Here is a long journey that a website design company took with a business owner, it shows the highs and lows of a business relationship and has a twist in the tale if you care to read all parts of this which will be added at a later date:
[Website Designers] Here are my ideas and suggestions with new prices as you are now a valued client.
1, Promoting your website via an SEO program
This project will need more website content to be effective (reference point 2 below and can be taken as a 1 / 2 or 3-month project)
2, Updating your site (including 5 new pages including new web copy, cleaning up the pages, correcting links, sorting out Meta Descriptions, Updating galleries etc). You need new content to maximise the SEO project
[Website Owner] I’d like to go ahead with points 1 and 2, I do have a couple of minor things I would like altered too (if you haven’t already noted them yourself that is) so yes, how would be best to proceed?
[Website Designers] Please confirm that we talking about a 3 month SEO program plus the extra pages/fixes and new content. If so that’s a good idea to make the best use of the website and SEO project, please give us a full list of your other requests/changes.
There is a lot of work involved here and you will get a list of recommended changes and our changes/reports as we progress.
I urge you to continue posting in your news section also as you have made a good start and am pretty confident in being able to improve your earnings but increasing the visitor numbers to your site.
Initially can you add me as an administrator to your Google Analytics account (google analytics > admin > [view] user management > add our email address as ‘manage users’
[Website Owner] Many of the little website modifications / tweaks / updates I have noted, I believe are ones which I discussed with you when we met, and also a fair few which I believe you pointed out and agreed with anyways, but here are the points I have noted:
1. The link buttons on home and other pages are different, the ones in the home are a bit “old fashioned” looking which I’d like to change, not very sleek, and the ones on the other pages are very simple, not so much a bad thing unless you think they would be improved in changing to a different style?
2. Wee discussed possibly hiding the galleries that weren’t wedding and making it view as a pure wedding photography site.
3. The broken Twitter link, this I believe may be my fault as I changed the Twitter page name to a better one.
4. Re-naming “Portfolio” to “Gallery”, “Blog” to “News” and maybe “Wedding” to “About”
5. As we spoke about before, some of the images aren’t scaled properly, and also I remember you saying about downsizing the file size of photos.
6. Maybe improving the look of the “Prices” page.
7. If you are planning on re-vamping the galleries, I do have a few new photos that could be added.
Any other improvements you believe should be made, I am welcome to the table, as i believe you know best how to improve the site for customer use and of course optimization, and any other little changes I will let you know about if i spot them.
I tried to add you to the Google Analytics as you said, however it said “No Google account exists for this email” by the way. Forget that its done now my mistake.
[Website Designers] Comments on Updates below, please answer and send whats needed so we can make a final quote / task list then get this started for you
1. Will change the ‘image’ buttons on the front page to be simply text links with a mouseover effect – will make them all uniform and consistent
2. I think they should all stay
3. We have updated this on both pages it is linked from.
4. Yes will get this done
5. Will get all these images reviewed and resized / optimised as a priority task as the majority are 500kb when they need to be between 60-90kb on average
6. Agreed
7. Please send them in logically named folders via dropbox (share to me using our email account.
I propose these new pages will be created called
FAQs
Services
Weddings
Packages
Testimonials
Please give us some direction on what you would like here – maybe cut and paste from your emails the questions asked by your potential customers and your replies to them (your faqs).
Please give us more testimonials (email your old clients)
[Website Owners] Please find attached links to photos to add to the galleries. Please let me know that you have received all the testimonials I have sent over too. Also, I will send over some re-done prices soon. How’s it all coming along?
[Website Designers] Ok we have now got the two directories of photos (40 photos) these will be optimised / resized and uploaded to the specific galleries – in future please name photos without being ‘spammy’ so keep the description brief / use hyphens instead of spaces / keep characters to lower case one of your photos had 30 words in the title! A naturally titled image should ideally be something like
wedding-thurrock-bride-groom.jpg
Normally we don’t start anything until all tasks are agreed and all info / photos received – the last email I sent included this statement
I think you need to respond to the email regarding the updates (we have already completed some of these) and provide us with the photos / new page ‘direction’ text then we can finalise the quote for this work ask the for deposit then begin
Don’t think you responded specifically so even though we haven’t finalised the Tasks / Quote we have started some ‘essential tasks’.
Outstanding Work
1. The link buttons on home and other pages are different – Change the ‘image’ buttons on the front page to be simply text links with a mouseover effect – will make them all uniform and consistent
2. Add 25 Photos to Gallery (photos resized / optimised / renamed and uploaded)
3. Add 15 Photos to Bride and Groom Gallery (photos resized / optimised / renamed and uploaded)
4. Re-name menu items “Portfolio” to “Gallery”, “Blog” to “News” and “Wedding” to “About”
6. Maybe improving the look of the “Prices” page. (awaiting prices info)
7 New pages will be created called
FAQs
Services
Weddings
Packages
Testimonials
If the following steps / points are the only ones required I can stick to the quote provided
3 month SEO program
Extra pages / fixes and new content
And confirmation of the notes above and for you to provide some ‘direction’ on the pages to allow us to create the new webcopy and the prices info. Once you provide them can you pay a 50% deposit and we will commence your website project.
[Website Owners] I overlooked the FAQ part I’m afraid, so will get that to you ASAP, also a list of services and packages I believe you need too, and thanks for the direction on the naming of photos. Below is the FAQs that I can think of, I can’t really think of any other question I have or am likely to be asked, but if i do, I send them over. I’m just about to get started on new prices, however, “packages” I believe I am going to simplify to a “standard package” with the option and prices for “add-ons”, which may be best to come under the prices page, what do you think website wise? Oh, one thing I noticed recently too is that the “Contacts” page link button should read “Contact” not “Contacts” obviously.
Just had a look at the site, the front page seems to be a little non-functioning with concerns to the auto changing gallery header thing, there’s just a large space and some numbers, is this just due to the fact you guys are working on it? I have also noticed the gallery shows some duplicates.
[Website Designers] I dont know what happened to the site but the slider stopped revolving and not showing any photos – I have done a temp fix (css and html) to show one photo – (check the changes in index.html and slider.css. The duplicate gallery photos have been removed.
Thanks for the message, the front page is temporarily fixed but will be working on this for a couple of days so expect some small tweaks
Quick update:
Attached is a rankings report showing the sites updated position for your key search terms.
Updated work list. We completed the following tasks:
1 Resized / Optimised all Gallery images (6 galleries / 140 images) Each photo is now under 100kb
2 Removed 3 corrupt images
3 Corrected Twitter Corrupt link (replaced with new / correct link)
4 Added new testimonials page / added testimonials – linked this from the home page
5 Added new FAQ page / added link to it from front page
6 Contacts changed to Contact on all menus (including news section)
7. The link buttons on home and other pages are different – Changed the ‘image’ buttons on the front page to be simply text links with a mouseover effect – will make them all uniform and consistent
8. Add 25 Photos to Reportage Gallery (photos resized / optimised / rename and uploaded)
9. Add 15 Photos to Bride and Groom Gallery (photos resized / optimised / rename and uploaded)
10. Re-name menu items “Portfolio” to “Gallery”, “Blog” to “News” and “Wedding” to “About”
11 New pages created called
FAQs
Services
Weddings
Packages
Testimonials
12 Multiple HTML (code) improvements and tweaks (loads of presentation improvements and fixes to things not mentioned specifically)
13 Fixed the ‘prices’ menu link to work correctly
14 create a new map that specifically shows your business
15 added links to the site from other websites (offsite SEO)
16 deleted redundant themes / delete redundant plugins
17 installed image upload resizer (all future uploads will be resized to 1024*800px max
18 As you have uploaded very large photos on the news section this will potentially reduce the page load speed and reduce the overall SEO ‘score’ so we resized all your uploaded images in May and June to max 1024px wide (saved 30MB in space)
19 Page load speed evaluated and reduced (now loads much faster)
20 Front page slides all optimised (reduced from 350kb to 100kb typically)
Further updates
1 New Anniversary page
2 The Anniversary and Vows Pages now linked from the wedding page
3 All pages had to be changed so that the H1 (Main page heading) from being the top logo to being the main page heading (code / css changes)
4 Headings on each page are now updated to make them more relevant / search friendly
5 Front page qualifications section removed and replaced with a ‘Why you should use us’ section.
6 Site optimised for local places (Chelmsford, Colchester and Brentwood)
7 Added website to Google Webmaster tools
8 Identified and corrected HTML improvements including duplicated meta descriptions and short meta descriptions
9 We resubmitted site to Google’s index (so it picks up the changes / new pages)
10 Worked with our webcopy team to get them to create two promotional pieces of text for the website (results pending)
More SEO updates
1 Have reduced the image upsizing to be a max of 800px wide as the ones you uploaded I think were too big.
2 Have put in ‘technical’ measures to redirect your site back to the home page if an incorrect page name is typed.
3 Have redirected the non www version of the site to the www. version of the site.
4 we have identified matched text from your news section and your facebook page. DO NOT copy text from one to the other and please rectify.
5 Another External link with promotional text about your company
6 We ‘tweaked’ / updated more of your meta descriptions to ensure they are long enough and relevant – all meta information on all pages are now updated and complete.
Did you remove the copied text from your facebook page / news page? we need 100% unique text on the website / news section.
Suggestion
1 change your email on facebook to your info@ email address
2 The next news posts please use the ‘local places’ within the text and page title.
[Website Owners] Excellent work really happy, all looking good, couple things just wanna check though is that’s cool, obviously the SEO package will cover a wiser variety of search words and that as we discussed, yeah? Also, where the links to the new pages are down the side on the home page, will they also be added to the link that are at the top of the page throughout the site?
[Website Designers] We can snapshot a variety of search terms but our main metric for SEO is visitor numbers, don’t worry though you will see your ranking visibly increase for a variety of search terms. Can you give me your idea of search terms / areas that you want to rank higher for? Then we can check / confirm we are looking at the same primary search terms.
The links are down the side as the current site’s horizontal ‘static’ menu structure is simplistic and not easily changed to cater for more pages, any new development should cater to that.
Also please continue the good news posts you are creating, this is the single best thing you can do for the website (for your visitors and for SEO).
Question – do you think listing your qualifications on the front page as its own section is useful / relevant ? Especially as its already mentioned in the text. Although impressive I think that the front page should contain some ‘marketing’ webcopy as another section at the bottom of the page, what do you think? Perhaps this section could be a ‘Current Wedding Package Offers’ or similar which could then link to the prices / packages pages.
[Website Owners] Yeah, now you mention it, it is something I have been considering (regarding the qualifications on the front page) so yes, go ahead, and alter that as you think best.
With regard to search terms, I think that specific areas are important, as they hold a large number of wedding venues, as well as “essex wedding photographer” as people would search for both “photographer” and “photography”. Other than that, whatever seems to be the most beneficial from your knowledge really, unless we start going into specific venues as search terms. Does the image re-sizer you’ve installed also apply to any photos I upload in the news page? When you say use “local places” within the text and page title in next news posts, what exactly do you mean? Make sure the next couple are more local as opposed to the last one I did which was in Kent?
