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The Gervais Group asked:


As soon as you make the decision to either build a new website or re-design the one you’ve got, you’ll realize that everyone you talk to knows someone that can build the “site of your dreams”.  Putting an ad on Craig’s List will confirm the fact that there are so many designers out there that sorting through the responses will likely be totally overwhelming. “Designers” will range in skill level from the nephew that will template your website for what looks like a reasonable price to experienced professionals that will build a site with unlimited capabilities, with a price tags reaching five figures. That range in skill levels provides a range of potential outcomes, starting with the nephew that takes half of his reasonable price up front and then loses interest, gets a girlfriend, or gets distracted and never quite finishes the project. At the other end of the curve is the professionally designed site with features and functionalities that are way beyond the scope of what you want to accomplish with your site.  

Filtering your options to find the right fit for your objectives can be done, starting with the following punch list:

* Check out the designer’s previous work – Any firm that has been around for a while will have a gallery or portfolio of websites that they have designed. Spend some time on the sites, especially those with functionalities similar to what you want on your site. Remember your first impression upon arriving at the sites, check for clarity on what the sites are supposed to deliver, and look for ease of navigation. Don’t get too caught up search engine rankings unless the designer intends on providing search engine marketing after the web design.

* Call a few of the designer’s past clients to get their reviews of the experience and their final product. Find out whether deliverables were done on schedule, the level of cooperation, and if the owner got what they expected.

* Find out how many people actually work for the web  designer – You will want a design company with some depth and consistency in their employees. Two common problems with small design firms are outsourcing and overload. Outsourced work can be uneven and unpredictable simply due to the fact that work can be outsourced to different contracted designers with varying skill sets. Overload issues occur when the bid for a project is too low to cover the cost of outsourcing, requiring that the work stays in-house. If a bigger, higher margin project requiring all the firm’s resources comes in, guess whose project is going to get put on ice?

* Determine what you are paying for and what you’re getting – There’s a fine line between too little and too much in terms of developing your site. Pay too little and you’ll sacrifice on design, functionality, and ongoing support. Pay too much for features you don’t need and you won’t get the return on investment needed to have the project make financial sense.

* Get a handle on whether your site will be designed to generate visitors, conversions, and revenues or as a whiz-bang project that looks great but doesn’t function as part of your business. A good looking site that is properly optimized and captures visitors is going to do a lot more for your bottom line than a flashy site that the search engines can’t crawl.

* Establish good chemistry – You’re probably going to have both a working and creative relationship with your designer. The best relationships have some chemistry and trust at their foundations and the best results are going to be achieved when the two partners are working together, pulling in the same direction. A dysfunctional relationship, on the other hand, which curbs constructive communication will either break up or ultimately doom the project to failure. Establishing good chemistry at the outset can greatly reduce the possibility of hitting those avoidable pot holes.

Your website is going to be your “storefront” and a vital piece of your business. The importance of partnering with the right designer to execute that aspect of your company’s strategy is going to be crucial. Taking the time and committing to making the hard decisions on that partnership will greatly increase the odds of its success.

The Gervais Group asked:


Gervais Group LLC – SEO News and Advice by Gervais Group — Google has lifted the veil, a little bit, on the changes set to take place with the implementation of its update on search technology called “Google Caffeine”. The secret project is the next generation for web search which will mostly affect its indexing processes. Caffeine is likely to change search results to an extent and could ultimately lead toward the holy grail of real time search. In total, it will a more powerful version of what Google offers today emphasizing improvements in “…size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and other dimensions,” according to Google.

Taking a look at each focus area and anticipating the changes in each is, at best, an imprecise venture but here are some thoughts on where they might be headed with the rollout of Caffeine:

1) Size – Caffeine will allow for their spiders to crawl more of everything; sites, pages on the sites, blogs etc.

2) Indexing speed – With fresh content garnering more importance with search engines everyday and the sheer amount of it that hits the web on a minute-to-minute basis, Caffeine will allow for faster indexing of fresh content to keep results up to date with news, articles, and information. What that means for search engine optimized content is that pages will be picked up and rewarded faster than in the past. While it may not provide immediate gratification, the importance of adding consistently fresh content will be even greater as Caffeine rolls out and indexing gets even faster.

3) Accuracy – The parameters for the relevance of keywords and phrases as they fit into the content on web pages will become much tighter. It’s likely that Google’s interest will go far beyond traffic that goes to a site and will give much more weight to what visitors do when they arrive. Visitors that bounce off of sites quickly will provide indications that keywords are not tightly linked to page content. How quick bounces will be “scored” by Caffeine is likely to remain unknown but they won’t help. More than ever, sites will need to be optimized making sure that keywords and content relate to each other to keep visitors on the pages of the site.

4) Comprehensiveness – Going hand in hand with accuracy, Google will continue to rank sites that do a great job in conveying their authority in the niche they cover. Again, the emphasis is on the consistent addition pages with new keyword-relevant content. Google is likely to stick to its wheelhouse of big websites with tons of information that have been around for awhile.

At the end of the day, the “to do” list that will work for Caffeine is not substantially different than what is working now. If a “best practices” methodology is already in use, an SEO company won’t have to make drastic changes to adapt to Google’s evolution. In setting up their new algorithm, however, Google will force websites to deliver a better user experience which, ultimately, will improve the performance of those sites where their SEO services are paying attention.