Best Practices

Since I’ve hit the one-year anniversary of being a full-time freelancer, it seems like a fitting time to look back on this blog. Enjoy some of my favorite best practices posts:

Pricing Your Web Design Service
I wrote in this post that I prefer to give clients a fixed price per project, and that’s still true today. I did talk to a lawyer recently who preferred that I charge an hourly rate. That’s the world a lawyer lives in, so that isn’t too surprising. I’ve also worked a few times with a client who prefers me to give 3 different prices for best case, worst case, and expected case. I do that in my quotes, but so far the actual invoice has always been for the expected case.

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Why this sounds like the holy grail of search engine optimization. What mystic secret could I possibly know? It don’t know if Google’s Local Business Search really counts as a secret. If someone does a search for “plumber Indianapolis”, then Google will still return their normal, natural search results. Above those results, though, they return a list of plumbers with Indianapolis addresses. All you have to do is sign up and confirm your address.

If you are looking for a way to keep the lines of communication open with your existing customers, this feature is great. Let’s face facts; SEO has its complexities. Imagine how exciting it is for someone who is not as comfortable with technology as you or I to be told there is a way to get quality traffic from Google that does not require jumping through all kinds of hoops with your web site. With this information, you’re demonstrating to your clients that you are a knowledgeable and trustworthy resource for using the Internet to help their business.

You can also make recommendations to your clients about getting the most out of their local business listing. Google allows businesses to include coupons with their listing. This can be a printable coupon for brick-and-mortar stores, or it can be a promotional code for e-commerce sites. Either example is a great way to stand apart from the pack.

I came across a good article yesterday with the title, The business case for Web standards-based development. I like the break down at the end of the article of all the benefits that come with designing a standards compliant web site.

It got me thinking about the clients I’ve had in the last year. Most of them don’t really know or care that I did my best to adhere to standards when designing their sites, and I think that’s probably typical of most of the clients of freelance designers. In truth that’s probably my fault. I’ve always made the assumption that the advantages of standardization really only apply to larger sites with high profiles and lots of traffic. As I look at this list, though, many of them hold just as much appeal for the “little guy”.

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What most clients want to hear about search engine optimization is that a few hours adding some keywords to their site will rocket them to the number one result on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN for any and all searches that contain their product or service. In some industries that was possible 10 years ago. I doubt it’s possible in any industry today, and if you offer SEO services, it’s likely you’re going to be the one breaking the bad news to your customers.

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Years ago, long before I ever heard of a blog, I wrote this article about allowing your visitors to leave comments on your web pages. Blogging software today makes this as easy as selecting a checkbox, but not too long ago it required an investment of time to set this sort of thing up. This article was an attempt to convince people of the benefits of allowing visitors to leave comments. I thought about trying to update it to reflect changes over the last few years, but the content still holds up pretty well.

I’ve read a lot about people disabling comments because the spam they can generate can be overwhelming. Comments or no comments? I suspect there is no single right answer for everybody, and it largely depends on the site. I thought it might be worth it to reprint this article, though, to recall some of the positives.

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I’ll cut right to the chase. The key to search engine optimization is content. You can try to “trick” search engines with keyword stuffing, doorway pages, and cloaking; but the best you can hope for with those approaches is a short-term increase in search engine rankings. Google (and all of the other major engines) are constantly refining the algorithms they use to rank search results. The bulk of these changes center around removing pages that have used manipulations to artificially inflate their scores.

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