Speculative design work isn’t the correct way to develop a website as it ends up being a quick beauty contest, whereas it should be a thorough user-focussed design process.

Design should be based around business requirements…

When creating any kind of graphical element for a business, be it a website, a business card or corporate identiy, to be truly effective at communicating with the target audience it needs to have been created with an understanding and target towards the specific business requirements. Different businesses obviously have different methodologies, styles, types of customer etc., and so the web designer should consider all of these different factors before creating a potential design. When we tender for work, sometimes we find out that other companies have created speculative work to submit to clients. Typically they have done this in a short timeframe, and so there can’t have been much thought gone into the business requirements. Having seen some examples of ‘spec work’, some companies even re-use designs without creating it especially for that individual business.

‘Spec’ design work makes it become a beauty contest…

As spec work is typically not created around business goals and the target audience, it simply becomes a beauty contest of trying to impress the client with the most visually attractive design, not necessarily the one that will give the best return on investment. The one with the highest RoI might not always be the website design that the business owner likes the best, but the one that has the best features and is attractive to the target audience.

It raises prices for everyone…

Lets say that for every website development opportunity it is submitted to four different web design companies. The client requests speculative design work and unfortunately all of the design agencies oblige without explaining the real process behind creating a highly functional website. If they only win one out of four jobs, then they would have had to create four different speculative designs without receiving a single penny. Not only is this unfair, as you wouldn’t ask anyone else to work for nothing, but the cost has to be recouped somehow, and the only way to do this is to charge higher prices to other new customers. If every company undertook speculative design work then each individual client would have this cost incorporated into the price.

Consequently I hope you can see how speculative work is a loser all round – it’s bad for the client, bad for the target market, and bad for the web design agency. A good web design agency should follow a customer and business requirements focussed design process, and so if you look at their portfolio of work and you see highly attractive and successful websites then you know you’re onto a winner.

At AeroDesigns we follow a rigorous process of establishing both the needs of the client, and of the intended audience for each website. The designs we create are based upon this research and carefully developed to achieve business goals and requirements.

Aviation Job Book is a comprehensive recruitment-type website that we developed from scratch and allows pilots and airlines to use the online control panels to find and communicate with each other about potential job opportunities. Trojan Tactical and Maid & Butler are both Northumberland-based companies (Otterburn and Alnwick respectively) and we have created bespoke-designed ecommerce systems to allow them to sell their range of products online. These systems have everything you would expect of a comprehensive online store, such as customer, order, product and stock management facilities. Trojan Tactical already had an ecommerce store built using Xcart and we migrated all of the data (orders, products and customers) from the old system to our new system. This ensured that existing customers could still log-on using the same details, and see their existing orders.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be working on developing the portfolio even further, adding an in-depth case study for each website we have developed. This will show for example what web technologies we have used, what the client required and what we implemented, and the results this has generated from the client – ideally with a testimonial included on each.

Hopefully now you’re able to get a better picture of the type of websites we have been working on recently, and we have a portfolio again that accurately represents our design skills!

The website has been developed using WordPress as the Content Management System. I love providing WordPress for small business websites for a number of reasons. First of all it satisfies the need for a simple easy to use CMS with that of advanced blog functionality, and secondly it can be themed to suit whatever design the site necessitates. As with all of our websites, the one for the Candy Bar is a bespoke design that conveys both a modern and stylish feel, with the use of imagery to highlight the visual appeal of the sweets and the bar.

There is also a photo gallery installed on the site. This features a lightbox-style image enlargement facility, so users can click on an image and it will enlarge to almost fill the screen. Other features include the blog which will help keep their customers updated, and also help with their search engine optimisation. On that note I’m also pleased to note that within a week Google has already included the site into its index and it’s well on its way to getting some high rankings. The site is already seeing first page rankings for some of its main keyword phrases, over time as it develops in authority I’m sure it will reach the top three results for its main ‘money phrases’.

I’m sometimes undecided about fixed footers, however I really like this one as it features the black and white logo on the bottom-right, ensuring it is constantly visible.

Feel free to visit www.the-candybar.co.uk to see the website in action and suggest them to any friends or family that are currently planning a wedding.

A few solutions arose thanks to much hard work (probably unpaid!) by the founders of Cufon (Simo Kinnunen) and sIFR (Mark Wubben). These two achieve relatively similar results visually, but behind the scenes they work in very different ways, and each has their pros and cons. Both are based on Javascript and utilise the jQuery library, however sIFR creates Flash files (no support for iPhones / iPads then), whereas Cufon uses HTML5 < canvas > elements. Anyway, that’s enough background for now, this isn’t meant to be a debate between sIFR and Cufon, as there are a few more modern alternatives worthy of consideration (Fontdeck and Typekit) nowadays.

For various reasons we have deployed Cufon on quite a few sites (including our own!) and are pleased with the results. They take a bit of tweaking, but generally you can get the visual look you are after fairly easily. We normally use Cufon just for headings, as it would be easy to go overboard and use some funky fonts for normal paragraph text, but then users wouldn’t be able to select or highlight those bits of text if they wanted to.

So what is the problem then?

Recently I had a discussion with another SEO company who considered that Cufon has a detrimental effect on search rankings, and that they had seen other clients drop in the rankings because of use of Cufon for headings. Based on the way these font replacement tools work, I couldn’t see a reason why they would actually have a negative impact on rankings. If you ‘view source’ for a site that uses Cufon, the existing heading tags <h1>, <h2> etc.. are still contained in the markup, and so the search engine spiders would see these heading tags, just like normal headings. It is only after the page is loaded that the heading tags are replaced by Javascript with the Cufon <canvas> elements in the user’s browser. The heading tags still actually exist in the source, they haven’t gone anywhere!

My only concern was that as Google and the other search engines are becoming more advanced, I wondered whether they saw font replacement as displaying different content to users than what is presented to the search engines, which is a big no-no in SEO-land. In general terms cloaking of content can have serious results, as it even resulted in BMW Germany being banned from the Google index recently! Another loose theory I could think of when trying to see the other SEO company’s perspective was that Google looked at the code that was created after the Javascript ran, rather than the raw source code, but this just didn’t seem right from how the search engines work. So, I thought I would create an experiment to see whether it actually does have any impact.

The test…

I decided the definitive way to test this out was to create a basic page that uses Cufon and one that doesn’t, and then see which one ranks more highly for a made up keyword phrase that doesn’t exist in the index. Then to try and scale this up a bit I tried it with three different keyword phrases, resulting in six different pages, three that use Cufon and three that don’t. The picture on the right shows one of the pages. Obviously there are a lot of variables at play, however here is how I tried to address the main issues:

• I only used the keyword phrase once on the page, as the first word in the main <h1> title tags on all pages.
• I varied the text in the main paragraphs and heading so that duplicate content wouldn’t be an issue.
• The wordcount of the paragraphs and heading tags on different pages were kept roughly similar so that this wouldn’t have an impact.
• I still included the Cufon Javascript file in the <head> of all pages, even on the ones that didn’t use Cufon, so the file sizes and hence load times of the pages would be as similar as possible, as we know that Google takes page load speed into account.

Here are the different pages and their keyword phrases:

• Keyword: “Tstkwdsites”. Cufon Version. http://79.170.44.81/cfontest1.com/
• Keyword: “Tstkwdsites”. Non-Cufon Version. http://79.170.44.81/cfontest2.com/
• Keyword: “Blablajstatst”. Cufon Version. http://79.170.44.81/cfontest3.com/
• Keyword: “Blablajstatst”. Non-Cufon Version. http://79.170.44.81/cfontest4.com/
• Keyword: “Reydgbfgmsg”. Cufon Version. http://79.170.44.81/cfontest5.com/
• Keyword: “Reydgbfgmsg”. Non-Cufon Version. http://79.170.44.81/cfontest6.com/

What are the results?

Well it took a couple of weeks, but all of the six pages were included in the Google index, and all of the keyword phrases were now returning two results rather than the zero before.

Just to recap, there were two pages created for each of the three different made-up keywords, one using Cufon and one just using regular headings. As you can see on the picture on the left for the keyword ‘tstkwdsites’ just my two results were appearing, and the version that uses Cufon was appearing above the page that doesn’t use Cufon.

When I checked the other two keyword variations, these also had the Cufon utilising pages above the non-Cufon pages in the rankings.

The SEO Conclusion

As in all three keyword variations the pages that utilised Cufon appeared above the non-Cufon pages, I think it is definitely safe to say that Cufon doesn’t actually have a negative impact on search rankings and SEO.

The fact that all of the pages that use Cufon appeared above the non-Cufon pages is probably a coincidence, perhaps because the Cufon version was always on a lower number folder – eg: /cfontest1.com and /cfontest2.com folders. It would be jumping to conclusions to say that Cufon aided search rankings! I think if this was to be taken further then extending the sample size to test say 20 different made-up keywords would be a good idea, as would having them on separate domain names, not just sub-folders as I did.

I hope this has dispelled some myths banded about by some SEO companies, and that SEO-minded web designers can be free again to use Cufon without worrying about the ranking consequences.

We’re also in the process of building a festival production calculator to dynamically build a quote for festival managers based on their exact specifications.

We’re very pleased with the site and have received great feedback from Ben the company owner.

So why do some people use multiple <h1> headings in pages? Apart from a lack of web accessibility knowledge, they can be overused for supposed search engine benefits. It is widely thought in the search optimisation industry that <h1> heading tags are quite influential in the search engines, and the keywords used in these help search rankings. I would tend to agree with this, however it needs to be remembered that web designers should be creating sites designed for users, and not for search engines.

Now I’m not proposing that search engines should be ignored – they can be a very powerful source of traffic and revenue! What I am saying, though, is that the search optimisation of a website should not interfere with accessibility and the general user experience. A balance should be struck where the site is fully optimised for Google, Yahoo and Bing etc, but should not interfere with the usability and accessibility of the site.

I’m sure once the word gets out and this technology is rolled-out to production websites it will grow exponentially in quite a short amount of time. Personally I’m quite excited by this and the potential that this will have to compete against rival major ad networks and methods!

We really enjoyed working on this project and with Pradeep Raman, an Innovation Manager at Newcastle Science City, and are delighted to launch the site with a range of advanced features, such as…

• SIFR search optimised font-styled headings, so we can still offer gorgeous headings that are both SEO-friendly and meet accessibility guidelines.
• Javascript system for the live advertising demos – complete cross-browser support from the decrepit Internet Explorer 6 to Firefox 3
• Integration of blogging system and customisation to offer a consistent visual presentation to the rest of the site.

Response Times

• Sales enquiries: 3 hours
• Support requests: 2 hours
• Accounts queries: 12 hours
• ‘Out of hours’: 14 hours

I just ran a test and can’t personally see any problems with the service, suggesting that any problems have now been fixed. I’ll keep an eye on the problem and in the meantime I would make sure you have multiple payment methods set up on any of your websites just in case.

Small business owners are quite rightly careful at how they spend their budget, sometimes too careful. Like many things, in the web design industry you can pay pretty much anything to have a website designed. The difference however doesn’t just rest in the price, but in the quality of the finished website, and hence the business it generates. When pitching for work, we have to differentiate that we’re not the cheapest web design company in the North East for good reasons. A well planned, well designed and marketed website will generate returns many times over a ‘cheap’ website.

The moral of the story… getting a website designed is a bit like hiring a salesperson or other staff for that matter – you should invest in the best you can afford as it will generate much more business for you in the long-term.