Lots of times we have built websites with Consultants, Professional Advisers and so called ‘web experts’ as helpers to the website owner, this sometimes works well but if the advice is from someone that really doesn’t know about websites and only has a design background then that sometimes causes problems, websites are dynamic and active and not static ‘adverts’, 99% of the time their primary goal is to attract relevant visitors and convert those visitors to people that make an enquiry or purchase. This is something we are expert at. The following conversations show how an consultant graphic designer can sometimes hinder a project.
[Website Owner] I am very impressed with the speed of your response. Please see attached my early stage design of my website. Please call tomorrow morning any time to discuss.
This is just to let you know I have chosen James of www.delicious-webdesign.com. I am very impressed with his helpfulness, prompt response and his knowledge both of website design and SEO. I found his business through Freeindex. He was the only one to give a prompt response. I have agreed with him that if needed (I am sure it will be!) you can communicate with each other over the phone and/or email – I hope that is okay with you. James has agreed to produce the first drafts for us to look at by the end of the week. He will also advice on SEO. I have also mentioned to him that I will change the detail wording on the website. I have mentioned to James that your views/input in this is vital- at the same time not taking up too much of your time.
Is there any written agreement you could let me have? You have been very open and honest so I am sure they will be no problems.
There isn’t anything formal / legal contract wise completed yet, I just keep putting it off, but you have prompted me to finish it and will forward it to my copywriter for approval and then sent to you
We are similar! I have been putting off my website for some time!
1, In your own words in one sentence please describe your business or new business (try to use non-technical language) – providing small businesses support, service and tools to grow and achieve their objectives
2, Please list 5 key words* that you think your potential visitors will use in a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo while searching for a site like yours:
(Keywords are words that people use in a search engine to search for your site. For example, if you sell jewellery, they might use words like: jewellery, gems, precious stones, etc.
This is difficult on since I am looking at this from an accountant’s and I am having difficulty in looking at this from the small business perspective- here goes
- Accountant Essex
- Self Assessment tax returns Wimbledon
- Tax help
- Accountant Thurrock
- VAT help
- Bookkeeping Stanford-le-Hope
Think about what you would put if you were looking for an accountant – that may help.
Do you have a graphic identity for your business? E.g. logo, stationery, brochures, etc.
Yes, already set up. – Stationery in progress by by graphic designer, logo is what you see in the name as Accountants supporting small businesses
Please let me know if you need further information.
I spent some time thinking about the words and the menu structure and went through several rewrites! I have attached the most final version. I do not think they will be any major changes to this, unless you or Brigitte think otherwise. I will be flexible with any suggestions.
My ideal is to have a photo on every page. I will leave you to find photos for other pages. The key point is they should look like everyday people, along the lines of photos Brigitte has shown.
I have also attached extra document and my photo mentioned in the notes. If my photo can be shown without the folded arms that would be good.
I am going for the video, it will be good and as you mentioned it will get the website up in the Google rankings.
[Website Designers] A little earlier than I anticipated we have got the framework completed, please comment openly and once we have agreed we can go ahead with this ‘look / feel’ the other pages will be created. No links work yet so clicking onto page navigation / links will lead to an error page
Couple of things we are happy with / like include :
The W3C compliant embedded Google video (the whole page is now compliant allowing it to look and work the same on all browsers and internet devices and it passes w3c validation)
The bullet points are always a great idea on front pages of website and give a little punch to your services.
Extra Info:
Video is a demo one I found on Google video
Obviously when I purchase the images (man on the index page) it will be better quality. I will work to use the images you included in the design draft (6 images – 26 credits approximately £35-£40)
The cost of which will be added to the final invoice
Thanks for such a speedy output. I will look at this and discuss with my management advisor. I agree to pay for images as over and above your premium rate for website design.
My first impression is that that video looks good. Just a point to bear in mind, it is likely I will go for a video with Essex Videos. This is an example video. I would be grateful if you could let me know if this would tick all the boxes.
That video would be fine the videos that this company produces are ‘Flash videos’ and can be easily embedded into your page. A note of caution though is that as its ‘flash’ the browser needs to have that plug-in installed and it wont work on mobile internet devices like the iphone (at the moment), there is obviously a design and production cost from them that may be in the region of £1500, I think that a DIY video / professionally produced video hosted on google video (free) and shown as an embedded video (free) on your page like I the one I have demonstrated is the most cost effective option.
You make a very good point. From what you say it is unlikely I will go for the expensive video. I am just thinking that putting a video in makes the first page just a bit squashed. Having said that I need to see what my advisor’s views are as well. Will set the email this evening. Thanks for the instructions – you will have Iphone instructions – great!
[Advisor] Sorry if this email is a bit rushed and to the point but I am really against it with dead lines – sorry to be negative but here’s my gut feelings on this draft. Overall although the design looks like our framework mock-up. I believe that it looks a bit heavy handed and lacks design finesse, the type doesn’t sit well in the panels, the menu bar type looks too large. I don’t think the fine key lines between the menu headings work visually. It should scream modern sophistication think of the Apple brand.
I would avoid at all costs – ticks on the font page – a bit clichéd and down market – That’s what they used to have and is something we are trying to get away from. Similar I wouldn’t have the image of the phone (especially not an old model) – again it’s making the new Southside brand look a bit brash and tacky.
The red I chose doesn’t translate well as a tint – my fault. I think the red will need to have a bit more orange in it to make it less pinky as it clearly doesn’t work well as tints. It seems to be adding to the overall look and feel of the site. The script typeface used is not the font supplied which was carefully considered for the logo and brand style. I’ve just noticed that the actual logo hasn’t been used – instead it looks as if it has been interpreted from what I supplied? Perhaps we can touch base sometime tomorrow. I’m busy until mid afternoon
[Website Owner] The ticks are my fault, I asked James to put them there. They may be other points where James has done what I had asked him to do. I would be grateful if both of you talk, before going further. James- I am sorry for the inconvenience, on the first page I would be grateful if you could follow Brigitte guide lines. I will look at this and decide on my preference.
[Website Designers] Sorry if the initial design wasn’t to your consultants likening, we really try hard and thought we had translated your look into a good workable webdesign, we take on board some of the comments but can’t agree that a London accountant’s business brochure website should have so much focus on the branding , the comment ‘It should scream modern sophistication think of the Apple brand’ is one we cant really understand, notwithstanding this we have made every effort to correct the suggestions and sent an email with the progress of those corrections.
As you know we are one of the best reviewed website design companies in the UK on freeindex and that’s because we know what we are good at and we do it very well and hope our final resulting website looks and works well and is highly placed in the search engines. Although we wouldn’t dream of publishing a second rate website I believe your final website will be fit for purpose and will hopefully earn you lots of business. There are many aspects to the design and hope that once the design look is agreed we can move on to the other stages of work for us.
Its not an inconvenience to rework the draft and we want the best for your site and the holistic approach to design / development is important, we don’t want to concentrate so much on the styling at the expense of the many other aspects of the site, I want every site to be great looking and functional, that converts well as well as the site being optimised and user-friendly.
Previously had clients so focused on the image of the website they made us change it / tweak it and / change it again tens of times just to achieve what they thought was the ‘perfect look’ but they missed the big picture, ignoring our advice on multiple occasions, about creating valuable well optimised / keyword targeted content and now I have two comparable website, in the same sector, and know that one gets 4-5 times more visitors per month than the other one. (one gets 250 – 300 visitors a month and one gets 50-60) The one with more visitors is 3 months newer and converts visitors into customer on a weekly basis. Please dont think I am change adverse, and stress that we are happy to make any changes you see fit to make this site ‘your baby’ and something you are happy with. Your success is my success and always said that.
[Website Owner] I understand that my consultant spoke to you and she will speak to you again. I will take things over after she has passed all the info to you. I will email/talk to you once she has passed all the info to you. I am sure we will work well and you will produce a website that meets my specification and get up in google rankings, otherwise I would not have gone with you! I really like the other websites that you and your team have designed.
[Consultant] I’ve spoken to the business owner and agreed to produce some extra guidance for you based on what you have produced – see extra guidance pdf – (2 pages). I have primarily looked at colours and layout tweaks. I have tried to simplify everything. I have been influenced by two sites for their design simplicity. If you have any queries please call. I am also sending you Photoshop files of the logo (I haven’t converted this to Hex colours) plus jpgs of the headings which are made from the font “Angelina” – I have made this font bolder as it looked a bit weak – let me know if you want me to make up any more in Illustrator. Also I have already sent you Helvetica Neue and Angelina – do you want them again?
[Website Designers] Received with thanks, we have these fonts but there are many many versions of them (helvetica neue / Neue Helvetica has about 150 versions) so you better sent them, this is the first email I have received from you so I didnt receive them previously. Additionally no photoshop files (.psd files) of the southside logo received so far.
[Website Owners] I am very sorry, I do not think this will work out. This is my mistake for not thinking things through. You were open and honest with me. Of course this means I will not ask for the deposit I paid to you. I am very sorry for the inconvenience, I have caused you and thank you for your help. I wish you all the best for the future.
I am sorry about how it all went over the week-end. I would like us to put all this behind us and move forward. Please ignore my previous message as my consultant is worrying me and that made me thing I was doing the wrong thing with this website. I would be grateful if you could continue with the website to its completion. I am sure as your website says, your motto is very much ensuring that the website will be completed to my satisfaction. This includes SEO. Due to my consultant’s very heavy workload she will no longer be directly involved with this. I may on the very rare occasions ask her opinion. However, I would like us to follow her brief and I will see what the website will look like. I think we have enough information now to follow her brief. Please disregard what I said earlier and follow her brief.
On reflection, lets remove the video from the first page of the website. I may have a video on the second page. I have written to the company asking if I can do this. I would be grateful if you could give me a call tomorrow morning.
I am sorry about any confusion I have caused on this. I misunderstood my consultant, she would like to be involved/kept in the loop. Having said that, please do not worry about making any mistakes. I have no intention of moving on to anyone else since I have given my commitment to you and I know you will do a great job.
[Website Designers] Thank you, was really taken aback by the halting of the development and now very happy that you are going ahead and sure you will be happy with the design and future rankings that it gets. Will continue to follow the guidelines and ask for your feedback / input at every stage. Will call you tomorrow, probably late morning now as, like you, we are still working here.
Great, have implemented some of the changes that should now be live and will continue full steam ahead on this from tomorrow onwards.
Questions: your new text from Home is much longer than the existing text that I have in the grey area and will not fit in there without changes, do you want me to make the grey box longer or put some text there and some below ? in that case what happens to the bullet points?
I have been working on the emails in chronological order and now seem to have some conflicts on what I should do so on the current version that has been uploaded do you want the video removed ? I think you need a footer on any page and have left the footer I created but removed the extra links, assuming that you want to go back to the original draft am I right in thinking you want to keep the rounded edges on the boxes and the deep red colours on the menu bar?
Perhaps Im confusing matters and would be better just to tell us what to change from the page thats live: im expecting you to say :
remove video
add extra pink box
added grey long box
add links as per the original draft
[Website Owners] Thanks for the revised front page. I am sorry about the conflicts. I am hope this will clarify. I will also use this email to respond to your queries on my other emails.
Front Page Video- Yes you are right I no longer want a video on the front page.
Second page (About us) – Video on this page -lets go ahead with your suggestion and look at what this would look like.
Menu- based on what you say let’s stick to current drop down.
Specific points on the front page:
– The drop down menu – currently not in same colour as the main menu, please change to same colour to the main menu.
– The menu titles to be in small caps and font as per the original draft template
– Testimonials on the same menu line (last on the line). I would like the menu line to be a single line rather than a double line. It may help if you reduce:
– The menu bar to be in line with web pages, at present it is short ie it does not extend to cover the grey box
– Please remove the telephone number on the top of the pages. On reflection, I prefer the the first style of these details being in the contact page.
– The font on the menu bear – please make this is the same as per Brigitte template. Please let me know if you would like further information on this.
– Top grey box text -sorry about the confusion. The existing text to be removed and to be replaced
– As a result of removing the video. We have space. I would like to use this space as per the very first template (emailed yesterday). I would like a light grey box in this template that currently says: accountancy services, added value services etc. I would like this box on the front page. The text in this box to be replaced by the following (without bullets but on separate lines):
– Underneath the above grey box as shown in the first template please add client testimonials as a link (first line). Second line our philosophy (lnfo- please refer to last set of notes (3/6 page 6)
– Sorry I do not like the footer- follow the style of (colour to remain as currently shown on the old website page ).
I hope this is okay. Please let me know if I have not been clear.
Yes the image does look good, I am pleased with it. I will pay for both the images. I am sure you will keep my costs down! I know I am really fussy, as you know the first page is absolutely vital. Here are more changes (it is looking good though!). Now that we are near completion of the first page, I can visualise the final output in a more clearer way:
– No further changes needed on the left side (image side of the page)
– On the right side we have a lot of white space on the bottom of the side of the page. We need to change this: (please let me know if this will not work)
- Making the top grey box longer, but maintaining its width. Then increase the font size either by 3 or 5 (whatever it takes) to fill up the box.
- Similarly increasing the length and font sizes of boxes below.
- Having more white horizontal space between boxes?
The objective is the boxes ending just above the grey footer.
– The bullet points in the box, the format does not need changing. However, on reflection the bullet point text size does need to be increased. Increase the size based on how far the grey box will increase in size.
– The bullet point text “Speaking plain English” to be changed to “To speak in plain English”.
– Please change the pink colours box back so “with a competitive fixed fee quote for agreed services” box becomes lighter pink and the latest tax tips box becomes the dark pink
– Our services box looks out of place, so let’s try this: if there is another shade of pink in between the two(!), change to that colour. Then change the text to white if there is another shade of pink.. This text to be replaced by the following “Which best describes your business? then separates lines for start-up, small, medium, large. The text in this box to be the same size as “we will provide” in other boxes
– Replace the following links:
“Client testimonials” replace with “our promises”
“Our Philosophy” replace with “how to choose an accountant”. If this text is too long, please let me know and I will think of something else.
Thanks for your help on SEO and using a template websites. I would like to think about this. I have posted a question on this issue on a SEO forum.
[Website Designers] Perhaps a better question would have been to ask about syndicated content as your website is not a template website, you could have bought a template website (website framework) and added your own content and that would be 100% perfect for SEO and your own unique content and images would make it look different. If you use all syndicated content then your chances of ranking for anything highly is very unlikely, and indeed Google may not even index the pages where you only have syndicated content on the pages.
Spoke to the web content girls, after our call, and gave them your initial draft as a guide and they would create those pages (minus the home page and about us page) with unique text and present you with the text for your review. They have recently done all the text for 90% of sites on our portfolio and have two further projects that are in the process of being proof read by website owners / website still in development. They understand the need for unique / relevant / search engine friendly text and think its very good value for money as currently if your text is 100% syndicated you will probably not get that page indexed, and if its indexed it will not rank highly
[Website Owners] Thanks for your comments on SEO and the importance of being unique. On reflection, for time saving, I will go ahead with template words. It just adds on too much work otherwise. Let’s review this after a year or so. I am impressed that through your work I am already at the bottom of page 1 of Google through Free Index (Accountant Essex).
[Website Designers]
site updates
Have done the Business Centre page and Tax Centre page now (using the iframe embedded code from accountant websmiths) I am unsure if you want different text in the grey box for the tax and business centre, couldnt find anything in the word documents for these pages. As the guide and subsequent updates and changes and word documents conflict I told the Developer to use his judgement and hopefully you will be happy with the pages so far
The menu buttons between these 4 pages and the home page should work also
extras
Taking over the hosting is not such a big deal but as you have just paid for it and it runs for a year we can still update you in your new style using your hosting or migrating it to ours.I think extra work required for this will include: to setup the new contact forms (email forms), adding email accounts, adding logo, linking the two sites ( could change the colour / rework my certax to be a similar logo to southside accountants) we have done this very successfully with the following two sites
Both sites are unique and you could have a menu item called business centre that links to your page in southside and if both websites are the same the visitor will get better experience and wont know he has changed site.
Content – As we are not sure exactly what pages are require I think we should review this again once we are all online and sorted, the two copy-writers are now busy with other projects at this time anyway.
[Website Owner] Sorry after talking with my advisor we are not 100% happy with the look of other pages apart from the front page. They look now how I wanted them because of boxes to the right which have been taken from the front page. Not sure why this was done. I will email amendments in the morning, so we can improve the feel and look of the remaining pages. Please do not buy any further images for the moment. I will choose the images for the pages and let you know. Thanks and not to worry I am sure we will get it right. I can see why there is some confusion on the remaining pages. I am currently drafting clear guidance on the remaining pages (it will take me a bit of time). I hope to email this to you in a couple of hours.
[Website Designers] The original draft has the other boxes taken from the front page on the other pages, I can remove the grey big background box simply and easily but wait your corrections. The images bought so far are ones from your original draft and the document. As I said in the email there is no draft document for the accountants websmith Iframe pages which will be the majority of your pages and we now have the draft document, the draft revised document and two word documents as well as email instructions to collate and interpret for the look of the pages so a clear list of changes would be very welcome and probably stop the many phone calls I am getting from the developer. The good news is that any changes given today will probably be completed today.
