 posted in business strategies
on 7 Mar 08
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Common complaints about web developers
We get a lot of enquiries from people who already own a website, and are interested in our website template. Generally speaking, people want to change their website when they're not satisfied with the results they're getting from their current site. When we ask them what's wrong with their current site, the typical replies are:-
- Not enough visitors to the site, despite quality content and link building campaigns
- Web developer is hard to get hold of - goes AWOL for days, or generally takes too long to reply
- Website is hard to update, and developer charges are too high even for the smallest job
- Website hosting is too slow / too much downtime for website
First off, no web development company is perfect, and we'd be foolish to upset the internet Gods* by saying we offer a fault-free service (*no claim to perfection goes unpunished on the internet). We'd also be liars because it isn't true. For a start, just taking hosting into account, the internet is about a chain of reliance - we manage our own servers, but we rely on our data centre to provide the security and physical upkeep of our servers. Our data centres rely on the electricity grid to provide them power, and also telecommunications companies to connect the servers to the internet. And so on and so on. One break in the chain of reliance means potential downtime to our websites through no fault of our own. Thankfully that is extremely rare (twice in 3 years for short periods of time). But it illustrates how hard it is to offer fault-free service. Also, complex web applications are never 100% bug free, and we don't even try to claim that with our own website template.
So with that in mind, I want to look deeper into the common problems businesses can sometimes encounter with web developers, why they occur, and how these types of problems CAN be avoided if you are aware of these issues before choosing your developer.
Not enough visitors to my websiteThere never is enough, but this is a genuine complaint when website owners are working hard at their content, making concerted efforts to build up their link popularity, yet their visitor stats remain stagnant. What is going wrong?
The likely culprit is poorly structured HTML, or poor on-page optimization as it's often called. This results in search engines struggling to develop a clear profile for such a website. In other words, they are struggling to CLEARLY categorise the content for each page of the website. To give you examples:-
- a website has 100 pages, and all 100 pages have the exact same page title. From a search engine's point of view, this is confusing and doesn't help distinguish one page from the other.
- no use of Headline tags (e.g. H1, H2). Headline tags help structure a page's content, so that H1 is the most important headline, H2 is the second most, and so on.
- The URLs for each page are lengthy and use parameters that make no sense to a search engine (e.g. http://www.website.com?ID=3424&CatID=34&SessionID=342903784239048234832488345f3).
- Website uses javascript dropdown menus making it hard for search engines to follow links
- Content embedded into Flash
- NOT Keeping It Simple when it comes to website architecture - cluttered layout makes it difficult for search engines to properly map the site and distinguish a hierarchy of importance to all the pages on the site - often resulting in too many pages going to the supplemental index (in Google).
So no matter how good your content is, no matter how good a link profile you have, search engines are still struggling to properly profile your website if it has poorly structured HTML. Search engines need to be sure their top results clearly match the search keywords entered- any vagueness is demoted further down the rankings.
You should check out the portfolio of a website developer and see how well these websites rank, and how their pages look in terms of page titles, URLs, H1 tags etc. It's a bit of detective work, requiring a small learning curve in the basics of search engine optimization, but this basic knowledge should be part of your skill-set if you want to run a successful online business.
Web developer is hard to get hold ofWebsite development is not a regulated industry. Anyone can register a domain, buy some cheap hosting, upload a couple of web pages, and announce to the world they are an established web design company. So it's important to check out the history of a web development company. Any truly professional web development company will have a large portfolio of websites, and plenty of testimonials (that can be verified).
Website is hard to update, and developer charges are too high even for the smallest jobYou might think the initial cost for your website was reasonable, but then you're paying for every single extra job you request for your site, no matter how small, even content updates. You should find out if your site has content management facilities allowing YOU to update your site easily and for free. Also ask developers their minimum charge for small jobs.
Website hosting is too slow / too much downtime for websiteA lot of web developers only connection to the server is simply FTPing files up to it and accessing databases to either back them up manually or edit the database schema. In other words, they don't manage the server whatsoever - it's just a place to upload files to. This describes ourselves about 5 years ago. We didn't know what effect our scripts had on the server's performance because we couldn't "see" the server and how in particular the CPU levels were affected by running particular scripts. Now with our own servers we've learned how important it is to "housekeep" your own servers in order to maintain reliable hosting.
You should ask web developers their hosting arrangements and how often they back-up their data (if at all).
ConclusionEvery web developer will give you their sales pitch when you approach them, but you can get closer to the truth by asking them about the above issues, and how they address them.
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