| LED Digest 2324: Design Elements vs Business Decisions |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. January 12, 2007 Issue no. 2324 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= <Moderator Comment> --== Saving Design Costs ==-- ~ Lynne Diamond "Who knows better? The business owner or the web designer?" ~ Jill Whalen "Unfortunately, it seems to be a huge problem inherent in website design." ~ Bob Cavanagh "We have recently used a web design company to redesign our site..." ~ Jere Matlock "We generally specify a clause in our design proposal..." --== Image Spam the Future? ==-- ~ Veronica Yuill "I'd like to know what on earth ISPs are doing about it." ---== What is Yahoo! Slurp Doing? ==-- ~ Will Bontrager "Feature request for SE spiders: Provide a referrer." --== An SEO Guide - is it Possible? ==-- ~ Shari Thurow "...I don't think there are enough true experts on the LED to come up with a really good SEO guide." ======== CONTINUING =============================== <Moderator Comment> Huge response to Shari Thurow's post regarding clients and design costs. I'll put together a special issue for Monday. I've also published a selection of comments here: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1708/172/ Have a great weekend, Adam PS - the iPhone that I lust after appears to already be trademarked: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/10/tech/main2349900.shtml ---------------- From: Lynne Diamond Subject: Design costs > What do you do when people insist on too many > renditions of design elements, making the project > launch date later than expected, and going over budget? - Shari Thurow, LED Digest 2323 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1707/55/ I am so glad you posted to this topic because I was thinking of posting on it myself. I am a client so I might be able to offer the other point of view. I am a divorce mediator and paralegal with an online Calfornia divorce site. The site went live in 1997. It is a large site with a lot of content and an e-commerce section. My previous designer / programmer of 9 years left a lot of his "fingerprints" on the site making it very difficult for someone else to step in - particularly in the cgi coded ecommerce pages. He got tired working on the site so I found another designer / programmer. I decided to do a total site overhaul and finally got started in June, 2006. The designer gave me an estimate on a phase by phase basis. Phase I was site design and we were right on target. Phase II was something else and we were right on target. The trouble started at the end of August in Phase 3 when she began the coding work. I am not sure exactly what happened, but I think she greatly underestimated the time to complete this task. She never told me that we were over budget or how much over we were. Instead, she turned hostile whenever I asked her to do anything on the site - like fix a typo or change a phrase. On the other hand, she took the initiative to re-write copy, reseach statistics and perform other tasks that we didn't contract for her to do. The e-commerce - most critical part of the site since it brings in the bacon was done last. Her programmer was amateur and presented me with work that was incomplete and just not acceptable. By this time, January, 2007, she pretty much refused to do anything but fix the most glaring problems. Hostility became totally rude and nasty. So I terminated our contract. She is now billing me for triple our agreed upon price (and the site is still not live - 7 months later). As a client, this is a real dilemma to me. I budgeted for the site based on her representations of cost. I can't afford to pay her triple her estimate. But I do want to be fair - so I'm not sure really how to proceed. If I could change one thing about this experience, I would have asked her to be more clear about costs as we went along. Before we went into budget shock, I wish she would have told me in clear money terms. For example, if I decided I didn't like a photo she put on the site, she could have said (in a business like way) - It will take me 3 hours to change the photo and cost you an additional $200. It may delay the launch by a day. Ultimately the site is not about design - it is about the client's business. Sometimes design elements should defer to business decisions. With all due respect, I think it is the client's decision as to the look and feel of the site - not the designer's. It seems that client's and designers don't always have their priorities lined up. So a photo that is perfect for the design may give the wrong message to a potential customer. Who knows that better? The business owner or the web designer? What a tangled web we weave... Lynne Diamond, President Divorce Wizards, Inc. www.divorcewizards.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Jill Whalen Subject: Design costs Shari Thurow asked... > What do you do when people insist on too many > renditions of design elements, making the project > launch date later than expected, and going over budget? I don't really have an answer to this. Unfortunately, it seems to be a huge problem inherent in website design. If you are in the business of pleasing your client and producing the highest quality of work, it's nearly impossible to actually have a profitable design business. For the past few years I had been partnered with a design company and saw this same thing in action. Once we started tracking time on jobs, and as I watched designs take from 6 months - 1 year to complete, it became obvious that you really can't make money as a design firm; exactly for the reasons Shari talked about in her post. As I am getting settled into 2007 and changing and growing my company, I can tell you that I'm going to stay as far away from website design as possible and stick with services and products that are profitable! (i.e., SEO consulting, site audit reports, SEM seminars and training.) Best, Jill Whalen High RankingsR Helping Sites to Be the Best They Can Be! www.highrankings.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Bob Cavanagh Subject: Design costs This is in response to Shari Thurow's problem with clients requesting excessive iterations of design. Shari, We have recently used a web design company to redesign our marketing website. The contract with them was very specific about the number of design iterations included at each stage (basically just one round beyond the initial). Anything beyond that was billable at a specified rate. While as a customer I would have been happier with more opportunity to "tune" the design it certainly did put a lot of focus into our review work knowing it would be costly not to provide the best feedback at each stage. In the end it probably was best for both us and the design company. Bob Cavanagh, Director of Technology Queen's School of Business -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Jere Matlock Subject: Design costs Hi, Shari - You asked: > I don't know how other designers give unlimited logo samples. > I've experienced too many people taking advantage of it (and > not paying). We generally specify a clause in our design proposal that we will provide three possible renditions of a site, from which the client gets to choose one, and then she gets up to 3 iterations of that particular design. This is usually all that is required to arrive at a design that the client likes, especially since we have our graphic artists contact the client directly and get her exact ideas about what she wants the site to look like before we start coming up with any designs. We get our clients to find sites that they like and tell us what about them they would like us to emulate. We would never steal designs outright from another website, but we've borrowed many design elements from other websites over the years, because that's what the client liked. I'm talking about colors, placement of elements on a page, etc. The next clause in the proposal says that if the client wants to make more than 3 iterations of the design they choose, that we will bill for the graphic artist's time at an hourly rate, usually $60 /hour -- something affordable so we won't go broke providing the service, and yet enough to sting if it goes way over what we normally provide. That way we can give unlimited logo samples happily. Everybody wins. Hope that helps. Jere Matlock http://www.wordsinarow.com Website Design & Marketing / SEO -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Veronica Yuill Subject: Image spam > The article mentions the fact that nearly 10% of the world's > 650 million online computers are 'botnet' victims and are > being hijacked by hackers to send out spam email... > http://tinyurl.com/y93uho [thisislondon.co.uk] - Steven Birk, LED Digest 2323 Well, that's not a "fact"; the article says "some researchers claim ..." and then provides no source or justification for either the 650 million or the 10%. What does it mean by an "online computer"? For a start I suspect it means "Windows computer" since there aren't many web servers or Unix / Linux / Mac boxes being hijacked in this way as far as I know. That's not to say that these botnets and the increasing volume of spam isn't a huge problem. We get literally hundreds of these every day. I'd like to know what on earth ISPs are doing about it. They must be able to identify that certain of their clients are sending out massive volumes of email (possibly unwittingly). Why don't they contact them, explain the problem, and cut off their access till they get it fixed? Veronica Yuill -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Will Bontrager Subject: Yahoo Slurp > ... you might be inadvertently linking to these > URLs from a rogue page deep within your website. - Derrick Wheeler, LED Digest 2322 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1703/55/ Yes, that's a possibility, considering the weird code and links I've seen on some scraper sites. As for our own links, we use very little PHP and utilize few URLs with query strings to scripts. If it's ours, it was inadvertent. Feature request for SE spiders: Provide a referrer. Please. It would make me and I expect other site owners feel grateful when odd URL requests are noticed. If more than one referrer, then just any one -- the last one, the first one, doesn't matter which. Referrer information could save people a lot of time, and let them keep their hair a while longer. > Let me know if you would like me to crawl your site to > see if there are internal links to these pages. Yes, please do. Thank you. If we're inadvertently linking to those URLs, I surely want to know about it. We've operated willmaster.com since 1998, and it has many hundreds of pages. We test most of our scripts on that domain, so it's conceivable there might be errant pages scattered about. It may be prudent to give your crawler a big meal before it starts out; it could be a long time coming home :) Yahoo! Slurp is crawling both http://willmaster.com and http://www.willmaster.com -- and requesting similar URLs. For example: http://willmaster.com/autoresponder/?S=A http://www.willmaster.com/autoresponder/?S=A The above were crawled the same day, but from different IP addresses. Mr. Wheeler, you have permission to ignore the robots.txt file during this crawl. Also, I've disabled code that would deny the IP addresses of those who snoop where they shouldn't. Just let me know when the crawler is done so I can re-enable. And let's report the gist of what you find for interested LEDers. Will Bontrager -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Shari Thurow Subject: SEO guide > ... I don't think an SEO guide is possible. What I just described > as spam is perfectly acceptable to other SEO firms. Their guide > would contain considerably different content than my guide. - Shari Thurow, LED Digest 2321 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1701/55/ > Shari's argument that the SEO guide could not work > because different people have different ideas about > what is good and bad practice makes little sense... - John Smart, LED Digest 2323 Hi all- This is in response to John Smart's post in LED #2321 regarding an SEO guide. But before that, thanks to everyone who responded to my design question post. Everything has been quite helpful. I've said it before, and I will say it again. Do not attribute thoughts and feelings and intentions to me without asking me first. John, IMHO, your conclusion was completely false, and you didn't even have the common courtesy to ask me what I meant. I do not think an SEO guide is possible because what some firms consider acceptable is actually search engine spam. If you pay out enough moola, you might find some SEOs are not as "ethical" as they promote themselves to be. To be perfectly honest, I don't think there are enough true experts on the LED list to come up with a really good SEO guide. The best search experts I've met have a really good education and experience in the information retrieval field. A lot of them have user-centered design (UCD) training and formal education. And this small group of people (whom I consider to be the true experts) is constantly continuing their education. I am aware that I may have come off as snobbish. It was not my intent, nor was it meant to be mean spirited. As this field evolves and I meet people, I am continually amazed at how much I don't know and where I need to evolve. It's hard for me to hear someone consider him- or herself to be an expert sometimes, when I know that person just does not have the training, education, or experience. I have a great deal of respect for copywriters, but I don't consider copywriters to be search experts without some level of technical expertise. Those are my standards. They might be too high for some people. They are not too high for me. I just don't think an SEO guide is possible because too many people spam, and too many people make erroneous cause-and-effect conclusions due to lack of technical knowledge. And please, just email me or call me. Don't make these false assumptions. I am sure no LEDer would like it if I made a false assumption about something they wrote and then published it as fact. Sincerely, Shari Thurow Grantastic Designs, Inc. http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains The Archives: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/126/120/ Subscribe: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/52/77/ Unsubscribe, Change Email, or Hold / Resume Delivery: http://www.led-digest.com/content/category/4/17/86/ (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it." - Lou Holtz |
