on their machine - when he got there he found that they had installed Google toolbar (which by default change your forms to yellow!) Problem solved, however do you think he sent Google the bill for the hour of work he spent trying to solve this problem??

If you know of any “Helpful tools” that also cause headaches, please share them!

That is the question! We have had mixed success with designing rough website templates for clients to send in with our web proposals. Now here is my concern…

We recently missed out on a potential web project because another bidder had included a ‘Possible Design Template’ of what the client’s web site could look like with their proposal. Sounds fair enough you might say, people are visual creatures and like to see things and get excited.

Now the reason why we didn’t include a ‘Possible Design Template’ is that we have indeed done this in the past, and recently have ceased spending hours of time roughing out a web site layout for clients who have decided to go ahead with the project but don’t want their web site to look anything like the ideas we had thought of.

So… do you spend the time doing a rough design without any ideas from the client (before an initial design meeting) that may not even get a second thought and hope that it may increase your chances of winning a project?  Or do you hope that you previous work, experience and proposal writing skills will get you through?

I’d love to hear any thoughts from both designers as well as business who have chosen a designer and their basis for doing so… have a great day