As hard as it can, but letting go of your website design ideas and listening to the customer can even benefit in the long term.
I know what you’re saying, you’re in the web design business long enough to know what works and just does not know what would be my customer? Well after approaching web design in the same way, I unfortunately had no option but to give my best laid plans and fulfill the wishes of my clients.
Construction of good websites usually means that it is too attractive to the eye, but also as a fully functioning for Search Engine benefits, but must display professionalism for the industry represented.
Comply with the W3C standards (W3C Markup Validation Service) for both HTML and CSS validation is crucial for a good design and programming (but not necessarily for the good Google PR), so we like to design the basic HTML and CSS Tahoma 11pt font formatting such use, to clean easily applied to text and image page layouts fun to read.
I will list some cases where the release has benefits for both parties involved and how in some cases actually resulted in little or no web traffic for the website.
Case Study 1. Architectural flash and font issues
Our client wanted to use Flash elements to different architectural display images with a nice transition between the images and changes in the original CSS Font used 11pt Tahoma font and replaced by Century Gothic 11pt, which is used in all their logos and the architectural design work.
As most would know embedding Flash files into your website results in W3C Validation undefined source failure, making the site invalid format. After explaining this, the customer felt the need for a nice graphical style flash image many times larger than the importance of quality Transitional valid HTML markup. For them, the appearance and perception of their website to their customers was much more favorable than meets the W3C.
In addition, they wanted to use the Century Gothic font instead of Tahoma. In designing Century Gothic has a much higher altitude than Tahoma and when the page is used increased height is greater than when using Tahoma resulting in the site are displayed with scroll bars to view under 1024 x 768 resolution, where previously it fitted across the page perfectly.
At the end of the customer’s desired effect they wanted and ultimately it is the customer who “always knows best.
Case Study 2. Box supplier is packaged in
Our client had started a new business delivering cardboard boxes for moving and packing. They wanted a simple site with heavy graphical image elements and little or no text on the home page.
Explain to customers the role of text-based search engine results and that having no “clear text” on the home page would reduce their visibility, they choose the design results.
Why you may ask would a company limit their ability to be found on search engines? Well the question still burns in us, but as mentioned earlier the ‘customer always knows best “and the decision is only to make them.
Their philosophy was simple, their website was purely for use as reference and not the additional source of business, as their marketing strategies would be enough to consistently garner business.
To this day I still wonder why they limited their marketability and especially on their website always online and can be searched at all times of the day.
So in short the best laid plans of mice and men (in this case web designers) can be a waste of perfectly good management as what I’ve said along that the ‘customer always knows best’ and eventually they are the ones paying for your service so sometimes its best to determine your guns and recognize defeat.