There’s been a notable increase this year in the number of our clients who’ve completely redesigned and relaunched their websites. In every case, they’ve moved to more modern content management systems such as WordPress, and I think the sites are really good looking too. All have taken advantage of the progression to larger screens for desktop users, and recent evelopments in web font technology. I could point to half a dozen which are genuinely impressive.
However, a number of clients have been let down by web design agencies who can produce a site which looks great and is easy to navigate, but who don’t want to get their hands dirty with the basics of SEO and analytics. I’m sorry, but this is as much a part of their job as the graphic design, and they’re letting you down.
I’ve seen things as daft as the Google Analytics code not being transferred from the old site to the new one, so suddenly there’s no visitor measurement. Another site had a “robots.txt” file designed to stop Google from accessing the site during development, left in place after the official launch. And then of course there’s the old problem of every page on the site changing its page address, but the designers failing to set up a comprehensive redirection of the old addresses to the new ones. These are basic things which you shouldn’t have to request, but unfortunately you need to keep a very watchful eye on the situation.