bumfluff

Agreed, consult with a lawyer. You may not have to get them to actually represent you or anything, but get their advice first. My own, non-lawyerly opinion would be that it depends on what was agreed and if there is documentation of some sort that shows the agreement. For example, you say that you advised this company that they may not get a good ranking - if you have emails, contract or some correspondence that verify this, I'd imagine this would help you no end. Without documentation of the agreement, it's all a bit "he said, she said" - one person's word against another. They say the site isn't fit for purpose because of low SERPS, and you actually have a number of counter-arguments.. assuming the coding is indexable, then rankings will depend heavily on the content, which is the client's responsibility, unless you undertook the writing of content for them. That argument depends on the coding though.. and it may be hard to explain if you get a 'technologically challenged' judge. Another argument you could use is that search engine rankings aren't the only factor involved in defining how good a site is. An example of this would be my old site, seed-design (now sadly defunct, as I'm starting with a different business model). After one of the more recent updates, it went from a PR4 to a PR0.. and it didn't make a lot of difference. The site was never built to be the only way a client could find me, it was more a support resource where I could send people who asked about what I did and wanted to see some work. So, unless your client wasn't going to use any other promotion/marketing methods alongside the website (eg, business cards, leaflets etc), the argument that 'low rankings=useless' falls down. Anyway, I haven't seen the site, don't know all the details and -most importantly- I'm not a lawyer, but you could run those arguments by one and see if they'd be any use Also managed to dig up some information on what to do if you're being taken to county court. There's some useful informational leaflets here.

sshh! Those are the secrets to my success, don't just give them away!

cookies?

Just create a new one, leave the old login to die a natural death..

1) if it's the actual pricespin.com, then bugger that, I don't work for free 2) If it's a made up company called that, there's not enough information to be going on with. What do they do? Who's the target? and so on..

I'd use Illustrator (or another vector program) for all logos. Even if I'm doing a logo that will primarily be used on the web, I'll create it in a vector program first and keep a copy in vector format. It just means that if the client later wants to use it for something other than web, I don't have to recreate it from scratch. For general web graphics, eg banner ads, you can get away with using Photoshop or another bitmap editor because it's unlikely to be reused at other sizes/resolutions. Pretty easy. All the Adobe programs are very similar in terms of interface, plus they're quite intuitive anyway. It shouldn't take long to pick up the basics. For a finished logo, I wouldn't bother unless they specified that they need it to work in different colours. For the most part, logos use a set colour scheme which would already have been settled on before completion, so just present it in that colour. It might be worth making a few mockups to show the logo's use on different media that it'll be used on, though (like on a t-shirt). Don't bother doing mockups on business cards, letterheads etc, though, not unless they've asked you to design those.

And if I were doing a cartoon website, I might think of Disney - doesn't mean I should rip off their brand, right?

Logo is damn close to MS's 'flying windows' one, the overall theme is taken from Aero, the first icon on the top is very similar to the Vista style folder icons, that second icon on the right is the Windows Messenger icon... It looks like you've basically ripped off a bunch of graphics from other places, no? I mean, I can understand some visual references to other operating systems due to the tech nature of the site, but I reckon this goes a bit far.

Crap, I just posted a LOAD of stuff on t-shirt printing after totally misreading the question! Photoshop is really not the right tool for logos, especially if it's going to be used on printed stuff. Photoshop is for manipulating bitmap images, whereas logos should really be in a vector format (made in something like Illustrator). That's so it can be resized without losing detail. They might want it on t-shirts now, but what if they wanted it on a billboard later on?

1/ Wordpress is a good all-rounder and has the bonus of having loads of plugins so you can do pretty much anything with it. The best CMS will depend a lot on what sort of content will be updated, how the content hangs together etc - articles, images, (and their integration with the E-Commerce side), but WP is probably the one I'd be checking out first. 2/ I'll leave this to someone else. I know a bit about e-commerce stuff, but I'm not an expert on them by any means 3/ You could use Google, but most of the well-known CMSs either have built in search, or plugins that let you integrate searches. 4/ You might want to decide if you want this before you start building the site, as it'll affect the way your site is structured (the CMS's index will probably have to be moved to another URL in order to make the flash intro page). Personally, I'd leave it out. Flash intros rarely add anything to a site, especially not an online shop. 5/ I don't know of any off-the-shelf solutions for this, I'd imagine you'd have to create this yourself. You're probably looking at basing it on Flash/Actionscript. You'd need to have a database that will handle user logins and hold details on what they've uploaded. It's a pretty complex job. 6/ Instant massage sounds interesting, but I'm presuming you meant messaging How you do it will depend on what sort of IM facility you want. Something like a shoutbox is pretty straightforward and again, you can get plugins for CMSs that will add them ( example ). VOIP (live chat) seems pretty well covered in terms of off-the-shelf stuff, there's even freeware versions. Here's another link that could be useful - there's some cheap/free ones here. It might be easier just to set up a Skype account for it though, at least to start with.

What, again?

Sizer

You could use PHP or something to check the user-agent and serve up the correct stylesheet.

They probably won't care, unfortunately. You'll probably have to explain it in terms of money/time savings. eg: "If we used a CSS-based design, we can make design changes much more quickly without having to rewrite every page. Although it will take time to implement this, this is a one-off cost and will result in long-term savings. On top of that, we can expect a higher number of visitors due to the site being easier for search engines to index, plus it will be easier to use for people using accessibility equipment such as screen readers. With a higher number of visitors and wider audience, we can expect an increase in online sales of x% per month, which will more than offset the cost of implementing the changes we need." Or something like that anyway.

Could someone fraudulently open an account using this method? Or could a customer use the service and then deny that they ever signed up, saying that someone else must have done it in their name? Tickbox agreements are fairly commonplace (signing up for online subscriptions/membership, EULAs etc), but I guess it would depend on how secure the system is and if it could be open to abuse. I'm not a lawyer, but I would imagine that there would need to be some way to verify the identity of the person making the agreement, which is pretty hard to do using purely online methods.

videospokespeople.com

There's a zoo there!

Reminds me, I gotta head to the AH..

Ah. That'll be for cruising along those information superhighways I kept hearing about.. back in the 90s..

Well summed up. I've noticed a lot of less experienced designers are basically selling a product - buy a website, buy a logo, etc.. I think it's much more effective to communicate that what you're offering is an investment. If it's well designed, it'll bring in more money than it'll cost, whether you're talking about a website, a brand identity, business card or whatever. I really wish there were some way of enforcing a negotiated return on investment in a design contract, but unfortunately in reality there are probably too many factors to take into consideration over the kind of timescale you'd need to monitor sales properly. It's a shame, because I think it would stop clients having to pay for shoddy design work that end up being a liability rather than an asset.

Yup, totally agree with you. It's about understanding who your target market is, and then using the most appropriate method of advertisement - targetting startups would mean using a different approach than if you were going after a household brand..

Thing is, Google's algorithms are always changing.. trying to optimise for a search engine is like trying to score in a moving goal - you think you have it, then the goalposts shift. So it makes more sense to aim for what they're trying to achieve, which is quality content relevant to the user's search. Deliver that, and you'll be ahead of the game.

If it's free I'd do that, otherwise I wouldn't bother. Two main reasons.. first is it's not very targetted, second that I don't think the local paper is where the clients I'd like will be looking. My own suggestion, if networking and cold-calling is out, would be to make contacts with organisations that will be dealing with your target market.. maybe business advisory services, banks (new businesses need bank accounts), accountants.. see if you can work out some kind of deal. 10% off for anyone refferred by them, or even pay them for any business they send you (I'd limit that to a month or so, though). Networking isn't too scary, it's basically just letting people know what you do. Hell, you could even get a bunch of business cards and do a bit of networking in a pub.. but at least go to one where there's liable to be some potential clients. If you go during the week, people aren't likely to be paralytic, and if you start chatting regularly to people, you might find that they, or someone they know, will be in need of design services. My point is that networking doesn't have to be a formal process. In fact, I think some of the formal approaches like going to Chamber of Commerce meetings can often be a waste of time - too often they're full of people who aren't interested in each other and just want to pimp themselves. I think it's better to just naturally get to know people with no ulterior motive. In a similar way, online forums can be good. I'm a member of a few, myself. I don't really try for business on them, but I've made some good friends over the years and quite often get work passed on to me, or have others contact me out of the blue.

So why was that?

Personally, I'd probably split it into related sections.. eg, spelling and wordcount tools in one section, formatting in another and so on. Chances are, if I arrived at your site, it'd be after searching for something specific (like, searching Google for "how to add page numbering to a word document" or similar). If it's all on one page, it'd be a bugger to find the bit that I needed (if you're looking at word processing basics, "find next" in your browser might be a bit beyond you). 2c