• Is this website being built from scratch with proprietary software?
• Is the website being built based on an existing CMS platform and code tweaked/customized? An example of an open source platform is Drupal.
• Has a team been hired just for this project?
• Is this project being done by a vendor?
• Have you or the vendor done a project such as this before?

To me, for a small to medium sized business the perfect website is based on existing tools and platforms but edited and tweaked to have:

1. A unique look
2. Unique content
3. Necessary branding
4. Updated content

This way, the Website will be affordable, in the thousands of dollars and not hundreds of thousands. The website should also be built on a platform where sitewide rollouts and navigation updates are easy and possible. The website can hopefully be updated by anyone with a login. And, of course the website should be built so that online marketing / SEO  elements and keyword strategy can be worked throughout.

For larger businesses, this website style can still work well plus scale. Or, a large website can be built from scratch. If you have questions, let me know as I’ve dealt with hundreds of types of top performing websites, from thousands to millions of pages.

• A new version of your website rolls out. It is missing some pages or some code has changed. Search engines index the site differently based on better or worse coding and inclusion of pages.
• Blog entries are deleted. Google may have given your website a higher pagerank based on the dates and number of entries on your blog. Now things have changed and pagerank drops.
• People are talking about you on social media websites. Search engines note various information about this and include that in their ranking for you.
• Your website is coded with non SEO friendly elements. Your competitor has their website coded with well done SEO. Even if you are the better business, your competitor has a better chance of being crawled well by search engines and indexed better.
• You have a writer that decides to copy text and cut corners. Search engines find this and ping the website.

These are just a handful of examples, but they do show it is ever so valuable to have good SEO in place. I’ve done consulting as well as worked as an employee for companies, managing SEO /online marketing departments. To do it well is both an art and a science. It is necessary that one never tries to trick search engines, but rather understand what will help both users and search engines.

• There are great employers out there still with open positions that you can find. It is important to be able to find them or have them be able to find and get in touch with you. To do this, of course one needs to post their resume, market themself, and actively seek ideal employers.
• When posting a resume on Craigslist.org and other career Websites, it is quite interesting who responds. There seem to be quite a flurry of individuals and companies trying to hire as many people as possible as independent contractors. They seem to do this in a way that people hired have no idea how many other people were just hired. These “positions” include life insurance, pay them so you can learn to be an entrepreneur, pay them so you can have your own franchise, pay $300-500 to buy training to open your own office, debt management, IT Solutions, recruiters, and real estate.
• It is important to find a company with good products or services. If you can’t believe in what you are doing or selling, it is difficult to make others believe.
• Perpetuate quality. In working as an independent contractor or employee, I’ve always believed in top quality. Treat the company, employees, and customers with the utmost respect.
• Most importantly I feel that it is unfair to some possible employees that some companies are currently taking advantage of the temporary economy downturn and not planning on rewarding employees in the long run. This means they may hire employees now who reconsider when times are better, or need to renegotiate in the future.