The Truth About Web Design

Let's step out of the sales office for a minute and talk about the truth of the matter. Our subject is website design and implementation. Having launched more sites than I care to admit to I owuld like to "tell it like it is" for a little bit. I feel so few will ever speak these truths until after the contracts are signed. I am putting my best foot forward and letting our clients and most importantly potential clients know the truth.

No Site is launched complete or error free

Some people may argue to the contrary, and I suppose there are a few exceptions out there, but this is held as a truth. When turning a site live usually the web team and clients have a discussion on "sites are launched broken and fixed live". Now we try to get everything working correctly and this is not an excuse for any poor work, but this is true. Not until a site is live do we find errors. The sheer nature of having hundreds and thousands of people looking over the content and build will show errors we could never catch in the build state. Additionally, there are too many browsers on the market. We can not have a site perform the same for all browsers. Each version of any browser has a microcosm of patches, fixes, subreleases, and intermediate states that no one (except for the browser developers) can track. Each of these instances have the potential to break a site for a certain user.

So now I have bummed you out? Don't be bummed. This is why Interzone's support for all sites is so critical. We will continue to fix sites every day, week, and month. We may launch a site broken, but we will keep fixing it, that is what a web company does. We are no different than Microsoft Windows or Apple's OS - they are always patching as new bugs and errors come to the surface. This is why it is so important for our clients to engage with the site often and talk to the shoppers and communicate with Interzone to make things work as best as possible.

An analogy: the golf course. This one is simple. On the golf course there is always some turf that needs to be mowed, trimmed, or treated. This is a never ending task, maintainence, that keeps the grounds keepers busy. We are your website grounds keepers. We will mow the site, figurativly speaking.

Content Delivery

It is a rare exception when a client delivers content ontime and complete. Now this is not an excuse to slack off and procrastinate. The most common single event that holds up site completion is the delivery of content. So, start writing before anything else. You will need to provide a small novel to us in content in only 2 or so months. This is serious business.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is 50% snake oil and 50% magic bean.

The 50% snake oil is the various "wand waving techniques" that you can buy or subscribe to from any number of companies. We will help you decide where the snake oil comes from and where the magic may lay.

The 50% magic bean is a direct reference to "holy cow, look what happened". There are tactics, strategies, and methods that will produce great results. We implement as many of them as possible. We are not an SEO company, but we do generate great search engine results. We work with SEO experts who speak truthfully, honestly, and from results.

SEO success comes from engaging with your site and marketing your line of products and services. Things like blogging, social networking, press releases, adjusting content, writing for the search engines, and a long list of smaller tweaks and efforts have a cummulative effect over time. Without this base of work and effort from the clients we can not unpack "the big guns" for greater SEO success.

The simple rule on SEO: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.