Site Design

[kpriewe]

Question: What do you do when clients (internal or external) insist that you design strictly for appearance?

For example, a home page made up of graphics only. No body text or even a heading that corresponds to the page title. Will alt tags that reference some keywords be enough to get you any kind of decent search engine rankings?

[waanagaran]

Hi kpriewe,
I guess we have to live with the fact that some of the sites we're doing is not ours and we're working for a client. We have to please him no matter what if we want to keep working on the job (and sometimes - or even most of the times- for designers, it's a frustrating thing).

Our present site's home page is totally made up of graphics (which I sliced into smaller pieces so some smaller images, especially the buttons, will load faster while waiting for the whole page to load). Based on 3 keywords I used for ranking, we placed among the top 10 of the list in both Google and Yahoo. And the keywords I used were placed in the title and meta tags (description and keywords).
I'm redesigning the home page now (making use of more texts) and I have to convince the owner of its necessity to improve SE ranking.

Whether our designs are pleasing or not, at the end of the day, it's still the client who determines what's pleasing or not.

[kpriewe]

Thanks for writing, Willie. Don't the keywords have to correspond to text one your page?

[ron sheldrick]

I had this problem, but it is true that the client pays and our job is to facilitate their requirements..but.....try explaining that flashy graphics etc that take ages to load can actually result in potential customers hitting the 'back' key.
If the customer is serious about the site increasing sales a bit of diplomacy works wonders. The customer sometimes doesn't understand 'net' selling so educate them.
This works and I have found that it makes the working relationship much better. Talk to them in terms they comprehend...not html, jave etc but business terms.
A lot of businesses know they need an internet presence but don't understand the technology.