SEO & Website Design San Diego

I have been asked to take over and work with various Indian programmers, after they have baffled the website owner, don't get me wrong, I'm sure many Indian programmers do a good job, I've just never come across any.

I did a quick tally last night, and I figure I have worked with 14 different Indian programming companies. And I know my name is on a blacklist somewhere on an Indian coders forum, because I insist that a website works, because the last programmer told me so, when he was getting angry with me, he rang me and said, I should never have worked with you, blah blah blah, I thought that was pretty cool, people are being warned about working with me, because I insist that the work be done correctly, that everything works, and when it comes to beta testing a site I would find every tiny problem.

That's a pretty good name to have I would say. I'm proud of it.

As an example of some problems I have come up with, problems that I've come up against, the first place I worked with, I assumed that if a feature was mentioned that that feature would then work, that's a reasonable assumption I would say.

One I particularly remember, because now I think it so funny but got me so mad at the time. We worked on a site that had 3 levels of website user, the top level coaches, then registered members, then general site users, a coach could sell products or services through the site. And one feature was the ability for coaches to say that website members that made bookings for a seminar before a specific date would get an early bird special discount price. That's a pretty normal way of working right?

When the site was finished, sure enough the coach could there was a place to put an early bird price, but at first it didn't show on the page when a website member looked at the details of the seminar. When I made an issue of this, the programmer said he didn't even know what that early bird thing meant, so just put a text box, so the coach could add this.

I thought well fair enough I guess, different countries different ways of doing things, so I explained how it should work. That was fixed duly, and all seemed well. Until I was beta testing as a registered member and noticed that although the features was there, and it said on the seminar page there was a discount, that when a member made their order, they were charged the normal price not the early bird price. Thinking this was just an oversight, I approached the company, and asked that it be fixed, this is where the problems started.

They said that that feature was in the list of what a coach could do, but was not listed for what a member could do, which was true, it wasn't listed, and because of this the site was now going to cost more to make this feature work for members. I must say they put forward a very good argument, and to the novice building their first website they would have probably paid.

However, I hit the roof, and walls of the reply email, saying that was the dumbest thing I had ever heard, how it didn't even make sense that it or any feature wouldn't work for all people that were using the feature. Anyway to cut a long story short, I eventually got what I wanted and didn't pay anything extra for it. But that was only the first of many many such issues there were something like 62 different parts of the site that the coder actually didn't know what the work order meant, so simply didn't add the features, or added a half assed job, once the coder even admitted to me on MSN that he had hoped that a particular feature was forgotten, because he didn't have any clue how to do it.

When starting to work with these company's you will also get a multipage proposal for building your website, this will be 35 plus pdf pages, and seems to list every last detail, but a word of warning, never under any circumstance assume anything. I did in the above mentioned example, and if I hadn't of known, could have had a different outcome. They always quoted a new price whenever I mentioned a different feature not working, and if I would have paid them all, the site would have cost over 3 times as much as the original quote said.

Oh another problem we had that was really funny, on the proposal anyone visiting the site could ask the coach a question by clicking on a link which took them to a form page. However because it wasn't mentioned on the coaches list that they would receive this form, the submitted form didn't have a place to go, it was really just a dummy form. How pathetically dumb was that.

My main problem with them is they prey on unsuspecting new website owners, people that really need a helping hand, and understanding that the idea of a site will evolve as it is being built, they are offering them a cheap website, and pretending to be wonderful and helpful, ringing up talking for hours on the phone. When most often rip the poor client.

I've dealt with a few website owners, over the years, who had their original website built by different Indian website designers/developers. Although the original website was cheap enough, they mistakenly agreed to have only the original developer do any changes on the site in the future or the site warrantee would be void.

One site was a comprehensive community website that originally cost only $6000 USD. Great price for the site, so no problems there, however a year down the line, and the site wanted to add a feature they wrote to the developer, and they wanted, $25,000USD that's twenty five thousand dollars USD for what was a relatively easy job even if the coding had to be written from scratch.

This is outrageous, yet sadly enough commonplace. For a new website owner really daunting.

Looking at the website warrantee or guarantee it actually only lasted for a month after the site was built, so I advised the owner of this, much to their relief.

I found a coder, and had the job done for a total of $350. The killer was that the feature the owner actually wanted added, was actually in the code all the time, and had been hidden, so all that was required was to find it, and take out the code that was hiding it. It took me longer to find a coder that actually coded in that particular coding language than it did to have the work done.

It is vital that if you get a cheap site made you don't agree to anything like this, for this very reason. I have heard story after story from owners of how these "Cheap websites" end up costing the owner a bundle of money.

Another story was a website, that at first look, seemed to be a nice website, and as long as any members joined, and did everything correctly the site worked well. And in the testing stage of the website, since the owner wasn't an experienced beta tester, he didn't realize there were no correct error controls within the site.

I went to the site, actually to become a member, I filled out the membership form, and when I submitted it, my password didn't have enough characters, when the page refreshed after the error message it was blank, so I filled it in again, this time my dyslexia kicked in and my password didn't match, again I was faced with filling in the form. After 4 tries I eventually got the form to accept, and wrote to the owner, explaining that it was a simple change in coding to make the form keep the information, when something like that happened. And told him what to ask his developers to do in geek speak.

The owner wrote back and thanked me, and said that he hadn't known of the problem, and would get it fixed. All was well. I started writing to the owner just on a friendly basis about the site, and how things were going, his idea was a good one, and I have an inquisitive nature, like hobit our hedgehog mascot.

A month later the site owner wrote to me and said he hadn't had a reply from the company, after several emails on his part, and was sick and tired of their lousy after sales service.

He told me about a couple of other issues that had been reported, and asked if our webdesign/development company would be willing to fix these issues. I by that time had found another 3 problems with the site.

I said that we'd be happy to do the work, and carry on as his developer. I suggested that I beta test the site, which he was happy for me to do. I found 24 different issues, nothing major but things that should have been found and fixed during the building and testing stage.

While looking at the code to fix a couple of small issues, I noticed that some of the code was familiar, and actually turned out to be open source code, free to use, and just had a couple of minor customizations made to it, and should never have cost the $4000 that he was charged in the first place, so even though initially he was happy with the cheap price, he was actually overcharged.

That was over 3 years ago now, and now the site works well, has had several changes made, and features added, the owner is a happy camper.

The moral of the story is, you often get what you pay for, especially when it comes to very cheap websites. And paying for someone to explain the options you have can often save you a lot in the long run.

Regards Lynny

Best SEO in San Diego
Website design and development, Hillcrest, San Diego

Best Regards Lynny Brown - Best SEO Results, from the BEST SEO!!!

San Diego Born, English speaking SEO.
Not The Cheapest SEO, but I get Results that amaze My Clients and & other SEO's

Contact Me directly.
Lynny help1@seobyCanz.com
SEO Blog SEO Website SEO & Graphic Design Website Best SEO Blog SEO hints

SEO is just a big game, and you want to be the winner.

I have a new SEO client that's thrilled that after his new optimized website has been online for only 5 days, he's #1 for all the keyphrases he wanted to be ranked well for, when we started his site couldn't be found in the first 100 search engine results. This client did his own SEO with my help.

Like I said he's jazzed about being #1 for all these phrases, and I offered to show him, how he could improve the phrases that say at #5 and get them upto #1. He is of course interested to know, and has made an appointment, but his comment was, SEO is just a big game isn't it…. Never have truer words been spoken.

The really good thing about SEO is so few sites have any done, that often only a small investment, will go a long way, unless you are in one of the very high competition businesses. But even then the investment will be more, but the results are well worth it for your business.

SEO is a game, and you want your site to be the winner. Contact me, if you want your site to be the winner…. We'll make it happen.

Lynny

SEO Consultancy

Gay Friendly SEO Services Hillcrest, San Diego, Southern California

Friendly SEO Service Worldwide, New Zealand to United States

Professional Website design

Professional graphic design and business branding services

Quite simply SEF means search engine friendly.

Have a look at our SEF CMS, or Search Engine Friendly, Content Management System, The CMS means you can if you wish build the whole site yourself, or have us build a professional website, and then you add your products as you see fit, or make changes to your pages as you want.

Regards Lynny

Best SEO San Diego to New Zealand

SEO Consultant

And designer of professional websites

Sending purchases from USA to other parts of the world.

If you want to buy a product in the United States, and have it sent to NZ, it either costs a fortune, especially if you but multiple things from the same place, and they add one $12 or some per item, or they won't send outside the States.

If you are in this position, contact me, I'll be living in the states soon, and would be happy to send things on, you can pay me by paypal for postage, and some extra for my time, and get your product far cheaper.

Cheers

Lynny@canzdesign.com

Many people have a website, but their website designer is long gone or now charging way too much for updates, or just generally offering a lousy service. and now all you get is spam, your website is out of date, and you don't know what to do.... easy answer, get a new webdesigner.

The staff at Canzdesign offer second to none after sales service for web design, often making small changes for nothing at all, but otherwise at a reasonable fee. And changes will often be made with a day, 2 days if we are way busy, but there's usually someone available, that will do small job, but most important, is we answer our emails as soon as they arrive, not 6 weeks later.

We check our spam bins every day, to make sure we haven't lost your email to the spam lords, and suggest you do the same if you haven't received a reply from us within 12 hours.

Even if the email is just to say, ok, or we'll be able to do that tomorrow afternoon or something short like that. We hate to wait for days for a reply to an email and figure why should you wait to hear from us.

Anyway about the service, I even have a website that I receive all their emails, and go through it for them delete the spam. I send the ones that look like they are real, by reading the subject line or the first sentence the ones that have emails I recognize as a client right on to the person that's supposed to receive it.

Each person has their person email address, I have done this for 2 years now, and was talking to the owner, and he said that they had just been talking about what a wonderful service it was. And how in the 2 years I had been doing it, I had only sent on 5 emails that were actually spam, and 7 emails that weren't to the correct person in the company.

Not a bad record for a business that was getting 200-250 and are now getting about 500 spams a day, and have 18 employee's that usually receive about 1-3 real emails a day each.

The experience I received when I first went online of dealing with emails from 13 different groups, numerous friends and spam has come in handy, back then I received about 3-5000 emails a day, I used to have a screenshot that showed that after I had no internet connection for 1 ½ days, I was downloading almost 9000 emails. Hehehehe….

Now I only get about a 1000 a day, and I still manage to work doing SEO for 9 websites, and answer about an average of 40 emails a day. And do heaps of other work…..

Regards Lynn

Help1@seobycanz.com

SEO In San Diego, Southern California, United States, and New Zealand

Website design, redesign, website development and branding

Parameter is a very cool piece of software, it is a free download, and will tell you the pagerank of any page, you just download it, install it, add urls one at a time. Click the plus sign, when you are finished, just click the green triangle, and the search will start. It's that easy…. Down load the program here

http://www.cleverstat.com/en/page-rank-software.htm

for a couple of other free SEO programs look here http://seobycanz.com/SEO_programs.html

Cheers Lynny

Your SEO that gets results
Search Engine Friendly Website Design

Like everything in the computer world, websites need to be upgraded regularly. Plus they need to have a face lift now and then too.

I website that is run using php, or is database driven will last about 4-5 years. As technology gets more complex and codes become out of date. So if you have a website that is successful, you should budget for a rebuild every 4-5 maybe 6 years.

Html website will last a lot longer, but then they can't do a lot of things that database websites can, html websites are really something for personal websites, and shouldn't be considered when looking at building a professional websites. Professional websites need to look professional, and changing that have to be made to an html website have to be made on every page, whereas on a database website, one change say in the menu, will change the menu's on the whole site. Of course, there are many other things that make database driven websites better than an html website, but this post is about how often you should look at rebuilding your site.

I would also suggest you give your website a new updated look every couple of years, this does not cost much, and can make the world of difference to a website. There's nothing worse than an old fashioned looking website.

Regards Lynny

Help1@Seobycanz.com

This is an easy question to answer, a coder needs to change the code of the site, making it possible for changes to be made to the various part of the site, that your visitor doesn't see.

Some people don't believe in using meta tags, for the most part I do, but still database driven urls need to be changed to search engine friendly ones, page titles, and a few other little places, need coding changes in order for a database driven website to become Search engine friendly.

Many database driven websites are starting to become out of date, the code that runs them is becoming old, and within a year or two there will be many website that will need to be totally rebuilt as the server, the place that hosts the website will be upgrading their servers and the older style websites will just not work.

Regards Lynny

Help1@Seobycanz.com

A question that I'm often asked is it better to have several websites, or just a whole lot of information on one website.

It depends on how much money you have, but several websites, each on a specific subject, is better than one big website that has many things all mixed up together. SEO-wise several websites on similar but different subjects is a dream.

If you did have several websites, the idea would be to have the sites linked together; the sites could even look pretty much the same, so people would not necessarily know that they are going to another website.

The problem is of course is keeping several websites up-to-date is a big job, but that is when you hire an SEO that's also a web designer like me, to make sure the sites all running smoothly.

Regards Lynny
I was an SEO before I began to make websites, and I have experts in web design to make changes I can't do myself.

Help1@SEObycanz.com