Weeknotes 12

Mostly work this week. I’ve been reviewing and amending a client’s site which has had an SEO Audit. Here are a few thoughts on that.

Web Design and Development

Yes, search engine optimisation (SEO). Yikes! It’s sometimes a misunderstood term … and occasionally derogatory, which results from sharp practices by a few. On the other hand, I like to think of it as doing the right things more often than not :-)

Any website needs web development work. Depending on objectives, this can be continual or occasional. For an ecommerce site, it really needs to be continual and an SEO audit can help that process. Identifying and prioritising issues. Fixing the most important.

I’ve been working on a client’s site to optimise a few things after an audit. Many of these are small items but it’s that old thing of “marginal gains”. If every item is 1%, you only have to do ten of these for 10% improvement. Well, it’s probably not quite as simple as that but it’s a good approach.

Actually, I really like this type of work but not many people value it enough.

Similarly, I’ve been browsing a few websites this week and finding mistakes and errors that really need to be fixed. I visited an ecommerce site (not my client) and found a page with delivery information that was broken, a missing image in the footer, and no physical address. It all looked very sloppy and wouldn’t give me confidence to buy from the site. Granted, I’m looking at this from a web developer’s perspective. Perhaps the average customer doesn’t notice these things but I think you have to get them right.

I’m not perfect. I’m sure that my personal sites have mistakes and the occasional missing image. But I try and fix these asap.

Horsham Pub Guide

This week, I’ve had someone pay for a promoted item on Horsham Pub Guide. Great stuff! It’s an incentive for me to do more on the site, there or on Twitter.

Horsham Coworking

It’s been a busy week with regular and new coworkers. One coworker brought his boss and a colleague for two days hot desking. And we had someone trying out the space with a free trial.

We plan to review things next week and assess how Horsham Coworking is working. I’m cautiously optimistic but I also know that things can change very quickly.